On Monday, Israeli lawmakers passed two bills that prohibit the highly controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating in the Jewish state due to its ties with the Hamas terrorist group.

The Knesset, Israel’s legislature, overwhelmingly passed a measure (92-10) that bars UNRWA from Israel as well as a second bill (87-9) that forbids state authorities from having contact with the agency.

The votes came after it was discovered that UNRWA workers had participated in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that killed over 1,200 Israelis, and that Hamas was using UNRWA facilities in Gaza as terrorist outposts.

“UNRWA workers involved in terrorist activities against Israel must be held accountable,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement following the votes. “Since avoiding a humanitarian crisis is also essential, sustained humanitarian aid must remain available in Gaza now and in the future. In the 90 days before this legislation takes effect — and after — we stand ready to work with our international partners to ensure Israel continues to facilitate humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not threaten Israel’s security.”

On Tuesday, Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor at the Jewish News Syndicate, joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” and explained the origins of UNRWA.

“UNRWA is a very unique organization,” she noted. “The Palestinians are the only nation or group of people on Earth that have a U.N. agency that’s just for them. UNRWA was established with the establishment of the State of Israel, and its purpose is to eternalize the Arab conflict with Israel by keeping the Arabs of the land of Israel — [who] later were called Palestinians — in a state of perpetual refugee status. [I]t’s transferred from generation to generation. So over the intervening 76 years, the Palestinians [are] the only community in the world whose refugee population has grown rather than shrunk.”

“UNRWA is only there to maintain … the Palestinian hatred of Israel,” Glick added.

She went on to detail the extent of UNRWA’s involvement with the Hamas terrorist organization.

“Since October 7th of last year, what Israel discovered was that … Hamas headquarters were in UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City,” Glick explained. “Hamas’s communications hub is in UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza City. UNRWA clinics, UNRWA schools, UNRWA offices are all used as weapons bases, launching pads, and places to hold hostages by Hamas. And UNRWA terrorists — that is, so-called ‘relief workers’ — actually engaged in the atrocities inside of Israel on October 7th. They murdered Israelis, they kidnapped Israelis, they stole the bodies of Israelis who had been murdered by the Hamas colleagues back to Gaza, and UNRWA employees have been shown to have been holding hostages since October 7th in their private residences and starving them to death and torturing them. So this is a terrorist organization.”

In addition, Glick pointed out that UNRWA relief supplies intended for Palestinian civilians have ended up in the hands of Hamas terrorists.

“[L]argely due to the humanitarian aid convoys that the United States has forced Israel to accept — massive quantities of on a daily basis since almost the outset of the war — Hamas has [been] completely resupplied,” she highlighted. “[I]n [Yahya] Sinwar’s bunker, the head of Hamas that was just eliminated by Israeli forces a couple of weeks ago in Gaza, he had all of these UNRWA bags of flour and other foodstuffs. … [UNRWA is] inextricably linked to Hamas’s terror regime. They’re part of it. They are sort of the welfare department of Hamas’s regime.”

Glick further emphasized that the U.N. and the Biden-Harris administration are continuing to support UNRWA despite its verified ties to Hamas.

“The most shocking thing that we’ve seen is not that the U.N. continues to stand by their terrorist organization … it’s that the Biden-Harris administration has been standing by UNRWA,” she argued. “[T]here was a letter signed by Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to their Israeli counterparts a week and a half ago, threatening that the United States was going to place an embargo on arms sales to Israel if the Knesset went through with its plan to pass this legislation into law. … So it’s a very strange situation where you have the United States leading an international posse of states in the U.N. that are trying to undermine Israel’s democratic processes in order to protect a terrorist organization that operates under the aegis of the United Nations.”

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill like Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) agree.

“I know the Biden administration says that they stand with Israel, but it seems like at almost every turn, they seem to want to undermine Israel’s ability to defend itself against an existential threat,” he argued on “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “… I believe they have a right to defend themselves, and if that means excluding UNRWA from Israeli-controlled territories because they’re infiltrated by Hamas, I think they have a right to do so, and I think that’s the right call.”