On a recent podcast, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz leveled incendiary charges against UNRWA — the UN agency which for more than 75 years has provided key social services to registered Palestinian refugees, who now total nearly six million people.
Waltz alleged that UNRWA has been “completely infiltrated by Hamas over the years” and has “radicalized the Palestinian youth through radical educational material and curriculum,” concluding that the agency must be “dismantled.”
Waltz’s tirade against UNRWA is the latest salvo in a longstanding bipartisan effort to starve UNRWA of funds in the hope that by erasing the UN agency that provides health, educational, and humanitarian relief services to Palestinian refugees, the Palestinian refugee issue itself will magically disappear, absolving Israel of its international legal obligation to repatriate Palestinians–and their descendants–who were driven from their homes in an act of ethnic cleansing during Israel’s establishment in 1948 and its military conquest and subsequent occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.
Waltz’s advocacy for dismantling UNRWA builds on various Israeli claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are affiliated with Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. However, an independent UN investigation published in April 2024 found that “Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this.”
Many donor nations had paused UNRWA funding for a short period of time, but as it became clear that the Israeli allegations were unsubstantiated, they all resumed funding except for the U.S. President Biden had paused U.S. funding to UNRWA in January 2024, a move that was followed by the enactment of a March 2024 law passed by Congress banning any U.S. appropriations for one year. In February 2025, President Trump extended this funding ban on UNRWA by executive order.
A new report issued by the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), however, undermines the expressed rationale for the ban and reveals Waltz’s charged claims against the agency to be spurious.
As the GAO notes, even the Trump administration itself found scant evidence to justify Waltz’s claim that Hamas “completely infiltrated” UNRWA. Instead, an April 2025 report by the USAID’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) allegedly found “independent evidence” only “connecting” three current or former UNRWA employees with Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel and only “affiliating” 14 current or former employees with the organization — representing only 0.1% of UNRWA’s current estimated workforce of 11,500 Palestinian employees in Gaza.
This investigative summary did not disclose the contents of the reported independent evidence collected by USAID, nor did it disaggregate the numbers between current and former UNRWA employees. Nor did it define what is meant by a connection or affiliation, clouding any realistic assessment of even these claims. If this evidence is the best the Trump administration can produce, then Waltz’s grossly exaggerated claims about UNRWA are difficult to take seriously.
And, as the GAO report makes clear, Waltz’s claim that UNRWA educational materials and curriculum “radicalize” Palestinian students is also wholly baseless. UNRWA utilizes Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks, which hardline neoconservative organizations, such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, have long argued propagate “antisemitic incitement.”
Examples of this supposed incitement examined by the GAO reveal such claims to be untenable unless one falsely insists that any expression of Palestinian national sentiment is tantamount to Jew hatred. Such ostensibly problematic passages in PA textbooks refer to Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital, use “Zionist” as a synonym for Israeli, and depict Palestinians killed by the Israeli military or police as “martyrs.” Protocols of the Elders of Zion this is not.
And, as the GAO report acknowledges, UNRWA has taken aggressive steps to supplement the PA curriculum with its own resources to instill human rights as a central component of its pedagogical approach. For example, when UNRWA identifies material in PA textbooks which contain material not aligned with UN terminology or UNESCO human rights standards, it provides “supplementary teaching documents to teach around or ban certain problematic content.”
In addition, since 2013, UNRWA has integrated a Human Rights, Conflict Resolution and Tolerance Teacher Toolkit into its curriculum. The GAO notes that the program focuses on “activities to highlight the importance of human rights education in its schools such as launching school parliaments and hosting a human rights enhancement and enrichment workshop.”
The U.S. initially funded this project; however, due to the current ban on UNRWA funding, the agency now “faces challenges implementing the program at full capacity.” In other words, the ban is prohibiting UNRWA from undertaking the very activities the U.S. purports to want the agency to conduct.
While Trump administration officials like Waltz continue to brandish false accusations against UNRWA in an attempt to discredit and destroy the agency, they remain silent about Israel’s devastating attacks against UNRWA employees, schools, and Palestinian schoolchildren. As of last May, Israel had killed 310 UNRWA employees in Gaza and, as of last month, Israel had killed an estimated 851 displaced Palestinians sheltering in UNRWA buildings since October 2023.
In September, Save the Children estimated that Israel had killed more than 20,000 children — the equivalent of more than one child killed every hour for 23 months. In October, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell stated that over the previous two years “a staggering 64,000 children have reportedly been killed or maimed across the Gaza Strip, including at least 1,000 babies. We don’t know how many more have died due to preventable illnesses or are buried under the rubble.”
As a result of the the ongoing Israeli military attacks in Gaza the GAO report says UNRWA has been forced to halt all formal education for 298,000 Palestinian students in 288 schools for more than two years because Israel either had destroyed all UNRWA school buildings or the buildings are being used as shelters by Palestinians displaced by the destruction.
Israel’s draconian policies have also limited UNRWA’s ability to continue its educational mission on behalf of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. As the GAO report notes, UNRWA has been forced to shutter some of its schools in the northern part of the West Bank as widespread Israeli ethnic cleansing campaigns have displaced more than 40,000 Palestinians from their homes over the past two years.
And Israel’s parliament — the Knesset — passed a law in October 2024 banning all UNRWA operations in what it considers to be Israel’s sovereign territory. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1980 — a move that violated international law and is not recognized by the international community. As a result of this law, Israel has forcibly shut down six UNRWA schools in East Jerusalem. Just last week, Israel bulldozed UNRWA offices in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
The Trump administration is working hand in glove with Israel to peddle debunked claims about UNRWA in an effort to starve the agency of funds and obliterate its ability to provide social services to Palestinian refugees denied their right to return home by Israel. Moreover, as noted by UNRWA-USA, given the size of its Gaza workforce, its expertise in delivering humanitarian assistance for more than 75 years, and its prepositioning of supplies, “UNRWA is the only agency capable of responding” to the humanitarian catastrophe inflicted on Palestinians by Israel’s blockade “at the scale this moment demands.”
Congress should put a stop to the U.S.-Israeli campaign to effectively destroy UNRWA and deny Palestinians access to life-saving humanitarian assistance by restoring the agency’s funding. It should instead defund and sanction Israel for its systematic attacks against UN personnel and those sheltering in UN facilities, its egregious denial of Palestinian children’s rights to education and life, and its ongoing blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza in violation of Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which requires a cut-off of all U.S. security and military assistance and arms sales to governments that restrict U.S. humanitarian assistance.
