US looks for alternatives as Congress mulls making UNRWA funding freeze permanent
Resuming funding for the UN’s Palestinian relief agency requires congressional approval, which is unlikely to materialize due to opposition from Republicans, some Democrats
WASHINGTON — US officials are preparing for a temporary pause on funding the main UN agency for Palestinians to become permanent due to opposition in Congress, even as the Biden administration insists the aid group’s humanitarian work is indispensable.
The United States, along with more than a dozen countries, suspended its funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in January after Israel accused 12 of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza of participating in the deadly October 7 Hamas attack in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 253.
The UN has launched an investigation into the allegations, and UNRWA fired some staff after Israel provided the agency with information on the allegations, which were later expanded to include 14 staffers.
The United States — which is UNRWA’s largest donor, providing $300 million-$400 million annually — said it wants to see the results of that inquiry and corrective measures taken before it will consider resuming funding.
Even if the pause is lifted, only about $300,000 — what is left of already appropriated funds — would be released to UNRWA. Anything further would require congressional approval.
But bipartisan opposition in Congress to funding UNRWA makes it unlikely the United States will resume regular donations anytime soon, even as countries such as Sweden and Canada have said they will restart their contributions.
A supplemental funding bill in the US Congress that includes military aid to Israel and Ukraine and is supported by the Biden administration contains a provision that would block UNRWA from receiving funds if it becomes law.
US officials say they recognize “the critical role” UNRWA plays in distributing aid inside the densely populated enclave, which has been brought close to famine during the war between Israel and Hamas over the past five months.
“We have to plan for the fact that Congress may make that pause permanent,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Tuesday.
Washington has been looking at working with humanitarian partners on the ground, such as UNICEF and the World Food Program, to continue providing aid.
But officials are aware that UNRWA is hard to replace.
“There are other organizations that are now providing some distribution of aid inside Gaza, but that is primarily the role that UNRWA is equipped to play, that no one else, is due to their long-standing work and their networks of distribution and their history inside Gaza,” Miller said.
‘UNRWA is a front’
A few Senate Democrats, including Senator Chris Van Hollen, along with some progressive House members, have opposed an indefinite ban on funding to UNRWA.
But any new funding would need the support of at least some Republicans, who hold a majority in the House of Representatives. Many have expressed their opposition to UNRWA.
“UNRWA is a front, plain and simple,” Republican lawmaker Brian Mast, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability, said in a statement.
“It masquerades as a relief organization while building the infrastructure to support Hamas… It is literally funneling American tax dollars to terrorism,” Mast said.
UNRWA was established in 1949 by a UN General Assembly resolution after Israel’s War of Independence, when 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes.
Today it directly employs 30,000 Palestinians, serving the civic and humanitarian needs of 5.9 million descendants of those refugees, in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and in vast camps in neighboring Arab countries.
In Gaza, UNRWA runs the enclave’s schools, primary healthcare clinics, and other social services and distributes humanitarian aid.
William Deere, director of UNRWA’s Washington Representative Office, told Reuters that US support accounts for one-third of UNRWA’s budget.
“That’s going to be very hard to overcome,” he said. “Please remember that UNRWA is more than Gaza. It’s healthcare and education and social services. It’s East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon.”
UNRWA says it submitted staff lists to Israel annually and received no objections
Meanwhile on Wednesday, an UNRWA spokesperson told The Times of Israel that the agency has been providing Israel with a list of its employees in Gaza every year and did not receive any pushback from Jerusalem, which maintained in January that roughly ten percent of the agency’s members are tied to the Hamas terror group.
“Every year, UNRWA provides the lists of all its staff to host countries across the region. In the context of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, UNRWA submits the lists of its staff to the State of Israel as the occupying power,” Juliette Touma told The Times of Israel.
“The last time UNRWA submitted that list was in May 2023. We have not received any response from the State of Israel on the list,” she added.
UNRWA fired 12 of its employees in January after it received evidence from Israel that they participated in Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught. But Israel has since offered what it says is intelligence to stakeholders showing that some 1,200 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staffers have ties to Hamas.
A senior European diplomat said on condition of anonymity that Jerusalem is “cynically” making such allegations in order to force UNRWA’s dissolution after never taking issue with the employee lists it received from the agency in previous years.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman dismissed this account, telling The Times of Israel that the lists it received from UNRWA were partial, did not contain ID numbers necessary for vetting the employees and were sometimes sent a full year after staffers were already working for the agency.
Nonetheless, Israel identified Hamas activists on UNRWA’s payroll on several occasions. In 2012, Israel alerted UNRWA that one of its principals, Sohail al-Hindi, was a Hamas activist, but it took until after Hindi’s election to Hamas’s politburo in 2017 for UNRWA to fire him, according to the Foreign Ministry spokesman.
