Free Republic

The head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees expressed hope Tuesday that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait will come up with $80 million to ensure that 500,000 boys and girls who are refugees can start the next school year on time in August. Last year, a $101 million shortfall in the budget of the agency, known as UNRWA, almost led to a delay in starting school. […] UNRWA operates 700 schools for Palestinian refugees with 22,000 education staff in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Last year’s funding crisis almost led to a delay...

At a facility in Judea of UNRWA, the UN body tasked with caring for "Palestinian refugees," a festive ceremony was held on Monday honoring Abd al-Hamid Abu Srour, the 19-year-old Hamas terrorist who exactly a week ago bombed a bus in southeastern Jerusalem. Journalist David Bedein, director of the Jerusalem-based Israel Resource News Agency as well as the Center for Near East Policy Research, told Arutz Sheva about the UN event to honor the terrorist who conducted the first bus bombing of the current terror wave, in which he died while wounding 15 victims. The investigative journalist revealed that Israeli...

Investigative journalist reveals UNRWA schools hold terror celebrations, Israel ignores and blocks US law against terror indoctrination. At a facility in Judea of UNRWA, the UN body tasked with caring for "Palestinian refugees," a festive ceremony was held on Monday honoring Abd al-Hamid Abu Srour, the 19-year-old Hamas terrorist who exactly a week ago bombed a bus in southeastern Jerusalem. Journalist David Bedein, director of the Jerusalem-based Israel Resource News Agency as well as the Center for Near East Policy Research, told Arutz Sheva about the UN event to honor the terrorist who conducted the first bus bombing of the...

Hamas Minister of Religion Ismael Radwan, told us on camera in our documentary film UNRWA goes to War that “The Hamas relationship with UNRWA is good, very good. Now a direct connection exists between UNRWA and Hamas.” What can and should be done by the current US administration: The US could demand that UNRWA dismiss employees affiliated with Hamas, in accordance with laws in the US, Canada, the EU, the UK and Australia, which forbid aid to agencies that employ members of a terrorist organization. After all, the US Congress enacted strict laws in 2003 in this regard, but they...

Let’s Create a Real Palestinian State It’s not a nightmare if you can make it come true. April 14, 2016 Daniel Greenfield    Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. A Palestinian state has never existed during any period in human history. Let’s change that. The United States has spent billions of dollars trying to create a Palestinian state. It’s time that we finally got our money’s worth. We’ve been putting money in the broken Palestinian slot machine in the metaphorical Palestinian casino (the real one was...

… A statement Wednesday says Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is pleased that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government decided to restart the funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. Canada discontinued the funding in 2010 during the administration of Conservative leader Stephen Harper amid criticism that the agency funded schools that had become hotbeds of anti-Israeli extremism. …

New review of Palestinian Authority textbooks finds systematic incitement against Jews, erasure of Israel continues. A review of dozens of Palestinian Authority educational books for the 2015-2016 school year found that the PA education system continues to encourage terror against Jews and completely ignores the Holocaust in history books discussing World War II. In addition, this year's textbooks continue to systematically erase the State of Israel from maps and texts. Gal Berger, a journalist focusing on Palestinian affairs with Reshet B, carried out a comprehensive investigation of about 70 textbooks for first through twelfth grades on the subjects of civics,...

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was put on the spot Tuesday by Interim Opposition head Rona Ambrose over reports that he plans to give UNRWA $15 million, despite its well-documented ties to the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza. [...] Ambrose, an MP of the Conservative Party, noted how UNRWA was documented storing Hamas rockets and weapons "designed to kill Israeli citizens" - as even the UNRWA chief admitted last June - and likewise has actively taken part in inciting anti-Semitic violence. In his complete dodge of the serious question, Trudeau noted that he welcomed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to Ottawa...

It is a common misconception that around 650,000 Palestinian refugees were created because of fighting that took place in 1948. But a closer look at both the population data and statements made by UN officials at the time suggest that the true figure is much lower, possibly as low as 270,000. The conventional figure of 650,000 cannot be true for more than one reason. Firstly, there were fewer than 660,000 Arabs living in the part of Palestine that eventually became Israel; and secondly, UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency), either through incompetence or deliberate manipulation, handed out multiple...

Mohammed Assaf, the Gazan winner of 2013's Arab Idol contest, was answering questions from fans in a Skype phone-in this week when he received a comment from an Israeli caller who said: "You should come to Israel...you have Israeli blood," the fan said. Assaf replied, "I spit on you and Israel" before going on to answer other fans' questions. It is not clear if the fan was a Jew or an Arab. "I don't want to talk about this issue too much," Assaf told The New Arab afterward. "The person who said that wanted to provoke me and it's known...

