Designate UNRWA as a Terrorist Organization

I t is mind-boggling to read in the New York Times this morning that the Biden State Department is assuring its fellow transnational progressives and Hamas pom-pom squads not to worry because only a tiny amount of American taxpayer funding for the Hamas branch known as the United Nations “Relief and Works” Agency for Palestinian “Refugees” (UNRWA — my sneer quotes) has been “paused” (more sneering).

Biden flack Matthew Miller explains that the administration — which restored funding that the Trump administration had righteously stopped — has already transferred over 99 percent of congressionally budgeted funding to UNRWA. Only $300,000 out of about $121 million is being withheld — and that’s just for the time being. Note: That $121 million is just a fraction of the $1 billion that President Biden has plowed into UNRWA since 2021. The implication, of course, is that the American dollars that pay for jihadist atrocities will continue flowing once Biden figures the heat is off.

As our editorial today counters, that is unacceptable.

I would go even further: Congressional Republicans should demand that the Biden administration designate UNRWA as a terrorist organization. Moreover, the Justice Department should indict UNRWA and its operatives for both material support to terrorism and any acts of terrorism (and terrorism conspiracy) to which specific UNRWA operatives can be tied by solid evidence. Any Republican presidential candidate who wants to be taken seriously should commit to such a designation and prosecutions — highlighting that (a) the Biden administration won’t make that commitment, and (b) when Biden and congressional Democrats restored UNRWA funding, it was already credibly undeniable that UNRWA conspires with the Hamas terrorist organization and that its complicity in an atrocity such as October 7 was easily foreseeable.

Hamas has been under U.S. government sanctions since 1995. In 1997, it became one of the first entities designated as a foreign terrorist organization — it was on the list two years before al-Qaeda. That was after the 1996 overhaul of federal counterterrorism law, which established that process. Ever since, it has been the law of the United States that a person or entity that provides material support to a designated terrorist organization is punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — or by death if the terrorist organization carries out lethal attacks abetted by that material support.

Over 1,100 people were killed in the October 7 sneak attacks carried out by Hamas with UNRWA complicity. Hundreds more were savagely wounded, raped, and/or taken hostage.

As our editorial notes, 10 percent of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza (1,200 out of 12,000) are believed to be Hamas operatives. It gets worse, if you can believe that. Viewing the same intelligence reporting on which the Wall Street Journal recently dilated, Commentary’s Seth Mandel observed this nugget:

“Two officials familiar with the intelligence said the UNRWA employees considered to have ties with militant groups were deemed to be ‘operatives,’ indicating they took active part in the organization’s military or political framework. The report said 23% of UNRWA’s male employees had ties to Hamas, a higher percentage than the average of 15% for adult males in Gaza, indicating a higher politicization of the agency than the population at large.” To repeat that last stat: Men in Gaza who work for the UN are more likely to be involved with Hamas than those who don’t have jobs at the UN agency. [Emphasis in original.]

The UNRWA is not “politicized,” as intelligence officials gently put it. The UNRWA is jihadi-cized.

As Noah Rothman forcefully argues, we should cut off the United Nations, period. But to have restored support for UNRWA is an abomination worthy of the Biden administration itself being cited for knowingly supporting a terrorist organization.

There are no virtually no refugees among the approximately 5.5 million Palestinians resident in Gaza, Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem. It was estimated that 700,000 were displaced in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence; of those, as former Trump secretary of state Mike Pompeo has observed, fewer than 200,000 Arabs remain. Meanwhile, generations of Palestinians have grown up in the Palestinian territories since the U.N. was established after World War II. They are not refugees seeking a homeland; they have one — one for which they demand recognition as a sovereign country (which they could long ago have had if they renounced terrorism and conceded Israel’s right to exist, instead of committing to terrorism as a means of swallowing Israel — “from the river to the sea”).

Yet the U.N. and UNRWA persist in the “refugee” fraud in tandem with the demand by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority that the refugees be granted a “right of return” to homes in Israel. This patently unacceptable condition perpetuates the conflict while undermining Israel’s legitimacy as a sovereign state (rather than a “settler-colonialist” intruder).

Rather than “relief and works,” what UNRWA provides, thanks to its underwriting by Americans and citizens of other nations, is rabid antisemitic indoctrination, rockets, and jihadists — for both Hamas (the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The revelations about UNRWA’s complicity in the October 7 atrocities are nothing new. UNRWA’s willful support of terrorism has been open and notorious for decades, notwithstanding the determination not to notice by the State Department under various American administrations (Trump’s honorably excepted).

In making the determination to designate UNRWA as what it is, a sponsor of terrorism, the fact that it is an arm of the despicable U.N. should be of no moment. In 2019, our government designated the nation of Iran’s principal military arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a foreign terrorist organization. And on significantly less evidence of hands-on jihadist activity than exists with respect to UNRWA, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was designated by our government as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist government in 2001 because of its financial support of Hamas.

A terrorist designation would make it politically untenable for the United States government to provide one more dime of American taxpayer funding to UNRWA, and to provide funding to any entity, including the U.N., that supports it. If we are serious about condemning and combating terrorism, that is as it must be.