The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, declares that it operates on four humanitarian principles — humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.
It is none of those things.

UNRWA is unlike any other UN agency. It is not the UNHCR, which manages refugees from every nation and conflict on earth. UNRWA is a creature of exception — created for a particular people, in a particular region, in a particular war.

The agency claims it was established to address the plight of refugees from Palestine following the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli War. But was that truly its purpose?
When the fighting ended, thousands of Jews were also expelled from their homes east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) — from Jerusalem’s Old City, from Hebron, and across Transjordan’s illegally occupied territory. They, too, were refugees from Palestine. Did UNRWA help any of them? No.

From its inception, UNRWA was built to serve Arabs alone. Even when those same Arabs became full Jordanian citizens, the agency continued to provide them with housing, food, education, and medical care — benefits that by any logical standard should have ended once citizenship was granted. Instead, UNRWA preserved refugeehood as an inheritance, not a temporary condition.

Over time, UNRWA’s mission has morphed from relief to perpetuation.
It has shown itself highly partisan, politically entangled, and morally compromised. Its schools and clinics may operate under the UN flag, but the agency’s allegiance is often indistinguishable from the politics of rejectionism that dominate its host territories.

During the 2023 Gaza war, UNRWA boasted that only it had the infrastructure to provide food, education, and healthcare to the Gazan population.
Yet when 250 Israelis were dragged into Gaza as hostages, where was this agency of “humanity”? Did it deliver a single bandage or calorie to the kidnapped Israelis held underground? Did it condemn their abduction, or even acknowledge their suffering?
It did not.
UNRWA’s humanity proved selective, its independence nonexistent.

Its operations in Gaza function only through integration with Hamas, the political-terrorist organization that rules the territory. Schools double as weapons depots; employees have been implicated in massacres; aid is distributed by political loyalty, not human need. Leaders at the OCHA, another UN “humanitarian” group, are not shy to say they view Hamas a legitimate political representatives of Palestinians, not as a terrorist group.

UNRWA now has additional offices outside of its field operations. It opened an office in Turkey to “expand its political and financial support base,” backed by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a political group. Very political. Neither independent nor neutral.

UNRWA is not a neutral humanitarian actor. It is a political instrument masquerading as one.
It fails every principle it proclaims.

It should be closed permanently.
Its essential services — food, healthcare, and education — can be absorbed either by host countries where these so-called “refugees” have lived for generations, or by the UNHCR, the global refugee agency that serves all peoples without prejudice.

So long as UNRWA exists, it will preserve resentment, dependency and hatred.
That agency founded in the shadow of war is the leading obstacle to peace.