At the same time, the United States wants UNRWA’s functions of aid delivery and support to Palestinians to continue.
By Etgar Lefkovits, JNS
American funding to UNRWA has been stopped for good over its ties to Hamas terrorism, and alternative U.N. agencies are being considered to funnel humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, a top U.S. envoy said Friday.
The unequivocal remarks follow a bombshell Israeli intelligence report, shared with the U.S. administration, which showed that dozens of UNRWA employees actively participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, while 10% of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza are Hamas members.
The revelations led 18 countries, led by the US and Germany, UNRWA’s biggest donors, to suspend funding to the agency totaling $438 million, or more than half this year’s expected funding.
At least in the case of the United States, the suspension is permanent.
“Congress has made clear…that U.S. funding for UNRWA will stop,” said U.S. special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues David Satterfield during an event hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Friday. “It’s not a suspension. It is a prohibition on providing further funding.”
At the same time, the United States wants UNRWA’s functions of aid delivery and support to Palestinians to continue.
“We are working aggressively as possible with the U.N. family, with U.N. agencies, to see how these key functions can be sustained, as we look at the months ahead,” said Satterfield.
On Friday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant released new revelations of UNRWA malpractice, saying Israeli intelligence had “significant indications” that more than 30 additional agency workers joined the Oct. 7 attack. One video released this weekend showed a UNRWA worker participating in the kidnapping of a body from an Israeli agricultural community near the border with Gaza.
Seeking alternatives to UNRWA
Amid a groundswell of national and international concern over the U.N. agency’s connection to Palestinian terrorism, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is proposing to redirect aid to the Palestinians through the World Food Program, an organization within the United Nations that provides food assistance worldwide.
Another option under consideration, pending American support, is funneling the support through USAID, an independent agency of the United States government primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance and which has carried out smaller aid activity in Gaza.
Amid near-daily new intelligence information about UNRWA’s ties to terrorism since the war against Hamas began, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has repeatedly called upon the UNRWA chief to resign.
UNRWA pushback
Pushing back, the head of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini has refused to step down, and alleged that Israel is intent on “destroying” the organization along with the idea that Palestinians are refugees and have a right to return home one day.
“At the moment, we are dealing with an expanded, concentrated Israeli campaign, which is aimed at destroying UNRWA,” Lazzarini said in the interview with the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger published on Saturday.
Lazzarini, who has served as UNRWA’s commissioner-general since 2020, said Israel apparently believes that “if the aid agency is abolished, the status of the Palestinian refugees will be resolved once and for all—and with it the right of return.”
Following the aid suspension by about 20 Western countries, he has sought additional funding from Arab Gulf countries to keep the organization running.
Perpetuating the conflict
Israel has long argued that UNRWA was created to perpetuate the conflict by granting Palestinians hereditary refugee status, a status afforded no other global population.
Established by the United Nations in 1949 to carry out relief and work programs for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who fled their homes during the 1948-49 War of Independence, UNRWA grants refugee status to those refugees’ descendants in perpetuity, including those with citizenship in other countries. As a result, the number of Palestinian refugees registered with the organization has mushroomed from 750,000 in 1950 to nearly six million today.
The main U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, which cares for the rest of the refugees in the world, has no such policy.
Foreign funding
Citing decades of hate and terror indoctrination, the Trump administration cut U.S. funding to UNRWA in 2018, a move President Joe Biden reversed shortly after taking office in 2021.
Last summer, the U.S. State Department allocated more than $200 million for UNRWA despite its schools’ glorification of violence and terrorism and an agreement conditioning funding on the prevention of teaching hate and antisemitism.
The funding brought the total United States assistance to UNRWA during the Biden administration to more than $600 million, cementing the United States’ status as UNRWA’s largest donor.
The Oct. 7 massacre has placed renewed international focus on UNRWA’s terror ties and led to calls from across the Israeli political spectrum to cut all ties with the organization, while the heads of the agency, backed by the E.U. foreign policy chief Josep Borell, seek to salvage the agency with an investigation into the wrongdoing.
But after decades of on-again off-again criticism of UNRWA, the wealth of intelligence information uncovered during military operations in Gaza following the Hamas massacre have called the continued existence of the organization in question as never before.