Since Friday, 12 countries have “temporarily” suspended funding for the UN agency, following Israeli allegations that 12 UNRWA employees participated in the Hamas attack on October 7...

US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized some countries' suspension of funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

She confirmed in her blog post on the “X” platform on Monday that suspending UNRWA’s funding is “unacceptable.”

She added that it is unreasonable to expose millions to the risk of hunger due to “serious allegations” against 12 employees of a United Nations institution that has 13,000 employees.

She called for the United States to resume its funding to UNRWA that it had suspended. On Friday, UNRWA said that it had opened an investigation into allegations of the involvement of a number (without specifying) of its employees in the October 7 attacks.

The Israeli accusations against the agency are “not the first of their kind.” Since the beginning of the war on Gaza, Israel has accused UNRWA employees of working for Hamas, in what was considered a “previous justification” for attacking the organization’s schools and facilities in the Gaza Strip, which shelters tens of thousands of displaced people, most of whom are children and women. According to observers.

Since Friday, 12 countries have “temporarily” suspended funding for the UN agency, following Israeli allegations that 12 UNRWA employees participated in the Hamas attack on October 7.

These countries are the United States, Canada, Australia, Italy, Britain, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Japan and Austria.

UNRWA was established by a decision of the United Nations General Assembly in 1949, and was authorized to provide assistance and protection to refugees in its five areas of operations, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, until a just solution to their problem is reached.