US pause on funding UNRWA may become permanent

US officials are preparing for a pause on funding the main UN agency for Palestinians to become permanent due to opposition in Congress, even as the Biden administration insists the agency’s humanitarian work is indispensable, Reuters has reported.

Along with more than a dozen other countries, the US suspended its funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in January after Israel accused 12 of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza of participating in the deadly 7 October Hamas attack. The UN has launched an investigation into the allegations, and UNRWA fired some staff after Israel provided the agency with information on the allegations.

The US is UNRWA’s largest donor, providing $300-$400 million annually. It said that it wants to see the results of that inquiry and corrective measures taken before it will consider resuming its donations to the agency. Even if the pause is lifted, though, only about $300,000 — what is left of already appropriated funds — would be released to UNRWA. Anything further would require congressional approval.

Bipartisan opposition in Congress to funding UNRWA makes it unlikely that the US will resume regular donations anytime soon, even as countries such as Sweden and Canada have said that they will restart their contributions.

A supplemental funding bill in the US Congress that includes military aid to Israel and Ukraine and is supported by the Biden administration, contains a provision that would block UNRWA from receiving funds if it becomes law.

US officials say that they recognise “the critical role” UNRWA plays in distributing aid inside the densely-populated Gaza Strip that has been brought close to famine by Israel’s assault over the past five months. Such recognition may not be enough to save the funding. “We have to plan for the fact that Congress may make that pause permanent,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Tuesday.

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Washington has been looking at working with humanitarian partners on the ground, such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP), to continue giving aid. However, officials are aware that UNRWA is hard to replace.

“There are other organisations that are now providing some distribution of aid inside Gaza, but that is primarily the role that UNRWA is equipped to play that no one else is due to its long-standing work and networks of distribution, and its history inside Gaza,” added Miller.

A few Senate Democrats, including Senator Chris Van Hollen, along with some progressive House members, have opposed an indefinite ban on funding to UNRWA. Any new funding, though, would need the support of at least some Republicans, who hold a majority in the House of Representatives. Many have expressed their opposition to UNRWA.

“UNRWA is a front, plain and simple,” claimed Republican lawmaker Brian Mast, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability. “It masquerades as a relief organisation while building the infrastructure to support Hamas… It is literally funnelling American tax dollars to terrorism.” He provided no evidence for his outrageous allegation against a major UN agency.

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UNRWA was established in 1949 by a UN General Assembly resolution, after the war that followed Israel’s founding, when 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba. Today it directly employs 30,000 Palestinians, serving the civic and humanitarian needs of 5.9 million descendants of those refugees in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem; and in densely-populated camps in neighbouring Arab countries.

In Gaza, UNRWA runs the enclave’s schools, its primary healthcare clinics and other social services, and distributes humanitarian aid. William Deere, director of UNRWA’s Washington Representative Office, told Reuters that US support accounts for one-third of the agency’s budget.

“That’s going to be very hard to overcome,” he said. “Please remember that UNRWA is more than Gaza. It’s health care and education and social services. It’s East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon.”

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