President Joe Biden’s decision to restore funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an organization for decades facing accusations of fueling radical Islam and antisemitism in Gaza, attracted renewed condemnations in the aftermath of Hamas’s unprecedented massacre of Israeli civilians this weekend.
Hamas, a genocidal Sunni jihadist terror organization, unleashed a wave of violence across Israel on Saturday featuring thousands of rockets fired into Israeli communities and the invasion of residential areas by scores of brutal terrorists.
The terrorists slaughtered Israeli civilians, including infants and the elderly, and desecrated corpses, filming their gruesome acts and uploading them online. At a peace music festival, the jihadists opened fire on, beat, tortured, and abducted unsuspecting attendees. Israeli news outlets reported the discovery of the headless bodies of babies in communities ravaged by Hamas members.
Israeli officials have confirmed over 1,000 dead in the assault as of Tuesday.
Biden’s foreign policy, particularly his administration’s overtures to top Hamas ally Iran and its geopolitical partners, have come under increased scrutiny in light of the attack. Iran has for decades supported Hamas’s goal of destroying the Israeli state and a spokesman for Hamas told the BBC on Saturday night that Tehran directly supported the atrocities committed this weekend. In addition to failing to enforce sanctions on Iran, seeking closer ties to genocidal China, and lifting sanctions on Iran’s oil industry partner Venezuela, Biden faces questions regarding his support for the widely condemned UNRWA.
The New York Post observed on Tuesday, citing remarks from a State Department spokesman in February, that Biden administration officials boasted of committing over $730 million in American taxpayers’ dollars to the UNRWA – $680 million between 2021, when Biden became president, and early 2023, followed by a promise from Secretary of State Antony Blinken of another forthcoming $50 million this year.
“Since April of 2021, we have demonstrated in very real and significant terms our commitment to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in February. “We’ve provided over $890 million for Palestinians, including over $680 in humanitarian assistance for refugees in the region through UNRWA … When Secretary Blinken was in Ramallah, he announced another $50 million in funding for UNRWA.”
The State Department signed a new agreement with UNRWA in May setting the conditions in which Washington would continue to fund the program.
“The Framework includes multiple specific commitments to advance the Agency’s ability to deliver effective and efficient aid to Palestinian refugees,” the State Department announced at the time, “through strengthened accountability, transparency, and consistency with UN principles, including neutrality.”
The agreement commits UNRWA only to aspire to be neutral, however, in Israeli-Palestinian issues, and “communicate any serious neutrality violations to the United States in a timely manner.”
The “framework for cooperation” goes on to condemn bigotry generally, naming discrimination against Palestinians or Israelis and “Islamophobia” as particular concerns.
For much of its existence – and under Biden, the White House boasted last year – America has been the UNRWA’s “largest donor.” Washington cut the agency off, however, under former President Donald Trump in response to extensive evidence that UNRWA facilities, including schools, were indoctrinating children into hating Israel and Jews generally; that UNRWA employed vocal antisemites who used the agency’s platform to spread hate; and that UNRWA supports Hamas. Trump faced intense criticism from the left at the time for refusing to send American taxpayer funds to the U.N. agency.
“The Trump Administration’s decision to end U.S. assistance to Palestinian refugees is wrong on every level,” Nicholas Burns, a longtime diplomat currently serving as Biden’s ambassador to China, said at the time, calling the move “heartless and unwise.”
Refugees International accused Trump of “making life-saving relief to civilians hostage to politics.” NPR’s coverage called the end to financing “absolutely devastating.” Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown resurfaced to claim defunding the UNRWA would destabilize the entire Middle East.
Yet years of evidence exists that, contrary to its claims of providing basic assistance to Palestinians, UNRWA has elevated pro-terrorist voices and indoctrinated children into jihad.
File/Palestinian girls exit from a school run by the United nations Relief and Works Agency’s (UNRWA) east of Nablus in the West Bank on September 2, 2018. The United States, the biggest contributor to the UNRWA, announced on August 31 it was halting its funding to the organisation, which it labelled “irredeemably flawed”. (JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP/Getty Images)
“Today, as UNRWA provides assistance in Gaza, it is directly providing financial and material support to the Hamas terrorist organization,” the Jewish Policy Center warned in 2007. “UNRWA does not seem to have a problem with Hamas’ Islamist agenda. It has not condemned the brutal Hamas violence that enabled the terrorist group to take the Gaza Strip by force in June. UNRWA waited to see who would win the battle, then immediately indicated to Hamas that it was eager to get back to providing its services.”
Video taken at a summer camp for children in 2013 revealed UNRWA teachers pressuring children to express hatred against Jews, celebrate terrorist “martyrs,” and embrace violence.
“Isn’t it true that the Jews are the wolf? What did the Jews do to us?” a teacher asks children in the video. “They expelled us into exile from out lands! They shot at us and they killed our parents.”
In 2017, the non-governmental organization U.N. Watch published a report documenting antisemitism and open incitements to acts of terror on dozens of Facebook accounts run by UNRWA employees. Among the offending posts documented were writings celebrating Hamas terrorist “martyrs” and praising Adolf Hitler.
U.N. Watch updated its investigation into UNRWA in March in a joint project with the research firm Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), finding that the agency’s schools “regularly call to murder Jews, and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism.”
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