The UN aid agency that can’t shake its terror links

Israel claims that a United Nations body in Gaza is collaborating with Hamas – and it could derail the provision of essential aid

In February the Israeli Defence Force announced the discovery of a subterranean Hamas data centre below the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the Rimal neighbourhood in Gaza.
“UNRWA provides cover for Hamas, UNRWA knows exactly what is happening underground, and UNRWA uses its budget to fund some of Hamas’s military capabilities, this is for certain,” Colonel Benny Aharon told the reporters accompanying him through the tunnels, including some that ran under an UNRWA school.
Also in February, a video was made public allegedly showing a UNRWA employee loading the body of an Israeli man into the back of an SUV and driving away from Kibbutz Be’eri during the Oct 7 attacks. The video was first reported by the Washington Post and also shared online by Israeli officials, who identified the man as Faisal Ali Mussalem Al Naami, a social worker from Gaza. Jonathan Fowler, an UNRWA spokesperson, said: “It is not possible for UNRWA to verify the footage or photographs and ascertain who the person is.”
These were further blows to the problematic and increasingly confrontational relationship between the UN aid agency and the Jewish state, which reached a new low this week with two bills passed by its parliament, the Knesset, that effectively ended Israel’s dealings with UNRWA and banned it from any Israeli-controlled territory. Now, more than a year on from the Oct 7 attack by Hamas, the largely Western-funded body is under the spotlight again, simultaneously defended as the only means of providing essential aid, healthcare and education for Palestinians enduring war and deprivation across the region but attacked as an organisation infiltrated by and protective of terrorists.
As the bills passed, Amir Ohana, the speaker of the Knesset, proclaimed: “The UNRWA, an organisation that has been proven beyond any doubt to be part of Hamas, took an active part during October 7, in the kidnapping, the murder, in all the actions that we know the Hamas organisation did in the state of Israel – UNRWA were an active part of it.”
Those proposing the new laws spoke of the longstanding antipathy towards UNRWA and increasingly towards the United Nations in general, which many in Israel believe embodies the failure of parts of the international community to recognise the role UNRWA has played in facilitating the actions and ideology of Hamas as well as being a platform for hostility towards Israel more broadly.
This view is contested by governments and by those who fear this latest development could be catastrophic for refugees, particularly in Gaza. Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding says, “UNRWA has a huge role in providing vital, life saving services to millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. As well as education and healthcare it acts in crises such as the one we see now with its 59 camps, providing food and emergency care. It’s the agency that keeps millions of refugees alive. Its role has been invaluable.”
That is not a view shared by the UN Watch group in Geneva which operates independently of the UN, which has compiled a series of reports highlighting the links between UNRWA and terrorism and Islamist ideology, as well as being intensely critical of its raison d’etre. “UNRWA has kept Palestinians in a state of dependency for 75 years,” claims Hillel Neuer, UN Watch’s chief executive. “Because rather than help make Gaza into Tel Aviv 2.0 they have told Palestinians their homes are not in Gaza but in Israel and their agenda is to dismantle Israel and that is reflected in their education for generations. They are nurturing grievance, revenge and terrorism and it’s the opposite of advocacy for a two-state solution.”
In response to the Israeli banning of the aid agency, which will take effect in three months, various Western governments, including the US and UK, have protested at Israel’s latest decision. Sir Keir Starmer said: “This legislation risks making UNRWA’s essential work for Palestinians impossible, jeopardising the entire international humanitarian response in Gaza and delivery of essential health and education services in the West Bank… Under its international obligations, Israel must ensure sufficient aid reaches civilians in Gaza.”
UNRWA, which was established in 1949 to provide aid to refugees following the conflict between the nascent Israeli state and Palestinian and other Arab forces, is the only UN mandated agency dedicated to a specific region and employs 30,000 people, most of whom are Palestinian. The vast majority of funding has been provided by the US and European countries, including £35 million from the UK in the last financial year, which makes any iteration of the humanitarian agency’s collusion with Hamas particularly uncomfortable, especially when it is the sole provider of so much aid to Palestinians in Gaza and the wider region.
As recently as 2007, Israel expressed its qualified support for UNRWA, saying that despite “concerns regarding the politicisation” of the agency, it recognised the importance of its humanitarian mission. That expedient but decidedly stable relationship was shattered in October last year, from which point Israel has taken a much harder line as it alleged further examples of direct and indirect ties between UNRWA and Hamas and other terrorist groups.
