UNRWA Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize amid Investigation into Staffers’ Hamas Links By Haley Strack
An Norwegian parliamentary official said that he nominated the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for the Nobel Peace Prize this week, after Israeli intelligence alleged that UNRWA employees participated in Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel.
At least twelve UNRWA staffers participated in the attack, an Israeli intelligence dossier revealed last week, and 1,200 of UNRWA’s 12,000 staffers in Gaza have ties to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Several countries, including the U.S., have since suspended funding for UNRWA.
Labour MP Asmund Aukrust said he nominated UNRWA “for its long-term work to provide vital support to Palestine and the region in general,” and added that “this work has been crucial for over 70 years, and even more vital in the last three months.”
Qualified officials select hundreds of individuals to nominate for the Noble Peace Prize annually. The Norwegian Noble Committee will announce the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in October, an award that should go to the individual “who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses,” Swedish industrialist and Nobel-prize founder Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.
UNRWA has made desperate pleas to the international community to regain its funding since Israel revealed U.N. employees’ links to Hamas. A spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said last week that UNRWA funding is slated to run out by the end of February.
“It would be immensely irresponsible to sanction an Agency and an entire community it serves because of allegations of criminal acts against some individuals, especially at a time of war, displacement and political crises in the region,” UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini said.
Israel’s “highly, highly credible” findings, as U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken labeled them, have lawmakers divided over whether or not they should resume UNRWA’s funding, or defund the organization altogether. Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to Congress last week asking Joe Biden’s administration to permanently halt UNRWA’s funding.
“It is time for Congress to stop funding this organization that rapes, murders, and kidnaps innocents—and that has shown it has no willingness, desire, or capacity to stick to humanitarian aid and away from supporting antisemitism and terrorism,” the attorneys general wrote.
House Republicans also introduced a bill to ban U.S. funding for UNRWA. American taxpayers have shouldered almost $1 billion in funding for UNRWA since 2021, money that Rep. Ronny Jackson (R., Texas) told the Washington Free Beacon should not be spent on an “anti-Israel, anti-Jewish organization that promotes terrorism and anti-Semitism.”
“American taxpayer dollars have no place in promoting and enabling terrorism, yet that’s exactly what’s been happening with UNRWA, and I won’t stand for it any longer,” Jackson said.
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