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.
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