Officials in US President Donald Trump’s administration have held advanced discussions on hitting the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, UNRWA, with terrorism-related sanctions, said two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, prompting serious legal and humanitarian concerns inside the State Department.

The United Nations agency operates in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, providing aid, schooling, healthcare, social services and shelter to millions of Palestinians.

Top UN officials and the UN Security Council have described UNRWA as the backbone of the aid response in Gaza, where the two-year war between Israel and Palestinian terror group Hamas unleashed a humanitarian crisis.

Israel and the Trump administration, however, have accused the agency of links with Hamas, allegations UNRWA has vigorously disputed. Israel has published evidence of UNRWA employees taking part in the October 7, 2023, onslaught and in taking and guarding hostages, as well as accusing the agency’s school of consistently glorifying terrorism and opposing the State of Israel’s right to exist.

Washington was long UNRWA’s biggest donor, but halted funding in January 2024 after Israel accused about a dozen UNRWA staff of taking part in the massive Hamas attack that triggered the war in Gaza. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio then accused the agency in October this year of becoming “a subsidiary of Hamas,” which the US designated as a terrorist organization in 1997.

It is not immediately clear if current US discussions are focused on sanctioning the entire agency or just specific UNRWA officials or parts of its operation, and US officials do not appear to have settled on the precise type of sanctions they would deploy against UNRWA.

Among the possibilities that State Department officials have discussed include declaring UNRWA a “foreign........

© The Times of Israel