Republican senators urge Trump to exclude UNRWA from Gaza plans

Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led 25 Republican Senate colleagues on Thursday in a letter urging the Trump administration to exclude UNRWA, the United Nations aid agency for Palestinians, from plans to rebuild Gaza.

The GOP senators cited UNRWA’s “systemic infiltration” by Hamas and the need to “avoid repeating the mistakes that empowered the terror group to take hold in the first place” in their letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“During your recent visit to Israel, you reaffirmed UNRWA’s ties to terrorism, describing the agency as ‘a subsidiary of Hamas’ and making clear that it ‘is not going to play any role’ in the delivery of aid to Gaza,” the senators wrote. “Reinstating UNRWA would only recreate the very conditions that allowed Hamas to entrench itself and exert control in Gaza.”

“We strongly urge the administration to ensure that UNRWA play no role in any efforts to stabilize, govern and rebuild Gaza,” they wrote. “Instead, we encourage the United States to work with vetted international partners, trusted regional actors and nongovernmental organizations that are demonstrably free of terrorist influence and committed to transparency, accountability and peace.”

Other signatories to the letter included Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

The text of the White House’s 20-point peace plan from October that secured the release of all of the remaining living hostages in exchange for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas includes a line that left open the possibility of UNRWA resuming full operations in Gaza.

It called for aid to enter Gaza “through the United Nations and its agencies” and to “proceed without interference” from either Israel or Hamas, without specifying whether UNRWA would be one of those agencies.

Despite Rubio’s comments that UNRWA would not play any role in aid delivery to Gaza, the agency’s commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters on Thursday that it “continues to be highly operational” in Gaza, where it employs 12,000 local staff.

Earlier in the week, a U.S. draft text of a U.N. Security Council resolution removed a provision that would have deemed groups found guilty of “misuse” of aid “ineligible to provide ongoing or future assistance,” which was widely seen as an effort to bar the U.N. Relief and Works Agency over its Hamas ties.

© JNS