President Donald Trump will reportedly defund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the agency for Palestinian “refugees” that has aligned with Hamas terrorists, this week.
Trump will also withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council, which has been little more than a forum for dictators to sanitize their human rights records while bashing Israel and, to a lesser extent, the United States.
Both moves will repeat policies that Trump had adopted during his first administration, and which were reversed by President Joe Biden — to little avail, as UNRWA sheltered Hamas terrorists and the Human Rights Council continued to attack Israel.
The executive orders giving effect to these decisions were postponed until Tuesday, when President Trump is to welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House.
Politico reported Monday:
President Donald Trump is expected to issue an executive order on Tuesday withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N. Human Rights Council and prohibiting future funding for the U.N. relief agency for Gaza, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.
The actions, which reinstate policies in place during the last Trump administration, will come on the day the president is set to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington. The U.S. has long accused the council of bias against Israel and of giving cover to governments with human rights abuses. It comes after the Biden administration paused funding to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, known as UNRWA, following reports that staffers were involved in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.
Israeli government spokesman David Mencer opened a press briefing last Wednesday with a blistering argument against UNRWA, which must cease all operations in Israel under a recent law by the Israeli Knesset (parliament).
“Every dollar to UNRWA is a dollar to Hamas,” he said. “The time to defund and to dismantle UNRWA is now.”
He noted that UNRWA employees had participated in the October 7 terror attack, and had held Israeli hostages. He added that UNRWA forces Palestinians to remain “refugees” and indoctrinates successive generations to hate Israel.
The United Nations complained bitterly about Israel’s enforcement of the ban against UNRWA. The New York Times noted: “On Tuesday, senior U.N. officials and every member of the Security Council save the United States called Israel’s actions a violation of its obligations under international law and the U.N. charter. They warned that the restrictions would have a disastrous impact on aid delivery and jeopardize peace in the long-term.”
But Israel was unmoved by these concerns, especially as the United Nations has been content to overlook UNRWA’s entanglements with terror. Mencer referred to a speech earlier this week by Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, in which he said that UNRWA had “miserably failed in its mandate” and had refused to “address the widespread infiltration” of the agency by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations.
President Trump halted funding to UNRWA in his first term, but President Joe Biden restored it. Eventually, the Biden administration halted funding to UNRWA again after Israel presented evidence that UNRWA employees had been involved in the October 7 attack. (Other countries also paused funding, but some later resumed it.) Since taking office again, Trump paused international aid funding, but has yet to pull the plug permanently on UNRWA.
Mencer said that aid should be “redirected to UN agencies that do the same work,” such as the World Food Program, and to “vetted NGOs” that actually deliver humanitarian assistance to Palestinians rather than helping them murder and abduct Israelis.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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