Israeli lawmakers propose 3 bills seeking to ban UNRWA from operating in Israel

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Three proposed bills aimed at banning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from operating in Israel are currently being discussed in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

The bills would designate UNRWA as a terrorist organization and, therefore, would require Israel to cut all ties with it and strip UNRWA personnel of all the legal immunities and privileges they currently enjoy because of their status as UN staff in Israel.

Israel has called out the deep ties between UNRWA and Hamas for months, seeking ways to shut down the UN agency for its corruption and ties with the terrorist organization.

In January, then-Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy said UNRWA “has been fundamentally compromised in three main ways.”

“Hiring terrorists on a massive scale, letting its infrastructure be used for Hamas military activity, and relying on Hamas for aid distribution in the Gaza Strip.”

In early February, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly said that UNRWA had been infiltrated.

“UNRWA is totally infiltrated with Hamas,” Netanyahu told a visiting UN delegation at the time. “It has been in the service of Hamas and its schools and in many other things,” he added.

According to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, 12% of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gazan employees are affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). This corresponds to 1,468 employees active in Hamas and PIJ. Out of those, 185 UNRWA workers were active in the military branches of Hamas, and 51 in the PIJ military branch.

Specifically, 12 UNRWA employees were suspected of having taken part in the atrocities of Oct. 7, with another 30 employees assisting in the massacres. UNRWA fired ten of those individuals and claimed the remaining two were dead. The UN later claimed Israel had not provided sufficient evidence and suspended investigations into several of the accused.

One of the Knesset members behind the bills, Yulia Malinovsky from the Yisrael Beytenu party, argued that UNRWA should be shut down entirely.

“UNRWA should not exist at all,” Malinovsky told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee during a debate on Tuesday. She called it a “branch of Hamas” and said it is “a terrorist organization for all intents and purposes.”

The committee debated merging the three proposals into one piece of legislation for convenience with Israeli National Security Council legal advisor Adam Wolfson, saying that the legislation should continue to advance, as long as it does not “harm Israel’s international obligations or humanitarian aid.”

Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein noted that many countries that declared they would suspend their funding following the revelations about UNRWA’s deep connections with Hamas have since reversed their decisions.

“We remember the atmosphere after October 7, when several countries announced a delay in funding and we felt that there was finally a political success, but as we get further away from the event, more and more countries return to funding [UNRWA], claiming that there is no alternative,” said Edelstein.

Earlier this year, Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf ordered the Israel Land Authority (ILA) to evict UNRWA from any state land and to “immediately halt” all agreements between the Israel Land Authority and the aid agency.

ILA was also ordered to remove UNRWA “from the territories leased to them” by Israel, such as the organization’s offices in Ma’alot Dafna and Kafr Aqab in Jerusalem.

Last month, around 100 survivors and relatives of survivors of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacres filed a lawsuit claiming UNRWA coordinated a billion-dollar money laundering operation that funded the Hamas terrorist organization, thereby contributing to the Oct. 7 attacks.

“Hamas – a known terrorist organization whose charter claims peace would only be possible when Israel is destroyed – openly controlled 24 of 26 leadership positions in the UNRWA employee union. At least 10% of UNRWA employees were members of Hamas and over 100 were proven to have taken part in the October 7 attack,” the lawyers for the plaintiffs stated in a press release.