U.S. Pledges $99M to U.N. Palestinian Refugee Agency

The U.S. will give $99 million to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, the State Department has said, after the Trump administration cut funding to the agency, which it called “irredeemably flawed.”

The State Department said the money to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) will “provide education, health care, and emergency relief to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children and families during a time of need.”

The Biden administration made a decision in April to resume funding for UNRWA despite the fact that it promotes violence against Israelis and that its schools – by the U.N.’s own admission – have been used as weapons caches and as launching pads for Hamas rockets.

Israel has called for permanently shuttering UNRWA, citing its perpetuation of the conflict as well as its terrorist ties. Palestinian so-called refugees are the only “refugees” in the world that pass that status on to their descendants in perpetuity.

One of the core issues in the conflict is the Palestinian demand for the “right of return” that would see those refugees and their descendants — who now number around 5 million — return to Israel in any final status agreement. Israel has categorically rejected this demand, deeming it a bid to destroy the Jewish state by demographics.

As Eugene Kontorovich, an U.S.-Israel professor of international law, explained to Breitbart in the past: “There is nothing intrinsically different about Palestinian refugees that warrants their own U.N. agency and there is nothing special about UNRWA employees that puts them above the law. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees should be the only agency responsible for people with genuine refugee status.”

Former U.S. ambassador to Israel under Trump, David Friedman, noted that the U.S. has “thrown more than $10 billion” in aid to the Palestinians, but is nonetheless no closer to peace.

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 U.N. 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 its statement on Thursday, the State Department said the “U.S. remains focused on the agency’s accountability, transparency, neutrality, and stability.”