Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led 25 Republican Senate colleagues on Thursday in a letter urging the Trump administration to exclude UNRWA, the United Nations aid agency for Palestinians, from plans to rebuild Gaza.

The GOP senators cited UNRWA’s “systemic infiltration” by Hamas and the need to “avoid repeating the mistakes that empowered the terror group to take hold in the first place” in their letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“During your recent visit to Israel, you reaffirmed UNRWA’s ties to terrorism, describing the agency as ‘a subsidiary of Hamas’ and making clear that it ‘is not going to play any role’ in the delivery of aid to Gaza,” the senators wrote. “Reinstating UNRWA would only recreate the very conditions that a

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