President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday withdrawing the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council and ending U.S. participation in UNRWA (the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), the Hamas-linked organization ostensibly tasked with delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“I’ve always felt that the U.N. has tremendous potential. It’s not living up to that potential right now; it really hasn’t for a long time,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
Trump also ordered the U.S. to review its ties to UNESCO (the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), a U.N. panel that promotes intercultural dialogue and global education. Further, Trump signed a directive authorizing a “maximum pressure” sanctions regime against Iran to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to kneecap the regime’s oil exports.
Trump took the executive actions ahead of his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, making it the first visit of a foreign leader during Trump’s second term as the U.S.-brokered cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas continues to hold.
The U.N. Human Rights Council routinely pushes through anti-Israel resolutions and investigations through a special rapporteur with a long history of antisemitic statements. Item 7 of the council’s agenda fixates on Israel and makes condemnations of Israel a consistent theme of its meetings, a standard that does not apply to authoritarian regimes and the world’s most notorious human rights abusers. The U.S. and Israel previously withdrew from the U.N. panel because of its anti-Israel bias.
UNRWA, the U.N. body for delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza, is banned from operating in Israel because of its extensive ties to Hamas, including the likely involvement of nine staffers in Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks. Israel’s law preventing UNRWA from operating went into effect last week after being passed last fall.
Trump cut off funding for UNRWA during his first term, a move President Biden reversed in April 2021. The Biden administration temporarily paused UNRWA funding last January over allegations that some of its staffers participated in the October 7 massacre, making the U.S. one of several countries to do so. Since 1950, the U.S. has contributed $7.1 billion to UNRWA, making it the organization’s largest funder, according to the Congressional Research Service.
President Trump has nominated Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) to serve as his administration’s U.N. ambassador and she is likely to be confirmed in the coming days. Stefanik is a strong believer in a close relationship between the U.S. and Israel and has criticized the outpouring of antisemitism on college campuses.