The Biden administration has funneled more than $730 million to a United Nations organization for refugee assistance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that harbored personnel who have incited violence against the Jewish people, The Post has learned.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been accused in recent years of employing educators who “regularly call to murder Jews” and teach from textbooks “that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism,” according to a March joint report by the non-governmental organization UN Watch and the Israeli non-profit Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education.
The US can’t legally provide money directly to the Palestinian Authority or the terror group Hamas, which last weekend carried out the worst civilian massacre in the state of Israel’s 75-year history.
The State Department has nevertheless provided grants and other funding to organizations in the area, despite experts bemoaning the lack of “guardrails” and internal documents noting “a high risk” that Hamas could benefit from the money dump.
The State Department, which has yet to pause any funding to groups in the Palestinian territories, did not respond to a request for comment. The US Office of Palestinian Affairs also did not respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration ended funding to UNRWA in 2018, calling it an “irredeemably flawed operation.” President Biden reversed that decision and the US is currently the agency’s largest funder.
Enia Krivine, Senior Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (FDD) Israel Program, told The Post Tuesday that UNRWA contributes to violence towards Israelis and the US should immediately review its support.
The Hamas terrorists that kidnapped and butchered Israelis on Saturday “are a generation of Gazans who have been raised in UNRWA camps,” Krivine said. “UNRWA was established to perpetuate the refugee problem.”
“The whole purpose of refugee programs is to reduce refugees and to repatriate refugees and to give them a life and a nation,” she added. “UNRWA does the inverse. UNRWA also teaches anti-semitic, anti-Israel content in their schools. It’s really a scandal that the US and the Europeans have funded these curricula through generations of Palestinians.
“UNRWA has been used as staging grounds for attacks. They’ve discovered terror tunnels under UNRWA buildings, registered Hamas members have been employed by UNRWA — it is rotten to the core.”
The restored funding push under Biden came despite a 2021 State Department report noting the agency had allowed Hamas terrorists to build tunnels under its schools and to stockpile weapons “in or near” other facilities, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“UNRWA also has a cash assistance program,” FDD senior adviser Rich Goldberg told The Post, noting that the UN does not categorize Hamas as a terrorist group, and does not have a “political litmus test” on international aid.
The funding is meant to act as a support system, especially for those who live in the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by Egypt and Israel. Stopping the funding, critics argue, would lead to a humanitarian crisis.
However, Goldberg argued, “allowing the Hamas terrorist organization to act like a government … and use its resources to commit terrorism, is one of the reasons we have ended up in the place we are today.”
The UN program was established in 1948 with the intention to aid Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza following Israel’s founding and the subsequent Middle Eastern war. The program, which originally covered 700,000 refugees, has more than 5.6 million registered with it as of 2019.
The State Department announced in February that it had “provided over $890 million for Palestinians” since April 2021, with more than $730 million going to UNRWA.
The tranches were approved to “support the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people as well as the aspirations of the Palestinian people,” according to Ned Price, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
However, experts who spoke with The Post said the US places few conditions on many of the organizations it supports in the region.
“Most of that is out the door already — there were no guardrails on it at all,” said Gabriel Noronha, a former special adviser on Iran under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said of the newest funding.
“It was earmarked for classic State Department-style projects and was all fungible,” he added, before noting that the US could still block $6 billion in Iranian assets that was unfrozen last month.
On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists launched rocket attacks and a multi-front armed invasion of the Jewish state, killing more than 1,000 Israelis and wounding thousands more. At least 14 Americans have also been identified among the dead.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps coordinated with Hamas and greenlit the attack, which brutalized Israeli children, women and grandparents in horrific acts of violence shared on social media.
The Free Beacon also obtained internal records that show US officials expressed concerns in 2021 about relaxing sanctions on funding to the Palestinian territories, citing “a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from US assistance to Gaza.”
“There is less but still some risk US assistance would benefit other designated [global terrorist] groups,” Andrew Weinschenk, the director of the State Department’s Office of Threat Finance Countermeasures, said in a memo to the Treasury Department.
“Notwithstanding this risk, State believes it is in our national security interest to provide assistance in the West Bank and Gaza to support the foreign policy objectives,” Weinschenk told Brad Smith, the acting director of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The internal documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust, which is run by Michael Chamberlain, a former Trump Education Department communications official.
The US government has given more than $6.3 billion to Gaza and the West Bank since the signing of the first of two Oslo Accords in 1993 as part of its efforts to negotiate a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians.
Asked about the ongoing support for Gaza and the West Bank, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Post Tuesday: “If you fund terrorists, you’re going to get terrorism.”