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.
