After a pause lasting five months, the new Labour government has announced that the UK will restart funding to a United Nations agency that Israel claims has been infiltrated by Hamas.
It was alleged that staff of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) were involved in the October 7th terror attacks, coinciding with criticism from MEPs about the longer-term use of European Union funds in Gaza. In January 2024, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak halted British payments to the organisation. Despite Israel’s legitimate security concerns, UK funding of UNRWA has now resumed.
Israel says that dozens of workers from the UNRWA took part in October’s pogrom, which saw more than 1,100 Israelis killed and 251 hostages taken, and that intelligence points to “the deep and systemic infiltration by … Hamas into the ranks of UNRWA.”
Given the long-term presence of the agency in Gaza, where it routinely disbursed funds to the Hamas-controlled territory that were spent on military infrastructure, the allegations were plausible even before the capture and/or identification of ‘infiltrators’ after October 7th.
As we previously reported, UNRWA
has over 30,000 employees (13,000 of them in Gaza, predominantly ethnic Palestinians) who provide aid for some 5.9 million Palestinian refugees within and outside Israel. In contrast, the UN’s main refugee agency, UNHCR, has less than 21,000 employees for over 108 million refugees worldwide.
Furthermore, unlike any other group in the world, Palestinians not only retain their refugee status even after being settled somewhere (including Gaza and the West Bank) but even pass it along to the next generation. This hereditary victimhood resulted in 750 thousand original refugees becoming nearly 6 million in the last seven decades, who, to a certain degree, all depend on the UNRWA for their food, housing, and livelihood.
In April, the Israeli foreign ministry dismissed a U.N. report that sought to clear UNRWA, declaring that Hamas’s penetration of the U.N. agency is so deep that “it is impossible to say where UNRWA ends and Hamas begins”:
“If more than 2,135 UNRWA employees are members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and ⅕ of the principals of UNRWA schools are Hamas activists, the problem with UNRWA Gaza is not a problem of a few bad apples.”
David Lammy, the new Labour foreign secretary, announced an immediate lifting of the block on payments on Friday after the initial report of a U.N.-commissioned independent inquiry said Israel was “yet to provide supporting evidence” for its claims.
The Labour government will now release £21 million (€25 million) to support what it described as the UNRWA’s “lifesaving work in Gaza.” The Daily Telegraph also reports that Lammy was given “personal reassurances that it [the U.N.] was tightening up the vetting of new recruits.”
In contrast, a Reform UK spokesman told The European Conservative that they “strongly oppose” this restoration of funding. However, much of the rest of Parliament has been notably quiet on the issue.
Politico notes that the House of Commons, Parliament’s elected chamber, “was pretty sparse” for Lammy’s statement, “with only a smattering of Tories present.” Conservative opposition frontbencher Alicia Kearns did not criticise the return of funding in her party’s official response, asking only for the foreign secretary to “advise the House [of Commons] on the timeline for that, and provide assurances that taxpayers’ funding will be directed with due regard.”
In fact, only one Tory MP—former party chairman Richard Holden—spoke in the House in opposition to the restoration of funding, highlighting that “UNRWA schools have been repeatedly used by terrorists both to store weapons and to launch attacks, and over 100 UNRWA staff have had links to terrorist groups in the region.”
The TaxPayers’ Alliance campaign group also responded critically, writing:
For decades this body has attracted enormous controversy over its role in perpetuating the conflict, with little in the way of justification for its costly existence given the presence of the UNHCR which is responsible for all other refugees.
Ironically, one of the few MPs to make an active commitment to the decision was unable to attend Lammy’s announcement.
The U.S. is now the only country not to have restored its funding to the U.N. agency, although it is likely that newly-crowned Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris could be pushed to back the restarting of payments, too. Harris was today criticised for skipping Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress—a decision which one Israeli official described as “disappointing.”
