70 No. 78 JUSTICE The issue at hand is quite important: if neither Congress nor the President has taken action to agree to or otherwise confer immunity upon an organization internally created by the UN, by what authority does that affiliated subsidiary entity enjoy immunity from litigation in the United States courts? When an agency bearing the UN’s name is alleged to be deeply enmeshed with terrorist activity, this raises serious national security concerns. Where neither Congress nor the Executive is presently addressing the issue or where neither supports the immunity claim, courts cannot simply presume that the UN may supply it unilaterally. The UN General Assembly – which is controlled by foreign governments – was never authorized to bind the U.S. courts or government. Thus, in our view, UNRWA has no basis, de jure or de facto, to assert or receive the immunity it claims unto itself. I. The Record: UNRWA’s Alleged Integration with Hamas As alleged in the D.C. complaint, UNRWA, established in 1949, presents itself as a humanitarian agency of the United Nations: a provider of protection, relief, and services to Palestinian refugees, advancing the UN’s peacekeeping objectives in a protracted conflict zone.9 But in practice, UNRWA is alleged to be the opposite of a refugee-protection, peacekeeping entity.10 Unlike the ordinary refugee model, UNRWA seeks no durable solutions; rather, it perpetuates the conflict by preserving a uniquely hereditary refugee status tied to an indefinite and arbitrarily defined historical claim to “return” to Israel’s sovereign territory for patrilineal descendants of men who lived in British Mandate Palestine between 1946 and 1948.11 That definition has no analogue in general international refugee law. Under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution, is personally outside the country of his or her own nationality; the definition turns on that individual’s own flight, and it does not extend refugee status to that person’s subsequently born descendants.12 No other country has this concept of “return” imposed on it; UNRWA applies it to Israel’s sovereign territory alone. UNRWA, which categorically refuses to resettle refugees into other countries, keeps the refugees in camps instead of neighborhoods, designed to showcase the people in the camps as being perpetual refugees, contrary to the very system used by other refugee organizations. Thus, UNRWA protects not refugees, but refugeehood itself – and at the refugees’ expense.13 That matters in this context, because under Article 105 of the UN Charter, the UN enjoys only “such privileges and immunities [that] are necessary for the fulfilment of its purposes” and under Article 1, the UN’s purposes are to serve as “a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of” peace, security, relations among nations, and international co-operation.14 UNRWA’s unique refugee definition necessarily disharmonizes the actions of nations by perpetuating conflict among Israel and its neighbors, thereby frustrating the prospects of peace, and undermining regional security. Created as a temporary relief mechanism, UNRWA turned itself into a permanent political, educational, and social system – one that employs tens of thousands of people as bureaucrats and teachers and runs hundreds of schools where children are inculcated across generations with a grievance-centered vision in which Israel’s existence is rejected as an unacceptable fact.15 Senior U.S. officials have described UNRWA as a “subsidiary of Hamas.”16 That characterization aligns with what the complaint alleges: that UNRWA – a by-product of the Arab League’s documented agreement and longcommitted determination to eliminate Israel – knowingly and intentionally created the precise environment in which Hamas rose and consolidated power. The population UNRWA cultivated was primed to regard violence in service 9. Sha’arabany Compl., supra note 2, at ¶¶ 209, 232. 10. Id. at ¶¶ 207–215, 231. 11. Id. at ¶¶ 207, 210–216. 12. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees art. 1(A)(2), July 28, 1951, 189 U.N.T.S. 137. 13. Id. at ¶¶ 210, 215–217. 14. UN Charter arts. 1, 105. 15. Id. at ¶¶ 217, 221–233. 16. Marco Rubio, Remarks (Oct. 24, 2025) (“UNRWA became a subsidiary of Hamas”); Tommy Pigott, U.S. No Vote on Anti-Israel UNGA Resolution (Dec. 12, 2025) (“UNRWA, a Hamas subsidiary”); Jeff Bartos, Remarks at a UN Pledging Conference for UNRWA (June 30, 2026) (“an organization that has become a subsidiary of Hamas”).
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