Former US ambassador the UN, Nikki Haley, on Thursday slammed the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), a day after US President Joe Biden announced he would be restoring aid to the agency.
"The Palestinian aid agency, UNRWA, is among the most corrupt and counterproductive of all UN agencies. President Trump was right to abandon it," Haley tweeted.
"President Biden is wasting millions of American tax dollars and undermining the great progress being made on Middle East peace," she added.
On Wednesday, the Biden administration said it intends to resume aid to UNRWA as well as other aid to the Palestinian Authority which was suspended by the Trump administration, as part of Biden’s efforts to renew ties with the PA that have been frozen since 2017.
The US, which was previously UNRWA's largest contributor, cut a full $300 million in funding to the agency in 2018, when Trump was President and Haley was UN Ambassador.
Created in 1949, UNRWA supplies aid to more than three million of the five million registered “Palestinian refugees” in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and territories assigned to the Palestinian Authority.
However, it is also notorious for its anti-Israel activities. During the 2014 counterterrorism Operation Protective Edge, Hamas rockets were discovered inside a school building run by UNRWA.
Likewise, a booby-trapped UNRWA clinic was detonated, killing three IDF soldiers. Aside from the massive amounts of explosives hidden in the walls of the clinic, it was revealed that it stood on top of dozens of terror tunnels, showing how UNRWA is closely embedded with Hamas.