Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations last week that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) should be disbanded and absorbed into the UN High Commission for Refugees.

Netanyahu told ministers at Sunday’s Cabinet meeting that he made the comments to Ambassador Nikki Haley after a Hamas terror tunnel was discovered underneath two UNRWA schools in Gaza.

The agency was established by the UN in 1949 to aid Palestinian refugees across the Middle East.

“Since World War Two, there have been – and continue to be today – millions of refugees,” Netanyahu explained. “And these millions have the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), while most of the Palestinian refugees are settled and have a separate commission. This is UNRWA; it has its own institutions and considerable incitement against Israel. I regret that UNRWA, to a large degree, by its very existence, perpetuates – and does not solve – the Palestinian refugee problem. Therefore, the time has come to disband UNRWA and integrate it into the UNHCR.”

UNRWA and its employees, as Netanyahu noted, have frequently been a source of incitement against Israel. For instance, UNRWA used a picture of a girl from Syria in a fundraising campaign blaming Israel for the problems in Gaza.

In February, the monitoring group UN Watch cataloged the postings of 40 UNRWA employees who promoted anti-Semitism, encouraged violence against Israel, and praised Hitler. While UNRWA has occasionally disciplined personnel for publicly posting inflammatory and anti-Semitic materials, no action has been taken against these employees yet.

When former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited an UNRWA school last year, Gazan authorities temporarily concealed a map of “Historic Palestine” that effectively denied Israel’s existence.

Chris Gunness, a spokesman for UNRWA, spoke in October 2015 at an event in the United Kingdom for Interpal, a UK-based organization that was designated a terrorist entity by the U.S. for financing Hamas.

In addition to employing teachers and other professionals who agitate against Israel, Hamas rockets were found at three UNRWA schools during the terror organization’s war with Israel in July 2014.

“The organization was established in 1949 following the failure of the Arab war against Israel’s independence, and its original mandate was to provide services to the approximately 650,000 Arabs displaced by the conflict,” Asaf Romirowsky wrote in The Real Palestinian Refugee Crisis, which was published in the May 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine. “Today, it is essentially a massive social welfare system serving millions of Palestinians, primarily in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. At the same time, its activities go well beyond simple humanitarianism. It plays a distinctly political role in Palestinian society, working to further the cause of Palestinian nationalism through politicized education, activism, anti-Israel propaganda, and other activities.”

“In effect, UNRWA has come to depend on the refugee problem itself. While the refugees benefit from its services, the organization benefits even more from the refugees,” Romirowsky added. “They are, of course, the organization’s raison d’être. UNRWA has no incentive whatsoever to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem, since doing so would render it obsolete. As a result, the agency not only perpetuates the refugee problem, but has, in many ways, exacerbated it. In doing so, it has made Israeli-Palestinian peace all but impossible.”

Romirowsky also indicated that UNRWA’s unique definition of what constitutes a Palestinian refugee has exacerbated the Palestinian refugee crisis. According to the organization, a Palestinian refugee is someone whose “normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” The definition was expanded to include “the children or grandchildren of such refugees are eligible for agency assistance if they are (a) registered with UNRWA, (b) living in the area of UNRWA’s operations, and (c) in need.”

“This is quite simply unprecedented,” Romisrowsky observed, “In no other case has refugee status been expanded to include subsequent generations over a period of decades.”

[Photo: Ramón Ivanovich Lopez / Flickr ]