Tim Burchett: “For a long time, there have been rumors that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency had a relationship with Hamas.…”

“For a long time, there have been rumors that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency had a relationship with Hamas. Last week, those rumors were confirmed when we discovered that 12 members of the agency were directly involved in the horrific attacks by Hamas on our friends in Israel on October 7. Another 1,200 employees of the agency have direct connections to Hamas. That is 10 percent of all the agency's employees in Gaza. The State Department did the right thing by pausing its funding to the agency, but it is also something President Trump did years ago. The Biden administration restarted the funding in 2021. Clearly, the administration did not do proper research to ensure this funding wasn't going to friends of terrorists. Also, pausing the funding did not have the huge impact they want us to think it did, since the United States has given them at least $730 million in taxpayer dollars since 2021. That is about 99 percent of what has been allocated, and we only paused about $300,000 in the remaining funding. Now, an Israeli firm is investigating the United Nations Relief and Works Agency's digital wallets to see where their cryptocurrency is going. The firm has found that at least one digital wallet that belongs to Hamas is still active. We need to defund the United Nations, Madam Speaker. ____________________”