On his first day in office in his second (nonconsecutive) term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” halting funding to the United Nations’ most corrupt and dangerous body: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
The president will take his first meeting with a foreign leader on Tuesday, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. UNRWA has already been banned in Israel, its offices are being cleaned out, and, hopefully, the fate of the organization stateside will come up in their meetings. Its days, it seems, are numbered.
This action does not come a moment too soon.
As a Palestinian and a former refugee myself, I know well that UNRWA, its ranks permeated with terrorist operatives, has long been one of the primary obstacles to peace and drivers of war and suffering in the region.
It’s important to understand that UNRWA is very different in structure and purpose from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which is responsible for every other global refugee population. Only consider: As of 2024, the UNHCR had fewer than 19,000 international employees from around the world to manage the issues of 29.4 million refugees. Meanwhile, UNRWA employs more than 30,000 Palestinians to service a claimed figure of 5.9 million Palestinian refugees.
The unusual status of Palestinian refugees under the UNRWA framework is part of a deliberate policy cultivated by rejectionist countries in the Middle East to perpetuate the political war against Israel. For the first 10 years, UNRWA’s mandate included resettlement of refugees as an objective, but the late 1950s deleted this provision under pressure from Arab states.
Consider my personal story. I grew up in East Jerusalem when it was under Jordanian occupation, in the historic Jewish Quarter, from which the Jordanians had expelled all Jews after 1948. In 1966, when I was 8, the Jordanian government forcibly relocated us to the Shuafat Refugee Camp; thus, it was Jordan that turned my family and me into “refugees.”
The consequences of turning Palestinian refugees into permanent refugees seep into ideology and identity and explain the failure of peace efforts in the region. Education takes up 58% of the UNRWA budget, and UNRWA educational materials are rife with antisemitism and incitement to violence: for example, celebrating the fire-bombing of an Israeli civilian bus as a “barbecue party.”
This enshrinement of and indoctrination into permanent refugee status is the key factor that has derailed previous peace agreements. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat famously rejected the 2000 Camp David Accords negotiated by President Bill Clinton even though Israel accepted a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem because Israel also refused to admit the claimed expanded refugee population into Israel itself as citizens, which would have made Israel an Arab-Muslim majority country. As Swiss Foreign Minister Ignacio Cassis said in 2018: “By supporting UNRWA, we are keeping the conflict alive.”
Furthermore, UNRWA’s employee population includes many active participants in terrorist organizations and activities. The United Nations itself was forced to terminate the employment of nine staff members after an internal investigation revealed evidence they participated directly in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Some of the over 250 hostages kidnapped spent part of their captivity, during which they were raped and tortured, at UNWRA camps. One UNRWA school headmaster and science teacher was a rocket-builder for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A Hamas commander in Lebanon was the head of the UNRWA teachers’ association in that country.
UNRWA’s immediate past commissioner-general, Pierre Krahenbuhl, is known to have met with Hamas and PIJ leadership in Beirut in 2017, where he emphasized the “spirit of partnership” between the terrorist groups and UNRWA, inviting them to challenge privately any UNRWA decision, which he could then “tear up,” while urging that their “discussions not be made public.”
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Trump has taken a critical first step by ending U.S. financial support for UNRWA. Still, the risk remains that other donor countries will take up the slack, as UNRWA positions itself internationally as a do-gooder organization dedicated to education and housing the vulnerable.
Sadly, UNRWA is nothing of the kind; it is a propagandistic entity that enables and justifies direct violence and is one of the most dangerous obstacles to peace in the region. The Trump administration, Israel, and their international partners should seize this moment to push for a new mechanism to address the needs of the Palestinian population: one dedicated to the resettlement of “refugees” outside of Israel, an end to incitement, and a severe and meaningful crackdown on terrorist infiltration. Doing so could generate lasting positive change and even open the door to the normalization of the Palestinian people and genuine peace with our Jewish neighbors.
Bassem Eid is a Palestinian human rights activist. He lives in the West Bank.