Even UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) officials, notoriously belligerent against Israel in the fulfilment of their duties as the world’s public trustees, of sorts, on behalf of Palestinian “refugees” and only Palestinian “refugees,” were sufficiently bothered with Hamas that they publicly announced last Friday they would temporarily suspend distribution of humanitarian aid throughout Gaza.

The agency made the announcement after Hamas, the day before, seized control of UNRWA warehouses, stole some 200 tons of food and supplies and 10 trucks in which the supplies were delivered. Earlier in the week, Hamas police officers stole thousands of blankets and food parcels from UNRWA meant for needy Gazans.

As of this writing, talks were being held between Hamas and UNRWA to resolve their respective differences.

UNRWA, it must be recalled, was established in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 to provide education, health and social services to the Palestinian people. It remains, to this very day, the only UN agency that assists one single, regionally defined group of refugees. That third- and fourth-generation Palestinians living wherever they do should still be defined as “refugees” strains logic, common sense, decency and historical precedent. Far worse, however, it carves deep into the psyches of Palestinians and many other peoples (of the Middle East and further afield, too) a false but pitiable sense of Palestinian victimization. And thus it prolongs Palestinian misery.

The need to reform UNRWA was trumpeted last week by one of its own former top officials. In a report titled Fixing UNRWA: Repairing the UN’s Troubled System of Aid to Palestinian Refugees, James Lindsay, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a former attorney with the U.S. Justice Department and then UNRWA’s general counsel from 2002 until 2007, urged the agency to “halt its one-sided political statements and limit itself to comments on humanitarian issues; take additional steps to ensure the agency is not employing or providing benefits to terrorists and criminals; and allow the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), or some other neutral entity, to provide balanced and discrimination-free textbooks for UNRWA initiatives.”

Lindsay also suggested that UNRWA services should be extended to individuals who truly need them and not to those who continue to claim them by virtue of their status as “refugee”.

Not surprisingly, Andrew Whitley, director of the UNRWA in New York, criticized the report. “Someone reading this paper with no background,” Whitely said, “would assume that the Israeli government was a benign actor. No mention is made of the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

With this quite revealing statement of rebuttal, Whitley proved Lindsay’s case. It’s our view that UNRWA should be disbanded and that aid should be distributed to the Palestinians in the way that other groups receive it from the UN. But reform of UNRWA along Lindsay’s lines would be a good, second-best alternative.