TEL AVIV – The Trump administration maintains that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees is a fundamentally flawed institution that is perpetuating the refugee crisis and thwarting any progress, a senior U.S. official told The Jerusalem Post.
Palestinian refugees are the only refugees in the world that pass that status onto their descendants in perpetuity. While United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, is said to minister to 5.1 million “refugees,” the numbers are unclear, with conflicting statistics regarding the Palestinian diaspora.
Palestinian refugees’ unique status, the official said, “has perpetuated and exacerbated the refugee crisis.”
He added that UNRWA’s mandate “must be changed so the Palestinian people can reach their full potential.”
On Friday, Foreign Policy magazine published emails by President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and other members of the peace team that slammed the agency and called for it to be shuttered.
The official corroborated the content of some of the emails which outlined an investigation ordered by Trump into the agency.
“The US policy regarding UNRWA has been under frequent evaluation and internal discussion. The administration will announce its policy on UNRWA in due course,” the administration official said. “UNRWA’s financial situation has been unsustainable for a long time, and for years we have voiced the need for UNRWA to seek out new voluntary funding streams, increase financial burden-sharing among donors, and find ways to reduce expenditures.”
In one email, Kushner called UNRWA “corrupt” and “unhelpful.”
“It is important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA,” Kushner wrote in an email dated January 11, a few days before the U.S. froze $65 million in funding for UNRWA. “This [agency] perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace.”
Another email written by adviser to Trump’s Middle East peace envoy Jason Greenblatt suggested closing UNRWA as part of a peace deal.
“UNRWA should come up with a plan to unwind itself and become part of the UNHCR [UN High Commissioner for Refugees] by the time its charter comes up again in 2019,” wrote Victoria Coates.
She noted that the proposition was one of a number of “spitball ideas that I’ve had that are also informed by some thoughts I’ve picked up from Jared, Jason and [UN envoy] Nikki [Haley]”
Other proposals included a suggestion that the UN agency be asked to operate on a monthly budget and come up with “a plan to remove all anti-Semitism from educational materials.”
UNRWA has also come under fire on many occasions for spreading anti-Semitic hate in its schools and employing members of terror organizations and supporters of terror. In February, UN Watch released an 130-page report exposing 40 UNRWA school employees in Gaza and elsewhere who engaged in incitement to terror against Israelis and expressed “anti-Semitism, including by posting Holocaust-denying videos and pictures celebrating Hitler.”
That month the agency also announced the suspension of an UNRWA employee suspected of having been elected a Hamas leader.
The UN itself released a report in 2015 that found Palestinian terror groups used three empty UNRWA schools in Gaza as a weapons cache. Moreover, it said that in at least two cases terrorists “probably” fired rockets at Israel from the schools during the 50-day summer conflict in 2014 between Israel and Hamas.
In January, Trump slammed the PA over its refusal to deal with the US, saying his administration should not continue to give “massive payments” to the Palestinians when they are “no longer willing to talk peace.”
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