US pause on UNRWA funding for Gaza may become permanent

Because of resistance in Congress, US officials are getting ready to temporarily stop supporting the primary U.N. agency for Palestinians, despite the Biden administration’s insistence that the assistance group’s humanitarian efforts are essential.

In January, the United States and over a dozen other nations ceased providing funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) following accusations by Israel that 12 of the organization’s 13,000 employees in Gaza were involved in the October 7 Hamas attack.

After receiving information about the allegations from Israel, UNRWA terminated certain employees and opened an inquiry into the claims by the U.N.

The United States, which provides $300–400 million to UNRWA yearly, stated that before it will consider resuming financing, it wants to see the findings of that investigation and any corrective actions taken.

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Just roughly $300,000 of the already approved cash would be given to UNRWA, even if the freeze is lifted. Congress would have to approve anything more.

Even while countries like Sweden and Canada have stated they will resume their contributions, bipartisan resistance in Congress to funding UNRWA makes it doubtful that the United States will begin regular donations anytime soon.

A clause in a supplementary budget measure in the U.S. Congress, backed by the Biden administration and including military aid to Israel and Ukraine, would prevent UNRWA from receiving financing should it become law.

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Officials from the United States say they understand “the critical role” that UNRWA plays in providing relief within the heavily populated enclave that Israel’s attacks over the last five months have driven to the verge of hunger.

“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 (WFP), to continue giving 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.

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 U.N. General Assembly resolution, after the war that followed Israel’s founding, 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, its primary healthcare clinics and other social services, and distributes humanitarian aid.

William Deere, director of UNRWA’s Washington Representative Office, told Reuters that U.S. 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 health care and education and social services. It’s East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon.”

Fighters from Hamas, which administers Gaza, killed 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 attack and took 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies, an assault that sparked one of the bloodiest wars in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign on the densely populated enclave has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza authorities, while infrastructure has been obliterated and hundreds of thousands are now close to famine.

(With agency inputs)