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US weighs hitting UN Palestinian refugee agency with terrorism-related sanctions

A damaged sign is pictured at the headquarters of UNRWA, following an Israeli raid, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Gaza City. (Reuters/File)
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Updated 11 December 2025
Reuters
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US weighs hitting UN Palestinian refugee agency with terrorism-related sanctions

  • The United Nations agency operates in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, providing aid, schooling, health care, social services and shelter to millions of Palestinians
Updated 11 December 2025
Reuters

WASHINGTON: Trump administration officials have held advanced discussions on hitting UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA with terrorism-related sanctions, said two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, prompting serious legal and humanitarian concerns inside the State Department.
The United Nations agency operates in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, providing aid, schooling, health care, social services and shelter to millions of Palestinians.
Top UN officials and the UN Security Council have described UNRWA as the backbone of the aid response in Gaza, where the two-year war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Trump administration, however, has accused the agency of links with Hamas, allegations UNRWA has vigorously disputed.
Washington was long UNRWA’s biggest donor, but halted funding in January 2024 after Israel accused about a dozen UNRWA staff of taking part in the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that triggered the war in Gaza. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio then accused the agency in October this year of becoming “a subsidiary of Hamas,” which the US designated as a terrorist organization in 1997. It was not immediately clear if current US discussions were focused on sanctioning the entire agency — or just specific UNRWA officials or parts of its operation, and US officials do not appear to have settled on the precise type of sanctions they would deploy against UNRWA.
Among the possibilities that State Department officials have discussed include declaring UNRWA a “foreign terrorist organization,” or FTO, the sources said, though it is not clear if that option — which would severely isolate UNRWA financially — is still a serious consideration.
Any blanket move against the entire organization could throw refugee relief efforts into disarray and cripple UNRWA, which is already facing a funding crisis.

‘UNPRECEDENTED AND UNWARRANTED’ 
Sanctioning UNRWA on terrorism-related grounds would be striking and unusual, as the United States is a member and the host country of the United Nations, which created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in 1949.
William Deere, director of the UNRWA office in Washington, said the agency would be “disappointed” if US officials were in fact discussing an FTO designation. He said such a move would be “both unprecedented and unwarranted.”
“Since January 2024, four independent entities have investigated UNRWA’s neutrality including the US National Intelligence Council. While occurring at different times and from different perspectives, they have all come to the same conclusion: UNRWA is an indispensable, neutral, humanitarian actor,” Deere said.
In response to a request for comment, a State Department official called UNRWA a “corrupt organization with a proven track record of aiding and abetting terrorists.”
“Everything is on the table,” the official said. “No final decisions have yet been made.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The State Department and other departments have various sanctioning options at their disposal, which generally allow for asset freezes and travel bans targeted at specific individuals and entities. An FTO designation would be among the most severe tools available to Washington and such designations are generally reserved for groups who kill civilians, like branches of Islamic State and Al-Qaeda. Dozens of key US allies provide funding to UNRWA, raising questions about whether foreign officials could face sanctions for aiding an organization if Washington sanctions UNRWA or one of its officials on terrorism-related grounds.
The United Nations has said that nine UNRWA staff may have been involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and were fired. A Hamas commander in Lebanon — killed in September by Israel — was also found to have had a UNRWA job. The UN has vowed to investigate all accusations made and has repeatedly asked Israel for evidence, which it says has not been provided.

DISCUSSIONS PROVOKE HUMANITARIAN, LEGAL CONCERNS
The sources directly aware of the UNRWA discussions, who requested anonymity to disclose non-public deliberations, privately expressed various humanitarian and legal concerns, given the organization’s singular role in aiding displaced Palestinians. Politically-appointed staff at the State Department who have been installed since the beginning of Trump’s term have generally led the push to hit UNRWA with terrorism-related sanctions, the sources said.
Many career State Department officials — including some lawyers responsible for drafting designations language — have pushed back, those sources added.
In recent weeks, the potential sanctions have been discussed by officials in the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism and members of its Policy Planning Staff, a powerful internal policymaking entity, one of the sources said.
Gregory LoGerfo, the nominee for the department’s top counterterrorism post, has recused himself from the UNRWA discussions while he awaits Senate confirmation, that source added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has for years called for UNRWA to be dismantled, accusing it of anti-Israeli incitement. Since January 30, Israel has banned UNRWA’s operation on Israeli land — including East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in a move not recognized internationally — and contact with Israeli authorities. Israel and Hamas signed a US-brokered peace deal in October, but apparent ceasefire violations have been routine, and progress toward fulfilling the broader terms of the peace plan has been halting. More than 370 UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza during the war, the UN agency has said.

