President Trump’s Department of  Justice could soon contest the United Nations claim that it is immune from legal action in the American court system, where Israelis are asserting that one of the world body’s agencies abetted 2023 terror atrocities, the Sun has learned.  

The justice department is asking a judge in the Southern District of New York, Analisa Torres, to await a ruling on whether the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees is automatically immune from standing trial in a case against the agency brought by families of Hamas’s victims on October 7, 2023.

The 167-page lawsuit was filed last July against Unrwa and its commissioner, Philippe Lazzarini, as well as several past and present higher-ups in the organization. In it, October 7 victims document how Unrwa let Hamas use its facilities for weapons storage, allowed tunnels and command centers to be built under its sites, and funneled cash into the terror group’s coffers. 

As Unrwa funneled aid money in dollars into Gaza, Hamas money changers charged high fees to convert the funds to Israeli shekels, and then used them to finance terror operations, according to the lawsuit. 

Last July, and again in October, the Biden administration sided with the UN, which argued that Unrwa is immune from prosecution. The current administration is being tougher on the UN agency. “We will not only defund Unrwa, we will dismantle it,” Mr. Trump’s UN ambassador-nominee, Elise Stefanik, told the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend.

On Tuesday the justice department sent a letter to Judge Torres, telling her that it is now reviewing Mr. Biden’s previous filing. It asked the judge to “defer taking any action concerning the immunities of the defendants until the Government has had time to complete this review.”

In a February 18 letter, first made public on X by Inner City Press, a website that covers the world body and the court system, an acting United States attorney, Matthew Podolsky, informed Judge Torres that Washington intends to complete its review by April 21.

The administration “will be struggling to find a legal justification for reversing themselves on this issue,” a scholar of UN immunities and procedures, who asked not to be named, told the Sun. In past cases involving the UN, Washington has cited treaties, such as the 1947 host country agreement, which provide the world body immunity from lawsuits.

Yet, the case against Unrwa might prove different. “Immunity could be waived for conduct that violates certain standards of international law that’s widely accepted by the world, such as racist murder, so that’s how it could happen,” a former Southern District judge and legal adviser to the Department of State, Abraham Sofaer, tells the Sun.

“In the late 1980s we were sick of Unrwa,” Mr. Sofaer says. “We were convinced that it was a terrible mistake, that they were the source of this whole Palestinian refugee idea as being separate from every other refugee type.” Yet, after Mr. Sofaer’s team wrote a “huge memorandum” to Secretary Shultz, he says, “the building went nuts. I mean, you could have thought we were going after the Boy Scouts of America.”

The case against Unrwa was cast aside, and the state department kept asserting that the UN is immune from prosecution in American courts. It occasionally advocated waiving such immunities when UN officials accrued large amounts of unpaid parking tickets or violated traffic laws in New York City. 

Yet, in several attempts to sue UN bodies — over corruption cases during the infamous Oil for Food program for Iraq, or the introduction of cholera to Haiti by UN peacekeepers — America argued that the UN cannot be sued. 

UN secretaries-general have occasionally waived immunity for mid- to low-level officials who have taken bribes. Yet, as the Trump administration signals that it would aggressively pursue UN excesses, Secretary-General Guterres hired a Manhattan law firm, Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP, to argue for immunity for Unrwa. 

“Defendants are all entitled to immunity from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts absent an express waiver of such immunity” from the secretary-general, a Curtis lawyer, Kevin Meehan, wrote to Judge Torres on November 14.

Mr. Meehan cited a Biden administration October filing that reaffirmed the UN’s immunity, adding, though, that “while Defendants believe that it is already abundantly clear that this case must be dismissed on jurisdictional immunity grounds, Defendants do not rest solely on the arguments presented by the U.S. Government.”

As video clips of Unrwa employees who actively participated in the October 7 atrocities flood the media, though, an unprecedented challenge might finally pierce the UN claim to immunity from accounting for crimes.