US Should Restore UNRWA Funding after UN Review

IMEU Policy Project Memo #5

“Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence” for claims that it made that a small number of UNRWA employees participated in the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, according to the report of an independent panel commissioned by the UN, which was released earlier this week.

The Biden administration and Congress took precipitate steps to cut off funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), a humanitarian organization that has provided social services to Palestinian refugees since 1949, based on these unsubstantiated Israeli allegations.

Topline

The Biden administration and Congress should take immediate action to restore funding to UNRWA based on the findings of this UN panel because:

• 1.1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are facing imminent starvation due to Israel’s illegal blockade of food and UNRWA is the best-placed agency to distribute food and other humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

• 30,000 UNRWA employees provide critically needed social services to nearly 6 million registered Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, all of which are now jeopardized by US funding bans.
  

• The hasty decision-making process of both the Biden administration and Congress, completed prior to the UN panel’s findings, was both premature and wrong, and constituted an act of collective punishment against Palestinian refugees.

Details

The independent panel, while making recommendations for the improvement of UNRWA’s functioning, also concluded that widespread allegations leveled against the agency by Israel and by pro-Israel NGO’s are largely meritless. The independent panel found that:

• UNRWA’s standards for ensuring the neutrality of its employees exceeds those of all other UN organizations. “UNRWA has established a significant number of mechanisms and procedures to ensure compliance with the humanitarian principles, with emphasis on the principle of neutrality, and that it possesses a more developed approach to neutrality than other similar UN or NGO entities.” The panel concluded that UNRWA’s framework for ensuring its neutrality is “robust”.
  

• UNRWA promotes human rights, conflict resolution, and tolerance in its educational curriculum. It is important to note that UNRWA does not print its own textbooks; it relies on host countries’ textbooks in its schools. After reviewing “three major international assessments and academic studies on the issue of Palestinian Authority textbooks,” the panel concluded that there was currently no antisemitic content in these textbooks.

Relentless campaigning by Israel and pro-Israel NGO’s to try to delegitimize and defund UNRWA through baseless allegations are not only designed to deny social services to Palestinian refugees. They are also part of a campaign to try to deny Palestinian refugees their right to return to their homes from which Israel expelled them in 1948. 

The US and the international community have an obligation to continue providing social services to Palestinian refugees for as long as Israel continues to deny them the right that all refugees have to return home. And the US should pressure Israel to finally implement UN General Assembly Resolution 194, adopted in 1948, which calls for Palestinian refugees’ right to return home, a resolution supported at the time by the US.

Photo credit: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid/Flickr, Creative Commons License.