Trump Can Close Hamas’s Front Office

 

Twenty-five U.S. senators and more than 90 representatives have urged President Trump to “take decisive action to fully dismantle UNRWA.” The United Nations Relief and Works Agency has supported Palestinian radicalism for many decades, in the process becoming Hamas’s front office.

Mr. Trump cut Unrwa’s funding in 2018 and again in 2025, citing revelations that a dozen employees participated in the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But U.N. agencies, and Unrwa especially, are designed to be insulated from accountability. Unrwa was created by the General Assembly in 1949 as a temporary mechanism to assist Arabs displaced during Israel’s War of Independence. While it can be closed only by the General Assembly, strategically applied pressure from the U.S. could go a long way.

The Palestinians are the only people with their own U.N. agency. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, responsible for the rest of the world, has long stopped dealing with refugees from the many wars and dislocations of the 1940s. Unrwa’s rolls, on the other hand, have swollen from 750,000 to six million because Unrwa invented a unique definition for Palestinian refugees. Lifelong, patrilineal, hereditary status in Unrwa can never be extinguished by settling elsewhere or even acquiring citizenship.

Unrwa’s facilities were used as covers for Hamas tunnels, as weapons caches and, reportedly, as places to hold hostages. It became a “subsidiary” of Hamas, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it. Mr. Trump’s 20-Point Plan calls for Hamas to be purged from Gaza. But that can’t happen while Unrwa remains one of the biggest employers in the strip, the primary provider of municipal services and author of school curricula.

The U.S. can make Unrwa pay for the harms it has caused. Lawsuits have been brought against the agency in U.S. federal courts, including by American families whose relatives were murdered or kidnapped on Oct. 7, but Unrwa has enjoyed total immunity as a U.N. “subsidiary organ.” The Trump administration has filed cogent briefs arguing why Unrwa doesn’t qualify for that status, but the only court to rule so far has upheld immunity, relying on the Biden administration’s position. Appeals could take years.

There is a faster route. Recognition of foreign entities is a core executive power. If the State Department issued a formal policy statement that the U.S. doesn’t recognize Unrwa as a “subsidiary” of the U.N., it would be binding on courts in a way legal briefs aren’t. In Zivotofsky v. Kerry (2015), the Supreme Court held that the president’s foreign-affairs power gives him absolute discretion to decide what the U.S. considers constituent parts of the countries it recognizes. If the president can deem Jerusalem not part of Israel even when Congress disagrees, as Barack Obama did, he can deem Unrwa not part of the U.N. when Turtle Bay disagrees.

Another pressure point is the U.N. budget. Secretary-General António Guterres has warned the international body faces “imminent financial collapse.” Unrwa’s commissioner-general serves at the secretary-general’s will. That means Mr. Guterres can ensure Unrwa has a leader who will abandon its baleful policies. The U.S. should condition any payment of arrears to the U.N. on three steps: Unrwa’s eliminating the hereditability of enrollee status, which comes solely from its internal regulations; its closing its Gaza operations (perhaps in favor of the Board of Peace); and the U.N. secretary-general’s waiving Unrwa’s immunity when it comes to material support of terror and atrocities. Under the U.N. Convention on Privileges and Immunities, he can do so whenever “the immunity would impede the course of justice.”

Unrwa’s leaders accepted working with Hamas as the price of doing business in Gaza. That makes it possible to impose sanctions against them for supporting a designated foreign terror organization. The sanctions should cover officials who ran the organization on Oct. 7, including Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, whose term ends in June. Closing Unrwa’s Gaza operations and changing the mandate could be rewarded by lifting those sanctions.

Finally, Unrwa pays its Gaza staff in U.S. dollars wired from a New York bank account. Those dollars need to be converted into Israeli shekels, Gaza’s de facto currency. Hamas takes a substantial cut on every money exchange, turning Unrwa’s payroll into a revenue stream. The U.S. Treasury can block the dollar transfers under existing sanction authorities.

For 76 years Unrwa has perpetuated the problem it was created to remedy. Now it’s time to resolve the problem of Unrwa.

Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason Scalia Law School and a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-can-close-hamass-front-office-c96bb3d8