Washington's UNRWA funding freeze is destroying hope, agency's US chief says

UNRWA USA lobbying Congress ahead of move to restore funding to the Palestinian relief agency

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At a critical moment for the fragile Gaza ceasefire, a Republican-led Washington appears more determined than ever to halt all aid to the UN's Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA.

Mara Kronenfeld, executive director of UNRWA USA, which raises private funding for the aid agency, said people in the US are rallying to support UNRWA but warned a lack of funding is thwarting efforts to build stability in Gaza and beyond.

“The American people have stepped up where our government, sadly, has let us down,” Ms Kronenfeld told The National. “It means all the more pressure on, frankly, our little organisation to do as much outreach as possible.”

Sitting down in a day care room of a Washington church, Ms Kronenfeld spoke during a training session for UNRWA USA advocates from across the country, preparing for a Thursday lobby on Capitol Hill to press US officials to restore funding. Progressive Democrats will soon announce bills in the House of Representatives and the Senate aimed at accomplishing just that.

The US halted funding to UNRWA last year over allegations some of its Palestinian staff had fought alongside Hamas. The decision by former president Joe Biden saw Republicans rally around legislation to permanently slash support. Since then, the number of individual donors to UNRWA USA has risen sharply from about 5,000 to 7,000 annual givers to “140,000 by the end of 2024”.

That has amounted to $56 million in private contributions to Gaza since the end of 2023, Ms Kronenfeld says. Yet without official US funding, she warns that “right now, we are destroying hope”.

The US has historically been the largest financial contributor to UNRWA, with more than $7.3 billion in contributions since 1950. According to UNRWA, US contributions accounted for nearly 30 per cent of its donor funds in 2023.

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  Pupils attend an English class at a school run by the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees in Wehdat camp in east Amman, Jordan, on Tuesday. All photos by Khaled Yacoub Oweis / The National

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  An ice cream and sandwich shop in Wehdat refugee camp

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  Pupils' representatives at the UNRWA school

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  Olaf Becker, director of UNRWA Affairs in the Jordan field office

According to the State Department, the pause prevented about $300,000 in unobligated 2024 funds and just over $2.5 million in obligated but unpaid balances for 2023 from being disbursed to UNRWA.

Ms Kronenfeld believes the halt is “destroying the potential of a population that can feed its own children, that can believe that the future is going to be better”.

“America has always stood for freedom for everybody and I hope that the US government will return to that stance,” she added.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal in the House, and Senator Peter Welch, both Democrats, are leading the bills that have brought in several more Democratic co-sponsors, says Ms Kronenfeld.

But with a Republican majority, those bills are unlikely to be passed. Under the new Trump administration, there has been an outright freeze on all foreign aid and a movement to shutter the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Mr Trump has also stoked fears that Washington is abandoning its long-standing policies with respect to the Palestinian territories – calling for the removal of Palestinians in Gaza and suggesting that the enclave could be the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

It is a position Ms Kronenfeld says amounts to ethnic cleansing and she describes the idea as “a pipe dream, at best”.

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Republicans, including the party's more moderate members, have long been at odds with UNRWA, over claims of staff links to Hamas, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism embedded in children's educational materials.

Senator Jim Risch, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said last year there was “bipartisan consensus” that the Palestinian relief agency should be shut down entirely.

Brian Mast, the new Republican Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The National last year that “the idea of reforming UNRWA would be like saying we should work to reform the Nazi party”.

Ms Kronenfeld says UNRWA and UNRWA USA are working “in the face of an absolute, concerted, co-ordinated propaganda campaign against UNRWA, against its work, against the Palestinian people”.

In responding to this criticism, she feels compelled to note that “I happen to be Jewish”, explaining that UNRWA uses textbooks in line with the local curriculum, “which is the common practice of all UN agencies because the students when they graduate [from] ninth grade in UNRWA schools, they are going to local schools, they need to be on the same curriculum framework”.

“Any time there has been something found to be anti-Semitic or racist … it has been noted and there are alternative lessons that are given to UNRWA teachers and staff to teach.”

This week, far-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene reiterated the claim that US financing of UNRWA was “directly funding Hamas terrorists” and argued Americans should send private donations to issues they care about abroad, but the burden should not be on taxpayers.

“The American people are the most generous people in the entire world and I'm so proud of that, they should be the ones who decide where their money goes … that is something they should never be forced to do by our government,” Ms Greene said at a Doge subcommittee hearing.

Ms Kronenfeld warned that without official funds from Washington, “it's just not enough”, and could come at the expense of Washington's regional interests in the Middle East. “It's absolutely a critical moment right now,” she says.

“Food is finally getting in at a mass scale … finally now, in the last several weeks, we have 1.9 million people, almost the population of Gaza, finally getting food. And that is UNRWA bringing that food in across the Gaza Strip.”

She said UNRWA has been “a stabilising force” and at a moment where the world is faced with key decisions over what comes next for Palestinians in the next phase of the Gaza ceasefire, escalating Israeli military presence in the occupied West Bank, and more emboldened right-wing leadership in the US and Israel, the mission is all the more pivotal.

“Who else can educate the young people of Gaza, who else can provide this health care at this scale, who has the experience? It's those tens of thousands of Palestinian workers who are part of UNRWA."