Israel’s Knesset approved in first reading on Monday a bill seeking to terminate Israel’s relations with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and declaring it a terrorist organization.
Since Hamas attacked Israel nine months ago, U.N. officials have repeatedly maintained that UNRWA is the backbone of aid operations—and much of the world agrees, placing UNRWA on an undeserved pedestal. As Israel advances efforts to dismantle it, 118 countries backed the relief organization as indispensable.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres asserted earlier this month that there is no alternative to UNRWA.
According to the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank, Guterres is wrong.
So why, if there are alternatives, is Guterres pushing UNRWA even though strong evidence exists that the organization is complicit in terrorism against Israel?
David May, a research manager at FDD, told JNS that this is because “the United Nations is still holding onto the narrative that terrorism within UNRWA is a case of a few bad apples and not a poisonous tree.”
According to May, “The United Nations doesn’t consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization, so membership in Hamas is not inherently disqualifying for the United Nations.”
The United Nations sees UNRWA as so crucial to aid services in Gaza that its “peccadilloes” can be overlooked, he added. “The urgent need for aid trumps the agency’s deficiencies.”
May also noted that UNRWA is part of a massive U.N. architecture of Palestinian-specific bodies designed to promote Palestinian grievances against Israel.
Roadmap for replacing UNRWA
An FDD report issued in May provides a roadmap for replacing the disgraced U.N. agency with existing organizations that will better serve the populations UNRWA was mandated to serve.
As per its official mandate, UNRWA provides education, health and aid to millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. However, critics accuse the agency of failing to fulfill its mandate.
Detailing how UNRWA is dispensable, “Turn-Key Alternatives to Replace UNRWA Immediately,” by FDD’s Richard Goldberg and Bonnie Glick answers the question of what would fill the void if UNRWA were abolished.
In the report, Goldberg and Glick describe what services UNRWA provides, identify turn-key alternatives, and suggested individualized solutions for other areas where UNRWA operates, including Jordan and Lebanon.
For instance, the report explains: “USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], working with OCHA [U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] or another organization with a Middle East presence, could coordinate shelter, non-food items, and livelihood issues; food security, emergency telecommunications, and logistics through WFP [World Food Program]; healthcare through WHO [World Health Organization]; nutrition through UNICEF [U.N. International Children’s Emergency Fund]; water, sanitation, and hygiene through UNICEF; and education through UNICEF….”
Goldberg is a senior adviser at FDD and a former White House National Security Council member. Glick is an FDD adjunct senior fellow and former deputy administrator of USAID.
The authors found that Gaza is already shifting away from a UNRWA-centric aid model to a post-UNRWA alternative.
And yet, UNRWA’s supporters are working hard to lobby countries to resume aid, and are relying on Guterres to block the entry of other agencies.
“However, if the U.S. remains firm on permanently prohibiting aid to UNRWA and brings in key allies and partners along with a credible plan for an alternative structure that makes UNRWA irrelevant while improving life for Palestinians, it can achieve a new paradigm in Gaza that excludes UNRWA,” write Goldberg and Glick.
“Implementation can begin immediately in Gaza to demonstrate proof of concept while steps are taken to prepare and implement transitions in other areas of UNRWA responsibility,” they argue. “In the end, even if the U.N. General Assembly [UNGA] maintains UNRWA’s mandate, the agency will be a shell of itself—unable to harm Palestinians or Israelis any longer.”
The report also lays the intellectual groundwork for extending the funding ban on UNRWA and gives Congress the tools it needs to make the U.S. funding ban permanent in the next congressional appropriations cycle. Congress, in its latest funding agreement, prohibited funding for UNRWA through March 2025.
“The Oct. 7 Hamas massacre validated past congressional attempts to overhaul or replace UNRWA,” write Goldberg and Glick. “Unfortunately, it took the worst pogrom since the Holocaust to shine a light on how UNRWA keeps Palestinians trapped in phony refugee status, incites violence through antisemitic textbooks and anti-Israel propaganda, allows Hamas to use its facilities to plan and launch terror attacks, and diverts aid to terrorists and their activities.”
