Daily Kickoff
Good Tuesday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we interview Catherine Lhamon, the top civil rights official at the U.S. Department of Education, and look at how Democrats are approaching UNRWA funding cuts ahead of today’s hearing on Capitol Hill. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Qatari PM Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Tom Nides and Liliana Segre.
Ahead of today’s House hearing on the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) is expected to lead a letter to Secretary of State Tony Blinken calling for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini to resign, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod scoops.
“I have lost all confidence in Secretary-General António Guterres’ ability to ensure that the U.N. is not actively supporting terrorism or giving refuge to known terrorists,” the letter, excerpts of which were obtained by JI, reads. “Therefore, I ask you to call on Secretary-General Guterres and UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini to immediately resign from their posts. They can no longer be trusted to maintain international peace and security, protect all nations, and uphold international law.”
The hearing begins at 2 p.m. ET, and will feature testimony from UN Watch head Hillel Neuer, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Rich Goldberg, IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff and University of Virginia professor Mara Rudman.
But one person’s absence will be noticeable: UNRWA head Lazzarini.
The Swiss-Italian diplomat received a request earlier this month from HFAC Chair Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Oversight Subcommittee Chair Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) to testify on Capitol Hill. But he is in Israel today, where his meeting with Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been canceled over the recent revelations from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about ties between his agency and Hamas.
Had he been on the Hill today, Lazzarini would have faced questions about the back-to-back reports, which found that at least 12 members of UNRWA participated in the Oct. 7 attacks, while roughly 1 in 10 employees of the agency in Gaza are members of a terror group.
But allegations of collaboration and cooperation between UNRWA and Hamas are nothing new — nor are they a surprise to UNRWA leadership. Three years ago, Lazzarini acknowledged that learning materials distributed to students in the Gaza Strip included a grammar lesson that taught, “Jihad is one of the doors to Paradise” and a math lesson that instructed students to count martyrs.
Peter Hansen, who headed the agency from 1996-2005, said in a 2004 interview that he was “sure there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll.” But, Hansen continued, “I don’t see that as a crime.”
Lazzarini’s absence in Washington is unlikely to win him sympathies as the organization stands to lose funding from half of its top 10 benefactors — including the U.S., which provided $340 million in 2022. Some on the Hill are already moving to take further measures against the group.
Mast introduced a bill to permanently end U.S. funding to, and seek the dissolution of, UNRWA, transferring its responsibilities to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, while Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called for the revocation of UNRWA’s tax-exempt status.

campus concerns
Dept. of Ed. civil rights chief ‘astounded’ by antisemitic incidents at U.S. schools, universities

Catherine Lhamon, the top civil rights official at the U.S. Department of Education, said on Monday she is “astounded” by the antisemitic incidents she has seen since Oct. 7. “I’m a longtime, lifelong civil rights attorney, and I and my staff know hate intimately because of what we do, and I am astounded by the kinds of allegations that we are seeing now in this country,” Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch in an interview. “I’m devastated that it’s true, and devastated for the students who are experiencing those kinds of incidents.”
Record number: Since Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel and touched off a wave of antisemitism worldwide, Lhamon’s team of 600 lawyers at the department’s Office of Civil Rights has opened a record number of investigations into discrimination at U.S. schools based on “shared ancestry.” This language comes from Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on people’s “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.” For two decades, the Education Department has interpreted this phrase to extend to religious minorities including Jews, Muslims and Sikhs.
Break it down: The department’s civil rights office received 183 complaints of “shared ancestry” discrimination in the four months since the beginning of October. In the entire previous fiscal year, from Oct. 1, 2022, to Sept. 30, 2023, the office received just 62 complaints. More shared ancestry investigations — 58 in total — have been opened in the past four months than in the previous seven years combined, according to publicly available data. Two-thirds of the complaints received since October have been related to allegations of antisemitism, a department spokesperson said. New FBI data released on Monday found that 10% of all hate crimes in 2022, prior to the recent wave of antisemitism, occurred at schools or college campuses.