The Biden administration’s foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, needs a strategic rethink, as well as an injection of new ideas. This Washington Examiner series, Middle East Mirage, will investigate how the administration has fallen short on Iran engagement, the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the push for a two-state solution, and sorely needed reform in the United Nations, particularly UNRWA. Part Two will look at the administration’s relationship with UNRWA and the U.N.
In the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis, the United Nations agency in the Palestinian territories received renewed scrutiny for its alleged ties to the U.S.-designated terrorist group that carried out the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history.
The Biden administration has publicly backed UNRWA’s long-term mission because it plays a crucial role in delivering aid to Palestinian citizens, even as it, and roughly half of the countries and entities that fund the agency, dramatically decided to suspend its contributions last month when allegations surfaced that about a dozen employees participated in the attack.
For some, mainly conservatives, the move to suspend funding was long overdue and a sorely needed move to bring the agency, and the wider U.N., to account and push for reform.
“UNRWA has ceased to be effective, and worse, it violates the first principle of humanitarian aid: do no harm. The costs of keeping UNRWA around far outweigh the benefits. Disbanding the organization is the only solution,” Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the Washington Examiner in a statement.
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“If humanitarian operations in Gaza are going to continue, they must be shifted to a different, trusted organization that operates with transparency and accountability,” he added. “This organization should support vulnerable Palestinians while ensuring funds do not promote extremism, be open to comprehensive financial audits, require increased vetting of all organization employees, and allow third-party monitors to conduct unannounced visits to monitor activities in schools and facilities. These are all reasonable expectations for U.S. taxpayer dollars.”
Despite the Biden administration’s decision to halt funding for the U.N. Palestinian agency temporarily last month, U.S. officials have stressed the overall importance of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which has provided lifesaving aid and assistance to Palestinians long before the terrorist attacks that ignited the current conflict.
“No one else can play the role that UNRWA’s been playing, certainly not in the near term. No one has the reach, the capacity, the structure to do what UNRWA’s been doing. And from our perspective, it’s important — more than important; imperative — that that role continues,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
He also said that while the United States has not verified the Israelis’ claims that the UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 attack, the evidence is “highly credible.”
The implications of what the suspended funds mean for Palestinian civilians devastated by the war sparked by the attack remain unknown, but the effects could be catastrophic for the population. The war has already resulted in the displacement of roughly 75% of Gaza residents, more than 25,000 deaths, though this is a statistic from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry and does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, and even more injured. UNRWA employs roughly 13,000 Palestinians in Gaza, while the Wall Street Journal reported that 10% of all of its staff in the strip have ties to Islamist militant groups.
The partisan split on the issue, with Republicans largely arguing the suspension was overdue and Democrats skeptical of the humanitarian impacts it may incur, was highlighted during a congressional hearing last week.
“With all due respect to the president, this was a long overdue response going far beyond the revelations of last week, however. There has long been massive and irrefutable evidence of UNRWA’s extensive complicity and cooperation in Hamas’s antisemitic genocidal hate campaign,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) said during a House Foreign Affairs Committee subcommittee hearing on UNRWA last week.
Comparatively, Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA) said during the same hearing, “The fact that 12 UNRWA employees out of 13,000 staff members in Gaza were implicated in the Oct. 7 massacres is deeply disturbing. And it only underscores the already clear need for reform. But the question we face right now is, how do we ensure that the innocent civilian population of Gaza that is facing famine does not pay an even steeper price in human life because of the actions of 12 horrific individuals and their actions? We know that for the civilian population in Gaza, unrest services have been a lifeline.”
Germany, Japan, France, Switzerland, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, Austria, and Finland have all followed the U.S.’s lead and suspended aid to UNRWA, meaning that about half of its top 25 donors from 2022 have temporarily halted their funding. The U.S. provided UNRWA with more than $340 million in 2022, much larger than Germany at $202 million, which was second in funding.
The U.S. has already provided UNRWA with $121 million this fiscal year, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week, while the suspended funds only amount to roughly $300,000.
Rich Goldberg, an adviser with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who was one of the witnesses who testified at the hearing, argued that UNRWA’s support for Hamas is “a feature, not a bug,” and described the U.N. agency as a “horror show.”
“Now you hear a lot of people saying, well, we can’t cut off food. We can’t cut off aid. We can’t leave people starving. That’s true. That’s correct. Nobody is calling for that,” Goldberg added, noting that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Food Programme, and other entities could take over UNRWA’s role.
“The only reason to remain dedicated to supporting the terror financing, incitement promoting, genocide promoting UNRWA is to help UNRWA keep Hamas and power in Gaza, promote terrorism incitement against Israel, and maintain a mandate that the region has moved on from and that is to hate Israel, destroy Israel,” he explained.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long been critical of the U.N. as a whole, is aligned with the U.S. conservative viewpoint, which he recently presented to a group of U.N. ambassadors, that “it’s time” for UNRWA’s mission “to end.”
UNRWA was established in 1949, a year after the creation of the state of Israel, to carry out aid and relief for Palestinian refugees. Refugees from other areas of the world are under the purview of the UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency, which works in 137 countries. The World Food Programme also operates in Gaza, and the U.S. is by far the largest donor of the WFP in 2024.
Concerns about UNRWA long predate the Oct. 7 massacre that left roughly 1,200 people dead, the vast majority of whom were civilians, some of whom showed signs of being tortured. In particular, one controversial aspect of UNRWA is the educational material its teachers use throughout the Gaza Strip and other areas it operates in, such as the West Bank, which has been accused of promoting antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments in younger generations.
“Our research shows the same violent jihadi educational materials are created on a large institutional level by UNRWA staff,” Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se, an international research and policy organization that monitors education globally, said during the hearing.
Twenty UNRWA teachers and other staff members expressed support for Hamas recently on social media, U.N. Watch, a nonprofit group based in Switzerland, said in a 68-page report released in November.
International entities and foreign governments warned about the possibility of starvation and widespread disease in the strip due to the lack of necessary resources, such as food, clean water, and healthcare, prior to the news that UNRWA would be losing some of its funding, and those concerns will likely be exacerbated if they run out of resources. A UNRWA spokesperson said recently the agency will not be able to continue operations in Gaza and across the region beyond the end of February if funding does not resume.
It’s not the first time the U.S. has suspended its UNRWA contributions.
The Trump administration announced it would cease funding UNRWA in 2018, with then-State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert calling the agency an “irredeemably flawed operation.”
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Executive Director Hillel Neuer testified during the hearing with Goldberg and urged politicians to “take the lead in dissolving this agency,” while Mara Rudman, a former Obama and Clinton administration official who is now a University of Virginia professor, told lawmakers she’s concerned that it will take too long, given the dire circumstances on the ground, for the international community to delegate the tasks previously carried out by UNRWA to other international entities that can be on the ground in the strip.
“There is no other organization right now, not WFP, not UNHCR, that is set up to be able to take the reins tomorrow and fulfill this,” Rudman explained. “UNRWA employs 13,000 Palestinians in Gaza. It’s the single largest employer in Gaza. It runs the only public school system in Gaza, [and] a majority of the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza depended on UNRWA systems before Oct. 7.”
