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United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) Acting Commissioner-General Christian Saunders will soon present a plan to gradually shut down the agency and transfer its responsibilities to the Board of Peace, Israel Hayom reported Nov. 1, 2026, citing Arab and Western diplomatic sources.
The U.N. agency has been conducting mass layoffs in the Gaza Strip over the past several months. Saunders told the staff union in early October that he intends to end the services of thousands throughout the agency, citing the organization’s financial deficit.
At the end of June, UNRWA announced a $100 million deficit. Before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, UNRWA’s largest donors were the U.S. and some European countries, accounting for 75 percent of the agency’s $1.1 billion budget. After the Israeli military and U.N. Watch provided substantial evidence that UNRWA employed active Hamas terrorists, including several who participated in the massacre, the U.S. and several other European countries suspended their aid to the agency. As of 2026, the U.S. and Sweden remain the only two countries to have completely cut funding to the agency.
In July 2026, the Board of Peace posted on X, “UNRWA has no place in the new Gaza. We are turning the page on the complex of perpetual aid dependency & conflict. The people of Gaza deserve better.” It reaffirmed this position in September.
An April 2025 Israeli Defense Intelligence report estimated that about 12 percent of UNRWA employees were ranking members of Hamas or other designated terrorist organizations. A January 2024 U.N. Watch report said thousands of UNRWA teachers had publicly glorified terrorism and praised the Oct. 7 attacks. IMPACT-se reported that UNRWA textbooks glorified terrorists, promoted antisemitism, and encouraged militancy. On Oct. 23, 2026, The Jerusalem Post reported that a teacher said administrators at a Gaza UNRWA school threatened her with scissors after she challenged pro-Hamas rhetoric.
American media has hardly covered the downfall of UNRWA over the past few months, and in past reporting on actions Israel took against UNRWA, has cast doubt upon the agency’s ties to terror. The lack of coverage suggests an unwillingness to give legitimacy to official findings of extremism within a U.N. agency.
Steadfast UNRWA critics, Hillel Neuer, head of U.N. Watch, and former Israeli lawmaker Einat Wilf welcomed Sunday’s planned shutdown. Wilf called it a “blessed direction, as long as it doesn’t involve replacing one source of funding with another,” but warned that ending UNRWA services “without putting an end to the fictitious status where every descendant is a ‘Palestinian refugee’ with a ‘right of return’ will change nothing.”
In “The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace,” Wilf and co-author Adi Schwartz argued that the demand for return to Israel is the greatest obstacle to peace and that UNRWA perpetuates Palestinian refugee status across generations, unlike other U.N. refugee agencies.
https://www.camera.org/article/news-you-didnt-hear-about-this-week-friday-november-6-2026/
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