Following growing documentation that the United Nations top organ aiding Palestinian Arabs is tied to terrorists, President Trump is reportedly planning to designate that agency, or parts of it, as a terrorist organization.

A spokesman for Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Farhan Haq, declined to comment on a Reuters report that the Trump administration is weighing to include the UN Relief and Works Agency in its proscribed terrorist organizations.

Mr. Guterres remained a staunch supporter of UNRWA even after troublesome evidence emerged on cooperation between the agency’s workers and Gaza terror groups in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, massacres. When recorded evidence first emerged that at least 12 UNRWA officials actively participated in the atrocities, Israeli officials approached the UN chief to reprimand them.

Some of Mr. Guterres’ top aides urged him to cooperate and deeply examine UNRWA’s activities in Gaza, two UN officials told the Sun. The secretary general resisted and was adamant he would fully back the agency. He ordered an inquiry that led nowhere, and then turned his ire on Israel, harshly criticizing its conduct in Gaza, according to the sources.    

The Thursday report that Washington is planning to designate UNRWA as a terror group emerges less than a week after the UN General Assembly renewed the agency’s mandate for additional three years. While UNRWA’s secretary general, Philippe Lazzarini said the vote “reflects the broad solidarity of people across the world with Palestine Refugees,” several European countries that in the past have supported the mandate extension declined to do so this time. 

“For the first time ever, Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Latvia changed their votes at the UN and refused to support renewing UNRWA’s mandate,” the executive director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, said in a video posting. “Last time, it was 27 EU countries voting for UNRWA’s mandate.” 

The news that America intends to designate UNRWA also occurred after the Israeli police on Monday raided UNRWA’s headquarters at Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, confiscating its assets and replacing the UN flag on the top of the structure with an Israeli one. The building has been mostly vacant since last January, when the Knesset banned all UNRWA activities on Israel’s territory. The Jerusalem municipality said the UN incurred $3.4 million in city property taxes for the building. 

UNRWA was established by the General Assembly in 1950 to aid 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were chased out during the Arab war to quash Israel’s founding. The agency currently lists nearly 6 million descendants of those Arabs as refugees. They live at towns known as “refugee camps” in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, as well as in areas that are controlled by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and Gaza. 

A co-author of a book on UNRWA, “The War of Return,” which was turned into a documentary that debuted at New York last week, Einat Wilf, argues that the goal of the UN agency is to perpetuate the refugee status until a dream of erasing Israel’s Jewish character is realized. Countries, therefore, must ensure that “not 1 dollar, yen, euro or pound goes into Gaza, except for basic necessities, until it is clear that no one in Gaza is considered a Palestinian refugee,” Ms. Wilf tells the Sun. 

A top Hamas official, Suhail al-Hindi, rose in UNRWA’s ranks, and became the agency’s teachers union’s leader. The schools teach hatred of Israel. Tunnels dug under UNRWA schools and aid buildings serve as Hamas military headquarters and arms depots.

President Biden suspended American financial support to UNRWA last year, after videos emerged of the agency’s employees who actively participated in the October 7 terror attacks. The Trump administration maintained the ban, and several countries, including Mr. Lazzarini’s Switzerland, also stopped funding the organization. A terrorist designation by Washington would sanction any country or organization that funds UNRWA.  

Washington, meanwhile  is weighing wide cuts of funding to UN agencies. “Some of these organizations are not reformable,” the American ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, told broadcaster Elliott Abrams recently. “Others, we are going to defund and withdraw our money and let them die on the vine, and then others, I don’t want to get ahead of some future announcements, but Elliott, you’ll be pleased.”