“There is no going back to the status quo,” they assert.
Numerous countries halted funding to UNRWA after Israel accused UNRWA staff of participating in Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel. However, several of those nations have simce resumed funding.
The report addresses those concerns and starts a credible, robust conversation on the alternatives and how they can meet the needs of the populations UNRWA was supposed to serve.
“UNGA today is unlikely to vote to change or dissolve UNRWA’s mandate,” write Goldberg and Glick. “The priority now must be to defund the agency and isolate it from any work or responsibility. Yet absent a concrete roadmap to move away from UNRWA, donors will restore funding out of the misplaced concern that no other alternative exists. This is a myth established by UNRWA itself.”
According to May, “the U.N. in general has institutional inertia, a desire to promote the good work it supposedly does and not to engage in serious introspection.”
Asked whether it is realistic to replace UNRWA given the atmosphere and mechanism at the United Nations, May said, “Turn-key alternatives to UNRWA exist.”
“Some UNRWA functions should be phased out and performed by a Palestinian body, while the U.N. and international bodies should carry out UNRWA’s necessary functions,” he said.
In May’s view, in addition to the WFP handling food security, the WHO handling health needs, UNICEF handling education, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene, USAID handling livelihood, development, reconstruction and shelter needs, the World Bank could manage reconstruction efforts.
“The problem with replacing UNRWA is a political one, not a practical one,” he said. “UNRWA serves to preserve and indulge Palestinian grievances against Israel. Turning over its responsibilities to non-Palestinian specific agencies would be seen as withdrawing support for Palestinian demands.”
The evidence
IMPACT-se, the Israeli Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, the only NGO invited twice to testify before the U.N. panel investigating UNRWA, recently presented evidence on UNRWA’s education program to chair Catherine Colonna and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
Following the testimony, Colonna reached out to IMPACT-se requesting further information, and IMPACT-se provided a 245-page dossier on hate teaching and antisemitism in UNRWA schools and educational materials.
Despite this, the final report ignored the extensive dossier, which analyzed thousands of pages of teaching materials, showing institutionally created violent and antisemitic teaching materials self-produced by UNRWA’s education departments and bearing the agency’s logo, and including the names of schools and lists of contributing UNRWA administrative staff. These include school principals, educational experts and content supervisors involved in drafting, supervising, approving, printing and distributing hateful content to students.
Examples presented to the review panel include material celebrating a Palestinian firebombing of a Jewish bus as a “barbecue party”; glorifying as a role model Dalal Mughrabi, responsible for murdering 38 Israeli civilians; and maps displayed in UNRWA classrooms that erase the existence of Israel and mark cities in pre-1967 Israel as Palestinian.
IMPACT-se also shared a November 2023 report which documents links between UNRWA’s education program and the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.
The report uncovers over 100 UNRWA graduates who are Hamas members responsible for murdering Israeli civilians, and evidence of links between textbooks teaching violent content in UNRWA schools and the Oct. 7 massacre.
It also reveals UNRWA school events celebrating the massacre, and UNRWA teachers and staff applauding the attack on social media.
But despite the evidence provided by IMPACT-se, the U.N. panel’s report described the existence of hate teaching as “marginal” and as a “small fraction.”
The report described UNRWA’s education policies that allegedly mitigate hate as “robust and fit for purpose,” and claimed UNRWA had initiated a range of initiatives to ensure the neutrality of its teaching material.
“No evidence was cited to demonstrate that this is the case,” according to IMPACT-se.
The problem of replacing UNRWA is not as simple as it sounds, and the United Nations itself will never agree to do so. Dismantling UNRWA or changing its mandate requires a vote at the UNGA, which is unlikely.
According to May, “the key to replacing UNRWA is drying up its funding.”
“UNRWA can functionally be dismantled by severing its money supply,” added May. “Dismantling UNRWA is part of a process of ridding the United Nations of its systematic anti-Israel bias.”
