U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrives for a photo op during the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on Security and Stability on the Korean Peninsula in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, January 16, 2018. REUTERS/Ben Nelms A new report suggests that the State Department is suppressing a report exposing that the number of Palestinian refugees is vastly overstated, thus reducing the need for the United States to the fund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the suppressed report states that the total number of Palestinian refugees is around 20,000, drastically lower than the 5.3 million figure circulated by the UNRWA.
The report came about from a 2015 amendment by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) requiring that the State Department conduct the study. In 2017, Congress required the State Department release the report, but the State Department has yet to comply with the congressional mandate.
Instead, the State Department designated the report as classified during the Obama administration in order to prevent it from being released and has maintained that classification ever since. Consequently, only individuals with “top-secret security clearance and access to a secure facility containing the documents,” per the Free Beacon.
“I was informed that there is no justification for classifying the report,” a source told the Free Beacon. “Rather, it is the officials at State Department who do not want this information out as it could and would lead to a call to reform UNRWA.”
The Trump administration announced on Jan. 16 that they would be withholding $65 million in funds from the UNRWA, although they would still provide $60 million to the agency. The agency claims it provides essential services to impoverished Palestinian refugees, however critics of the agency argue that the UNRWA is simply provides welfare for terrorism and that the agency’s teachers have anti-Semitic social media posts and incite terrorism.
The UNRWA was first created in 1949 in the aftermath of Israel’s war for independence to deal with the Palestinian refugees, who became refugees after Arab leaders ordered them to leave Israel under the pretense that they would be able to return once the Arab countries eradicated the newly formed Jewish state. For the most part, Arab nations haven’t provided much aid to the Palestinian refugees, as they view the refugees as simply a political bludgeon against Israel.
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