Rep. Chris Smith by United States Congress / Wikimedia Commons (Left), Nikolas Gannon / Unsplash (Right)
CV NEWS FEED // Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a staunch pro-life advocate, voiced strong condemnation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) over its ties to the terrorist group Hamas.
Smith’s comments in a September 30 press release followed the revelation that Fateh al-Sharif, Hamas’ top leader in Lebanon, who was killed in a recent airstrike, was also employed by UNRWA, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
While the WSJ report claims that this discovery may “heighten suspicions about Hamas’s influence” in the UNRWA, Smith holds a much firmer stance than mere suspicion, his comments in the release indicated.
“This is who UNRWA is,” Smith affirmed, later describing the organization as “an incubator of hatred and a child-soldier factory,” with its educational system designed “to perpetuate conflict in the region.”
“If you were surprised that Hamas’s top leader in Lebanon was also employed by UNRWA, stop kidding yourself,” he continued, adding:
UNRWA’s deep ties to terrorism — including its employment of hundreds of staffers with terrorist affiliations — have been vastly documented, including by expert witnesses at four congressional hearings I’ve chaired over the past 18 months on UNRWA’s decades-long complicity in the most vicious forms of antisemitic hate.
Smith, who is chair of the House Global Human Rights Subcommittee and co-chair of the House Task Force for Combating Antisemitism, also highlighted an April United Nations report that revealed that the UN does not vet UNRWA employees for “connections or sympathies with Hamas or Islamic Jihad,” according to the September 30 report.
Smith reiterated his call for the U.S. and other nations to cut off all funding to UNRWA, advocating instead for humanitarian assistance to organizations that do not “promote, espouse, or affiliate with those that support violence, terrorism or antisemitism.”
As CatholicVote reported in January, Smith authored legislation that would permanently end U.S. funding for the UNRWA. The “Stop Support for UNRWA Act of 2024” was driven by what Smith described as “massive and irrefutable evidence of UNRWA’s extensive connivance, complicity, and cooperation in Hamas’ antisemitic genocidal hate campaign.”
According to a February press release from Smith, in 2003 he also introduced an amendment to the State Department authorization bill, establishing that Congress “expresses deep concern” over UNRWA for its funding of schools that use materials promoting antisemitism, denying the state of Israel’s right to exist, and worsening tensions between Palestinians and Israelis, as well as the minimal effort by the UNRWA to prevent or report their facilities being used for weapons storage, bomb-making, terrorist training, and terrorist operations.
“The antisemitism and terroristic complicity of UNRWA has been established beyond doubt for a long time,” Smith stated, according to the February press release. “The evidence is in and it’s time to cut all US funding to UNRWA — and to make it permanent.”
