Stop Genocide. End UNRWA

Israel accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of having many staff members involved in the October 7 Palestinian genocidal attack against Israel. In response, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres asked UNRWA to investigate itself, and find out the veracity of the charges and to fire those who committed atrocities.

Several western countries, who make up the majority of the funding of the UN agency, suspended their contributions. They include the United States, U.K., Finland, Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Iceland and Estonia. So far.

This is not a surprise. UNRWA is staffed almost exclusively by Palestinian Arabs; only the thin veneer of the executive management is European.

UNRWA has long been known and accused of teaching students to kill Jews and destroy Israel. Many staff members have been bomb makers for Hamas. Tunnel shafts at UNRWA schools lead down to Hamas’s terrorist tunnels.

In February 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives put forward H.R. 1102 “The UNRWA Accountability Act” which called for withholding funds to the UN Palestinian group if “UNRWA staff and partners nor its funding and facilities are affiliated with terrorism or disseminating certain rhetoric, such as calling for the destruction of Israel or describing Israelis as occupiers or settlers.” The U.S. Senate had a similar bill, S.431.

For much of 2023, Israel had been rooting out terrorists from UNRWA schools in the West Bank, Jenin in particular. UNRWA’s West Bank terrorists committed and planned to commit several attacks against Jews. Those terrorists were not only from Hamas which carried out the October 7 massacre, but the Jenin Brigades and Lion’s Den, other very popular terrorist groups.

*UNRWA in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)*

Guterres has asked donor countries to renew payments to the agency, arguing that a few bad apples shouldn’t mean that millions of Palestinian Arabs should suffer.

But he completely misses the point.

UNRWA is the leading CAUSE of the October 7 attacks. Its mission of funneling billions of dollars into Gaza and the West Bank to employ Palestinian Arabs and miseducate them that Israel is an illegal European colonial state and that millions of descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948 have an “inalienable right” to move into the Jewish State is the main reason that the conflict has dragged on for decades. UNRWA in Gaza and the West Bank must be dismantled and the agency’s operations in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan should be folded into the other agency to handle refugees, UNHDR.

The United States has taken the first steps in UNRWA Accountability. It must lead to the termination of the toxic agency to forge a pathway towards coexistence.