My weekend column in on the Palestinians’ new intifada, the Obama State Department’s disgraceful response to it, and how Islamists and Leftists continue to push for the “One State Solution”—no more Jewish state—an objective that is helped along by the “Two State Solution” fantasy peddled by the bipartisan Beltway. A related development: A watchdog group, UN Watch, reports that staffers at a major United Nations agency with a long history of encouraging Palestinian terrorism, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is inciting the latest spate of attacks in Israel. …

GENEVA, September 1, 2015 - UN Watch released a new report today documenting 12 different Facebook accounts operated by UNRWA officials (see images below) that openly incite to antisemitism and terrorism, and urged UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and UNRWA chief Pierre Krähenbühl to terminate the responsible officials, condemn the offending posts, and establish a commission of inquiry, comprised of representatives of top donor states (see chart at right), to investigate the culture of impunity for perpetrators of racism and incitement that pervades UNRWA. “The pattern and practice of UNRWA school principals, teachers and staff members posting antisemitic and terror-inciting images...

UNRWA’s latest appeal for more than $100 million in special additional funding should be treated in the same way as the boy who cried wolf The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, which serves Palestinian “refugees,” is constantly complaining of budget deficits. No matter how much money it sucks out of the United States, European Union countries and other donors, it is never enough. It is always pleading for more money, which it is continuing to do today with another one of its special appeals. It is time to stop throwing good money after bad to this dysfunctional UN...

Hamas continues to lead daily protests against the intention of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), to cut its services in light of a deficit of more than $100 million. Suheil al-Hindi, Chairman of the Arab Teachers Union of UNRWA, which is affiliated with Hamas, warned the UNRWA against a delay in the start of the upcoming school year, stressing that education is a "red line" and that interfering with it could lead to a "disruption of the peace." In a statement Friday, ​​Hamas warned that cuts in UNRWA services is a move that will...

As the eyes of the world focus on the dysfunctional U.S.-Iranian accord, another dysfunctional accord with the U.S. government has escaped public scrutiny: The new accord reached between America and UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which was recently posted on the State Department website. he U.S., the largest funder of UNRWA (at $400 million this year, one third of the UNRWA budget), should have stipulated that the funding could only go to resettle UNRWA’s client population: 5.4 million descendents of Arab refugees from the 1948 war. Yet the U.S.-UNRWA accord mentions nothing of the kind. Instead, it...

Ein el Helwe Palestinian camp, Lebanon: This is one of the questions ricocheting between Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon, posed also by ISIS (Da’ish) operatives, as the hot summer months and plummeting quality of existence raise tensions in the refugee camps and social gatherings. With its resilience, on-the-ground “achievements”, adaptability, global franchising, copy-cat knock-offs, chameleon-like adaptations, combinations and permutations, and slick honing of medium and message, ISIS is offering oppressed and desperate populations in this region both hope and fantasy for escaping their deepening misery. The dream is to escape abject poverty and indignity by any means necessary, and joining...

The UN’s condemnation of the IDF’s conduct in Operation Protective Edge surprises no one, Jewish Home chairman and Education Minister Naftali Bennett commented Friday. “The UN has never been honest,” he said, during an interview with Army Radio. “The world will always come to us with complaints, and we need to focus on keeping ourselves safe.” …

Pierre Krahenbuhl, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, the UN body tasked with aiding "Palestinian refugees," admitted on Wednesday that Hamas terrorists hid weapons at UNRWA facilities during their terror war against Israel last summer. "We were the ones who found the weapons caches in our facilities during inspections," Krahenbuhl told Yedioth Aharonoth in an interview. "The reason that the whole world knew about it is that we told them." Krahenbuhl's reference is to at least three separate occasions in which rockets were found at UNRWA facilities. After the first finding of rockets at an UNRWA school, UNRWA workers reportedly called Hamas to...

Israel has often complained that UNRWA, the UN body dealing with "Palestinian refugees," merely exists to continue the conflict without resettling the people it treats as the UN does with all other refugees, but apparently the Palestinian Arabs are unhappy with the organization too - for not giving them enough, and for giving too much to their brethern in Syria's Yarmouk neighborhood. Residents of Gaza defined as "refugees," namely the descendants of Arab residents who left Israel in the 1948 War of Independence, are protesting against UNRWA after the latter transferred resources to displaced Palestinian Arab residents of the Yarmouk...

An explosive device went off near the offices of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza City Saturday night, AFP reported. A second struck near police headquarters, the report said. UNRWA and Gaza security officials said there were no dead or injured. […] UNRWA facilities in Gaza were at the forefront during last year’s Operation Protective Edge. During the operation, no fewer than three UNRWA schools were found to be serving for storage of rockets for the terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad. …