UNRWA After Washington: Fundraising in Atlanta, Scrutiny on Screen

When a spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) appeared on British television in December, he offered a familiar defense.

“No other organization has the capacity or the mandate to do what we do,” said Jonathan Fowler, responding to mounting criticism of UNRWA following the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and subsequent allegations involving agency staff.

In Washington, that claim is now being openly challenged.

Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has rejected the premise that UNRWA is indispensable. In a statement provided by his office, Risch argued that humanitarian assistance could continue without the agency, whose mandate he said has outlived its purpose.

“We can abolish UNRWA and still support those in need,” Risch said, pointing to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, UNICEF and the World Food Programme, which manage refugee crises elsewhere.

That debate, once largely confined to diplomatic circles, is now playing out in American cities.

Next month, UNRWA USA will host a large-scale fundraising event in Atlanta: the Atlanta Gaza 5K, a walk-and-run scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 14, at Shirley Clarke Franklin Park. The event aims to raise $400,000 for mental health counseling and trauma support for Palestinian children in Gaza.

The fundraiser comes at a moment of transition for the agency. After the United States announced it would halt funding to UNRWA following investigations into staff ties to Hamas, the organization has increasingly turned to private donors and community-based fundraising to fill the gap.

Supporters see the shift as necessary. Critics see it as a sign of how deeply politicized UNRWA has become.

The timing is striking. The Gaza 5K will take place just days before the 2026 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival begins. On Feb. 28, the festival will host the Atlanta premiere of “Unraveling UNRWA,” a documentary that takes a well-rounded, critical look at the agency’s history.

Directed by Israeli filmmaker Duki Dror, “Unraveling UNRWA” examines how a relief agency created in 1949 to address the displacement following the Arab-Israeli war evolved into a permanent institution serving a community that has since grown through inherited refugee status to roughly 6 million registered refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The film draws on archival footage, former UNRWA officials, historians and policy analysts to argue that the agency’s design — including the unique practice of allowing refugee status to be inherited indefinitely — has entrenched displacement instead of resolving it.

Rather than focusing on the devastation in Gaza, the documentary steps back to examine UNRWA as a system.

That system, critics argue, is unlike any other in the global refugee regime. UNRWA is the only U.N. body dedicated to a single population, and the only one that maintains refugee status across generations, even when descendants have been born and raised outside the original conflict zone.

For Einat Wilf, a former Israeli lawmaker who participated in the 2000 Camp David peace talks and appears in the film, that distinction is central.

“The right of return was never just a negotiating position,” Wilf says in the documentary. “It became the foundation of Palestinian political legitimacy.”

Wilf argues that UNRWA’s indefinite operation outside the global refugee framework transformed displacement from a temporary humanitarian condition into a permanent political identity, preserved at the expense of peace.

UNRWA’s defenders counter that such critiques underestimate the humanitarian reality on the ground. Fowler has repeatedly warned that without the agency, millions of Palestinians would lose access to food aid, schooling, vaccinations and basic medical care. He has emphasized the difficulty of operating in conflict zones and denied systemic wrongdoing, even as the United Nations acknowledged dismissing nine UNRWA employees after an internal investigation found they may have been involved in the Oct. 7 attacks, according to AP News.

Both claims may be true.

UNRWA fills a real humanitarian vacuum. It also absorbs the political cost of an unresolved conflict, allowing multiple actors — Israel, Hamas, regional governments, donor states and the United Nations itself — to postpone difficult decisions.

Former UNRWA legal advisor James Lindsay, who appears in “Unraveling UNRWA,” puts it bluntly: “No one pays a price for avoiding a solution.”

The Atlanta Gaza 5K illustrates that tension in miniature. Framed as a community event supporting children’s mental health, it appeals to Americans’ humanitarian instincts at a moment when public sympathy for Palestinian civilians is high. At the same time, broader questions surrounding UNRWA’s structure, accountability and long-term impact remain unresolved.

For Jewish communities, particularly in cities like Atlanta with active civic and cultural institutions, the juxtaposition is unavoidable. In the same month, one part of the city will host a major UNRWA fundraiser, while another screens a documentary questioning whether the agency’s very design has helped perpetuate the conflict it was meant to alleviate.

Ending UNRWA would not end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Even its critics acknowledge that humanitarian needs would not disappear, and that any transition would require careful planning to avoid chaos.

But the question now being asked in Washington and beyond is whether managing displacement indefinitely has come at the cost of resolving it.

As Dror observes in the film, “We preserve life, but we preserve the conflict as well.”

What comes after UNRWA is not simply a question of aid delivery. It is a question of whether the international system is willing to stop administering a problem across generations and instead confront the political responsibilities that administration has postponed.

Eric Schwartzman is a journalist, SaaS founder and advisor focused on owned media, information integrity, narrative discovery, and how ideas are amplified and distorted across modern information systems.