The federal government should put an end to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA. It has long connived at Islamist terrorism against Israel and has, to put it mildly, long been an impediment to peace.
In a May 18 letter, U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and 23 of their Republican colleagues urged President Donald Trump to take “decisive action to fully dismantle UNRWA and eliminate it from the U.N. budget.”
The senators cited UNRWA’s links to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, in which Iranian-backed terrorists invaded the Jewish state and murdered 1,200 people. The massacre was the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. U.N. employees were among the perpetrators. They were also among those who kept some of the terrorists’ hostages.
They were also terrorists themselves. An Israeli investigation found that at least twelve UNRWA employees took part in the attack. The U.S. Agency for International Development Office of Inspector General has since identified additional current or former UNRWA workers tied to the assault or to Hamas, which Washington has designated a terrorist group committed to Israel’s destruction.
UNRWA was created in 1949, after Arab nations vowed to push the Jews “into the sea” and ordered their armies to attack Israel to do so. It is the only U.N. organization dedicated to one specific refugee population, Palestinian Arabs. This in itself is a severe problem, for it implies falsely that Palestinian Arabs are in a unique position and should be found a home in what is now Israeli sovereign territory.
It also means a vast bureaucracy has been created with a vested interest in perpetuating itself. All other refugees fall under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. While the UNHCR will always have a changing body of refugees to deal with in different parts of the world, UNRWA has only one body of refugees, and if once those refugees were settled elsewhere, in all the Arab countries that expelled their Jews in 1948, for example, UNRWA would have lost its reason to exist.
UNRWA is different because it does not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but perpetuates it.
Its very definition of a “refugee” is absurd. The term includes people several generations removed from the 1948-49 war, who are citizens of other states, and people who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, both of which Palestinians themselves claim as part of a future state.
UNRWA schools indoctrinate children with hatred of Israel, and form them as they grow up to want to murder Jews. A 2024 study by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education presented to the U.K. Parliament found that UNRWA teaching materials “glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis, and incite antisemitism,” yet the agency itself “has held almost none of its employees accountable.”
Ten percent of UNRWA’s Gaza workforce, roughly 1,200 people, belong to Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, according to Israeli intelligence. Indeed, when Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, one of the architects of Oct. 7, was killed by Israeli forces in October 2024, an UNRWA teacher’s ID was found on his corpse.
UNRWA’s perfidy is not new. In a 2015 inquiry, for example, the U.N. acknowledged that UNRWA facilities had been used by terrorist groups to hide weapons and launch attacks in previous conflicts.
American tax dollars helped make this possible. That must end.
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In February 2025, Trump issued an executive order barring U.S. funding for UNRWA. Yet the U.N. has kept the agency alive.
The United States funds roughly a quarter of the U.N.’s budget. Washington should use that leverage to put an end to an agency, the existence of which is contrary to American values and interests, violates Israeli security, and militates against any lasting peace in the Middle East.