1.7m Gazans stripped of UNRWA aid by Trump’s Board
Trump's Board of Peace has told the UN to defund UNRWA and fund its own 'Hamas-free' zones instead, while 1.7m Gazans still depend on the agency.
UNRWA has been excluded from Gaza’s reconstruction by the governments now deciding what gets built in its place. On 30 June, at the United Nations pledging conference for the agency, the US Mission to the UN and Donald Trump’s Board of Peace told member states plainly: keep funding UNRWA and you are funding “incitement, terrorism and stagnation.” Fund the Board instead.
The 1.7 million Gazans who currently rely on UNRWA for food, water, healthcare, schooling and shelter were not in the room. Nor were the families of the 390 or more UNRWA staff killed by Israeli forces since October 2023, most of them teachers and health workers. Six of those colleagues died in repeated strikes on a single UNRWA school in Nuseirat, hit five times while sheltering around 12,000 displaced people, mainly women and children. Those are the people this decision is about. The US envoy who announced it was not.
Excluded from Gaza’s reconstruction, by design
Jeff Bartos, the US representative for UN management and reform, framed the choice at the pledging conference as a binary: pledges to UNRWA fund “incitement, terrorism and stagnation,” pledges to the Board of Peace fund “a path to peace and prosperity.” The US Mission’s own account of the meeting declared UNRWA “has no place in the new Gaza.”
UNRWA was created by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 in 1949 and its mandate runs to June 2029. No single state, and no board appointed by one, has the authority to dissolve it. A 2025 International Court of Justice advisory opinion went further: states should not support measures that weaken UNRWA, should not substitute politically driven structures for UN mandates, and should keep funding it, protect its staff and facilities, and ensure it unrestricted access. The Board of Peace’s campaign to have member states walk away from UNRWA runs directly against that opinion.
The money has already gone. Washington was once UNRWA’s largest single donor; Trump has stopped all US contributions. The agency is short roughly $100m against its 2025 needs, after donors pledged $878m and delivered only $839m, and the US is the only major donor that has not unfrozen funds it holds. In April 2025 the Trump Justice Department reversed the position that UNRWA held UN-derived immunity from US courts. By July 2025, more than 200 plaintiffs had sued the agency in a Washington district court. The organisation feeding, schooling and treating 1.7 million people is now being defunded, stripped of legal protection and sued, in the same season it is being told it has “no place.”
The board that replaces it
The Board of Peace was established in January 2026, chaired by Trump, with Tony Blair, Jared Kushner, Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, Apollo chief executive Marc Rowan, World Bank president Ajay Banga and Robert Gabriel making up its executive. Its lead envoy, Nikolay Mladenov, unveiled a 15-point roadmap for Gaza on 21 May. On 6 July, Gaza’s Emergency Committee dissolved to hand administration to the Cairo-based National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, and Mladenov used the moment to press for the roadmap’s finalisation. The next day, Hamas, which has governed Gaza since 2007, said Israel was engineering an “administrative vacuum” in the territory.
Into that vacuum the Board plans to move its own population management system. A pilot “Hamas-free humanitarian zone” is due to open within weeks at Tel Sultan, near Rafah, for civilians vetted as having “no weapons or affiliation with Hamas.” It will be policed by the International Stabilisation Force, described as carrying non-lethal weapons, operating out of the Israeli-run Amitai Camp under Board command. The Board has pledged not to allow concrete into Gaza. An unnamed Israeli official told Middle East Eye the wider strategy is to expand control over roughly 70% of the territory while “increasing the pace of targeted killings while remaining below the threshold of international criticism,” a claim that should be read as one official’s account, not established fact, but which sits alongside satellite imagery showing the razing of Rafah.
Who profits
The men writing Gaza’s future are also positioned to profit from it. Kushner’s Affinity Partners, funded almost exclusively by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, charges a 2% annual management fee. Yakir Gabay, the Israeli-Cypriot developer on the Gaza Executive Board, has described his vision for the strip as “Dubai-like.” The UAE has pledged $1.5bn for a “New Rafah” built around entry and exit checkpoints. A board chaired by the man who once called Gaza waterfront property, staffed by his son-in-law’s fee-charging fund and a developer selling a Gulf-financed Dubai on the Mediterranean, is the body now telling the world UNRWA has no place there.
UNRWA is not above scrutiny. Allegations that a handful of its staff were involved in the October 2023 attacks triggered genuine donor reviews and governance questions the agency has had to answer. That debate is real and we do not pretend otherwise. But a governance dispute is not a legal basis for a foreign-chaired board, sitting above a transitional Palestinian administration that has not yet set foot in Gaza, to instruct UN member states to defund a body established by the General Assembly and protected by the World Court. The occupation and the assault on Gaza produced the dependency the Board now cites as grounds to abolish the agency that meets it.
Philippe Lazzarini, who stepped down as UNRWA’s Commissioner-General on 31 March, used his last day in office to call for an independent investigation into the killing of nearly 400 of his staff. No such investigation has been agreed. His successor, Christian Saunders, calls the agency “a critical platform for recovery, institutional stability and lasting peace.” Whatever opens at Tel Sultan in the coming weeks will not carry UNRWA’s name. UNRWA’s name, this week, is attached to something else: a list of almost 400 people its outgoing head says were killed doing the job the Board of Peace has just decided Gaza no longer needs.
