‘Tainted by Terror’: Israel Bans UNRWA From Operating in Its Territory

Ban receives US support

By: Jessica Schwalb

Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon announced Tuesday that his country will ban UNRWA, a Palestinian refugee agency whose members participated in Hamas’s October 7 massacre, from operating in Israeli territory.

“UNRWA has miserably failed in its mandate. It has failed the people who are supposed to benefit from its services,” Danon said in a press conference. “We reaffirm our readiness to cooperate with other U.N. agencies that are not tainted by terror.”

The ban will take effect within 48 hours.

The United States backed Israel’s decision at Tuesday’s U.N. Security Council briefing, with U.S. chargé d’affaires Dorothy Shea saying that shuttering the agency is a step toward giving Gazans a “brighter future.”

The U.S. show of support for Israel follows years of mixed messages from the Biden administration, which restarted U.S. funding for UNRWA in April 2021 before freezing it again following the October 7 attacks. President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.N. ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has vowed that, if confirmed, she will fight “anti-Semitic rot within the United Nations,” particularly UNRWA.

After the Palestinian aid agency claimed for months that none of its staffers had anything to do with Hamas’s October 7 terror attacks, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis, UNRWA in August abruptly fired nine staffers after an investigation revealed that they “may have” participated in the attacks. Reports broke one month later that a prominent UNWRA official who worked as a principal at a U.N. school moonlighted as Hamas’s top commander in Lebanon.

Israel’s decision to sever all ties with UNRWA follows legislation, passed by the Knesset in October, to dismantle the group’s operations within Israeli territory given its ties to the Hamas bloodbath.

“UNRWA encourages terrorism and encourages massacres like Oct. 7,” Knesset member Dan Illouz told the Washington Free Beacon at the time.

Earlier this month, JNS reported that according to the December 2024 report “The Unholy Alliance: UNRWA, Hamas and Islamic Jihad” from UN Watch, a watchdog based in Geneva, officials of UNRWA meet “routinely” with Lebanese and Gazan terror groups and “mutually praise each other for ‘cooperation’ and describe each other as ‘partners.’”

Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA commissioner-general, “and his colleagues knowingly allow Hamas and other terrorist groups to infiltrate UNRWA’s employee base, indoctrinate impressionable Palestinian children to pursue a path of terrorism against Israelis and Jews and install military infrastructure underneath or next to UNRWA facilities,” as was indicated in the report.

The report noted that more than 10% of UNRWA’s senior educators in Gaza are members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as per the JNS report. Israel has that said hundreds of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gazan staff members, including teachers, are active Hamas terrorists.