A new bipartisan bill introduced by Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) to permanently dismantle and replace the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, some of whose members participated directly in the Oct. 7 attacks, is long overdue, experts told JNS.
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“It’s trying to put the administration’s words into action,” Yoni Tobin, senior policy analyst at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told JNS on Tuesday, when the bill was introduced.
“It sort of lays out a roadmap for how to actually create not only a pathway to dismantle UNRWA but to replace it,” he said. “To ensure that there is an entity that does what UNRWA was supposed to do all these years but didn’t do.”
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Tobin told JNS that the U.S.-led Board of Peace has already adopted a policy of ensuring that UNRWA has no place in Gaza’s future. The legislation, he said, lays out a plan for “how to actually make that come to fruition.”
“There needs to be some plan, some action item, while we have this window of opportunity,” he said, “while the United States is actively seeking the dismantlement of UNRWA as formal government policy, while Congress is receptive to the idea, while Hamas is militarily weak and while we have momentum with the Board of Peace.”
Since 2000, the United States has provided more than $5.2 billion to UNRWA, “and in return, it’s gotten a hostile, rogue agency that is an obstacle to peace in Gaza,” according to Tobin.
“When news broke in January 2024 that nearly a dozen UNRWA personnel participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, it was shocking but not surprising,” he said. “UNRWA’s many structural problems for decades have included a very cozy relationship with terrorists in Gaza, many of whom had infiltrated the agency.”
“This is not a case of a few bad apples,” he told JNS. “It’s a case of a rotten tree.”
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