Topics: trump administration UNRWA

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Trump’s new tariffs shift focus to balance of payments; economists see no crisis

Updated 2 sec ago
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Trump’s new tariffs shift focus to balance of payments; economists see no crisis

Updated 2 sec ago
President Donald Trump’s temporary 15 percent tariffs to replace those struck down by the US Supreme Court are meant to resolve a problem that many economists say ​does not exist: a US balance of payments crisis, making them potentially vulnerable to new legal challenges.
Hours after the high court on Friday struck down a huge swath of tariffs Trump had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president announced the new duties under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a never-used statute that even his own legal team dismissed as irrelevant months ago.
Collections of the new 15 percent tariffs began at midnight on Tuesday as IEEPA tariff collections of 10 percent to 50 percent halted.
The Section 122 law allows the president to impose duties of up to 15 percent for up to 150 days on any and all countries to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits and “fundamental international payments problems.”
Trump’s tariff order argued that a serious balance of payments deficit existed in the form of a $1.2 trillion annual US goods trade ‌deficit and a current ‌account deficit of 4 percent of GDP and a reversal of the US primary income surplus.
Some ​economists, ‌including ⁠former International ​Monetary Fund ⁠First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath, disagreed with the Trump administration’s alarm.
“We can all agree that the US is not facing a balance of payment crisis, which is when countries experience an exorbitant increase in international borrowing costs and lose access to financial markets,” Gopinath told Reuters.
Gopinath rejected the White House’s claim that a negative balance on the US primary income for the first time since 1960 was evidence of a large and serious balance of payment problem.
She attributed the negative balance to a large increase in foreign purchases of US equities and risky assets over the past decade, which outperformed foreign equities over this period.
Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury and IMF official, said that balance of payments crises are more associated with countries that have ⁠fixed exchange rates, and noted that the floating-rate dollar has been steady, the 10-year Treasury yield fairly ‌stable, with US stocks performing well.
Josh Lipsky, chair of international economics at the Atlantic Council ‌think tank, agreed, noting that a balance of payments crisis occurred when a country ​could not pay for what it was importing or was unable to ‌service foreign debt. That was fundamentally different from a trade deficit, he added.
Brad Setser, a currency and trade expert at the ‌Council on Foreign Relations who served as a senior adviser to the US Trade Representative in the Biden administration, took a somewhat contrarian view, arguing in lengthy X posts on Sunday that the Trump administration may have a reasonable case that there is a “large and serious” balance of payments deficit.
He noted that the current account deficit was far higher than when then-president Richard Nixon erected tariffs in 1971 to address a balance of payments crisis, and the US net international investment ‌position is much worse. This “gives the administration a real argument,” in favor of its tariffs, Setser wrote.
The White House, US Treasury and US Trade Representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment about ⁠the use of Section 122.

WRONG STATUTE ⁠FOR THE JOB
Despite the Trump administration’s new focus on balance of payments, the Justice Department had previously argued that Section 122 was the wrong statute to handle a national emergency over the trade deficit.
In court filings in its defense of IEEPA tariffs, the Justice Department said Section 122 would not have “any obvious application here, where the concerns the president identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.”
Neal Katyal, who argued at the Supreme Court on behalf of plaintiffs challenging the IEEPA tariffs, told CNBC that the Trump administration’s stance against the use of Section 122 for a trade deficit will make those tariffs vulnerable to litigation.
“I’m not sure it will necessarily even need to get to the Supreme Court, but if the president adheres to this plan of using a statute that his own Justice Department has said he can’t use, yeah, I think that’s a pretty easy thing to litigate,” Katyal said.
It is unclear who might take the lead in challenging the Section 122 tariffs.
Sara Albrecht, chair of the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm representing several small businesses that challenged the IEEPA ​tariffs, said the group would closely monitor any new statutes ​being invoked.
Albrecht did not reveal any future litigation strategy, adding: “Our immediate focus is simple: making sure the refund process begins and that checks start flowing to the American businesses that paid those unconstitutional duties.”
In its ruling, the Supreme Court did not give instructions regarding refunds, instead remanding the case to a lower ​trade court to determine next steps.

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