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When the UN Security Council approved President Donald Trump’s plan to establish a board of peace overseeing Gaza’s transformation from Hamas terror base to calm Palestinian enclave, it was a diplomatic coup.
In Monday’s nearly unanimous vote — with China and Russia abstaining rather than wielding their veto — global powers, along with both Israel and the Arab world, effectively handed Trump the right to demilitarize and deradicalize the Gaza Strip, while defining Hamas as the threat to peace.
Now comes the even harder part: Implementing a plan that Hamas and the UN are plotting to undermine.
Leading the charge to upend Trump’s vision will be the UN agency responsible for radicalizing Palestinian society, the UN Relief and Works Agency, which the General Assembly voted to maintain Wednesday over American objections.
To succeed, Trump will need to shutter this organization by imposing anti-terrorism sanctions on it — a move fully justified by UNRWA’s complicity in empowering Hamas.
Oct. 7 was the logical conclusion of 75 years of indoctrination.
Thanks largely to UNRWA, Palestinians wrongly view themselves as “refugees” who must “liberate” their homes from Jews who “stole” their land in 1948.
The UN established UNRWA in 1949 to perpetuate this lie.
UNRWA’s most successful radicalization tool has been its schools.
Their curricula teach the idea of Palestinian “return” — the belief that six million Arabs, few of whom were alive when five Arab armies declared war on a new Jewish State of Israel, will one day flood Israel’s borders and erase its Jewish majority.
These schools’ glorification of terror is well documented, radicalizing the Palestinian people from an early age.
Teachers set arithmetic problems involving numbers of Palestinian “martyrs” and traffic in antisemitic tropes; schools and soccer fields are named after suicide bombers.
In Gaza, where Hamas seized power in 2007, UNRWA is deeply integrated with the terrorist rulers.
According to Israeli intelligence, more than 10% of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gaza staffers were Hamas members, and fully half had a family connection to Hamas.
UNRWA facilities were used as Hamas bases of operation — in one documented case, sharing its power supply with an underground terror tunnel.
The mountain of evidence showing how UNRWA provided material support for terrorism is why Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently called it a “subsidiary of Hamas” that could play no role in Gaza’s future.
But what Washington keeps missing is that UNRWA is a cancer wherever it operates.
While European leaders declare the existence of a Palestinian state — and the UN Security Council envisions a pathway to achieving one — the truth is that UNRWA considers much of the population of the West Bank to be a “refugee” population under its aegis.
It teaches the children of the West Bank the same curriculum it’s taught the children of Gaza.
Hamas exists in the West Bank, too — and it’s no coincidence that UNRWA’s areas of operation comprise the terror group’s strongholds.
If UNRWA continues to operate outside of Gaza, it will aim to undermine everything Trump hopes to achieve.
Pulling US funding and walking away isn’t the answer: Trump did just that in 2018, only to see UNRWA continue operations thanks to other donors — a movie being replayed today.
To shutter UNRWA for good, the United States should impose terrorism sanctions on it, stopping the flow of money in and out of the agency and grinding its operations to a halt.
As an interim measure, the Treasury Department could issue temporary licenses allowing UNRWA to wind down its services and transition its functions to local government authorities or non-radicalizing international bodies.
The licenses would allow banks and contractors to do business with UNRWA for a limited period, blunting criticism in Ramallah and Amman that the US sanctions put any lives in immediate danger.
Moreover, they would give Trump’s lead negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, maximum control over the future of the Palestinian Authority and leverage over the peace process.
UNRWA might sue to challenge US sanctions: The Justice Department and a federal court judge are currently at odds over whether it merits privilege or immunity as a UN-affiliated body — a dispute that may be litigated all the way to the Supreme Court.
But with clear evidence of UNRWA’s support for terrorism, US sanctions are on solid legal ground, and the policy benefit far outweighs the risk.
Rubio’s firm statement is important, reflecting America’s recognition that UNRWA can have no role in Gaza going forward.
But to truly deradicalize Palestinian society — and to give Trump’s vision for peace the best opportunity to succeed — it’s even more important to shut UNRWA down wherever it operates.
Enia Krivine (@EKrivine) is senior director of the Israel Program and the National Security Network at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Richard Goldberg (@rich_goldberg) is a senior advisor.