The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) can finally join the club of entities that have lost billions of dollars because of their explicit antisemitism.
The ties between UNRWA and Hamas have always been well-known and documented, and this week, a landslide of damning evidence has emerged on just how deeply intertwined the two are. Any rational person can see that Hamas has infested UNRWA to the point that the agency is merely an arm of Hamas that is masquerading as a humanitarian organization.
UNRWA is the central relief agency in Gaza, exclusively responsible for Palestinian refugees (while all other refugees fall under the UNHCR). UNRWA has created its own definition of refugees, which only applies to Palestinians. The main objective of a refugee agency should be to resettle those who were displaced, but with UNRWA, Palestinians are the only group of people who maintain their refugee status in perpetuity.
As a UN agency, UNRWA is supposed to remain impartial and work solely on humanitarian efforts for Palestinians. However, UNRWA has a history of promoting antisemitic violence in its school systems, glorifying terrorism and teaching students to become martyrs.
Hamas has regularly used UNRWA schools as military bases, weapon storage facilities and rocket launching pads. How can an organization call itself impartial when it actively promotes Hamas’s ideology in the Palestinian school curriculum and gives the terror group the ability to launch an assault against Israel?
Since the Hamas-Israel war began on October 7, more and more evidence has emerged on how Hamas has infested itself within the agency. UNRWA teachers can masquerade as ordinary civilians with legitimate UN employee IDs, then simultaneously work as military combatants for Hamas.
The initial evidence came about after one Israeli hostage who was released in the first hostage-prisoner swap revealed that he had been held captive in the attic of a teacher employed by UNRWA (who was also a father of 10 children). The former hostage said he had been locked away for nearly 50 days and was barely provided with food or any medical needs. A month later, UN Watch, a Geneva-based nonprofit that monitors the UN, revealed that 3,000 UNRWA educational employees celebrated the October 7 massacre and called for the execution of the hostages in a telegram channel.
All of these are terrible revelations on their own and prove that UNRWA is far from impartial and, at the very least, complicit in aiding Hamas. However, this was just the tip of the iceberg, as more evidence has come out over just how involved UNRWA staff were in the murder and kidnapping of Israelis. What we can confidently say is that the United Nations is using global taxpayer money to fund the salaries of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.
Israel has exposed that 12 UNRWA employees in Gaza were directly involved with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israeli civilians. It is difficult to wrap your head around how the crimes committed by these 12 individuals and the fact that the UN pays for their salaries. The allegations against them include kidnapping hostages, participating in the actual murder of Israeli civilians and filming hostages being taken captive. One of the twelve is an UNRWA elementary school teacher who has been accused of being a Hamas commander and of having participated in the massacre in Kibbutz Be’eri.
At the same time, another is a UNRWA social worker who was involved in the kidnapping of an IDF soldier’s body on October 7. Israel’s revelations summarize that six UNRWA employees infiltrated Israel as part of the massacre, four were involved in kidnapping Israelis, and three additional UNRWA employees were “invited via an SMS text to arrive at an assembly area the night before the attack and were directed to equip themselves with weapons.”
UNRWA chief's response
After Israel revealed the crimes of these twelve terrorists, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini rushed to release a statement declaring his “shock” at the revelation and announced that UNRWA terminated the contracts of the employees in question. This, however, did not stop the domino effect of nations that suspended their funding to UNRWA after learning about their direct involvement in the October 7 massacre. Over 90% of UNRWA’s funding comes from “voluntary contributions” from UN member states, receiving over $1 billion in pledges just last year. Over fifteen countries have suspended funding to UNRWA, including major donors like the United States, Germany, the European Union, Sweden, Norway, Japan, France, and Switzerland.
In an attempt to save face, UNRWA released a statement claiming that these revelations are “unsubstantiated claims” and claimed (along with pro-Palestinian public figures) that UNRWA should not be punished because of a “few bad apples.”
This statement, however, was entirely obliterated when The Wall Street Journal published its expose on UNRWA. According to WSJ, an estimated 1,200 UNRWA employees in Gaza are actual “operatives” of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The report showcases that of UNRWA’s 12,000 employees in Gaza, 23% of UNRWA’s male employees took an active role with Hamas, and an estimated half of UNRWA employees have close relatives who belong to the Islamist terrorist organizations.
While the public pretends to be shocked, anyone familiar with UNRWA cannot be surprised. With the corrupt way that UNRWA has operated in Gaza and its direct ties with Hamas, learning that their employees were involved in these horrific acts was nothing short of inevitable. UNRWA employees have participated in terrorism, glorified the murder of Jews, pushed antisemitic propaganda in Palestinian society, and denied Israel’s right to exist. All of this is just a short list.
Instead of pretending to be “shocked” and “horrified,” public figures and the international community should finally decide how to end UNRWA and the funding for good. The Palestinians deserve better than a corrupt agency that employs terrorists and is a self-serving business that capitalizes on Palestinian suffering.
The writer is a social media activist with more than 10 years of experience working for Israeli and Jewish causes and cause-based NGOs. She is the co-founder and COO of Social Lite Creative, a digital marketing firm specializing in geopolitics.