“For the past 10 years we have been monitoring UNRWA staff’s support for terrorism on public social media,” says Neuer. He claims that some UNRWA staff “routinely glorify Adolf Hitler, praise terror attacks and call to slaughter Jews. We sent our findings to UNRWA and the heads of the UN. Time and again they ignored us.”
In January, Britain was among several countries, including the US, Germany and Australia, to suspend its funding for UNRWA after 12 of its employees were accused of taking part in the Oct 7 attacks. Speaking at a briefing for journalists in Tel Aviv, the Israeli minister for defence Yoav Gallant also claimed more than 1,400 staff members were members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The figure amounted to around 12 per cent of its workforce.
“There may well have been UNRWA employees involved in those horrible attacks in October,” says Doyle. “Hamas has a popular base but that doesn’t mean the organisation itself is personally involved, responsible or facilitating any of this. Donor states immediately suspended aid but then restored it once they realised there was no evidence to substantiate the evidence. The US is still suspending aid. I think Israel has not exactly been hiding their agenda to undermine UNRWA. Hamas runs Gaza, so some of its tunnels are no doubt under UNRWA buildings but that doesn’t mean they are tied at the hip.”
Aid agencies described the suspension of funds as “reckless” and Mohammad Shtayyeh, the former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, accused Israel of a “premeditated political attack” on UNRWA. But in August UNRWA dismissed nine of its staff members after finding that they “may have been involved” in Oct 7. At the time, UN spokesman Farhan Haq said UNRWA had “sufficient information in order to take the actions that we’re taking – which is to say, the termination of these nine individuals”. In nine other cases, UNRWA didn’t have sufficient evidence of involvement.
“A year ago we notified UNRWA that the leader of its teachers union in Lebanon, Fathi al-Sharif was involved with Hamas – posting of Hamas ‘martyrs’ and images of himself with figures of Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda and Hamas,” says Neuer. “He was suspended and thousands of teachers shut down the education system in protest for three months. He was killed by Israel [in September] and Hamas admitted he was indeed its leader in Lebanon.”
The former head of the teachers’ union in Gaza, Suhail al-Hindi, is in Hamas’ politburo, with accusations about his political affiliations going back to at least 2011. He was fired by UNRWA in 2017.
Scrutiny of UNRWA’s involvement in education, in particular the textbooks used in its schools date back the 1990s and critics have highlighted occasions in which Israel has been erased, Jewish links to the region have been ignored and, in the most extreme case, martyrdom has been extolled. However, this has been countered by the UNRWA’s use of the new curriculum of the Palestinian Authority since 2000. “UN agencies have to adopt the curriculum of the host country,” says Doyle. “Accusations about UNRWA and education are part of a smear campaign.” As recently as 2021, In UNRWA won a British Council award for excellence in “preparing students to be responsible global citizens by embedding international education into their curriculums.”
In 2021, James Cleverly, who was then foreign secretary, said that the Foreign Office monitored UNRWA’s work and was satisfied that it had “a robust review system of each host country’s textbooks to ensure education in its schools reflects the values and principles of the UN.”
“We accompany our support to UNRWA with stringent attention to implementation of their neutrality policy, including how they apply this to textbooks,” Cleverly told the Commons.
This positive appraisal is not shared by the Israel and UK-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-SE), which has been analysing the curricula used by UNRWA since the 1990s. It warned about what it says is anti-Israel incitement contained in Palestinian textbooks, including the glorification of violence and martyrdom. “The cooperation between UNRWA and Hamas is absolutely undeniable,” claims Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-SE.
A UN review published in April largely exonerated UNRWA following the accusations of links with Hamas while making some recommendations about procedures and practices designed to ensure more transparent neutrality. UN Watch claims that the review was used to make it easy for Western donors to reinstate funding to the UNRWA without losing face. “Our democracies are in complete denial over the links between UNRWA and Hamas,” says Neuer.
It’s eminently possible that UNRWA is – at the same time – performing vital relief work in the midst of a terrible humanitarian crisis while also harbouring members of Hamas and even potentially jeopardising the long-term prospects of peace through its educational programmes. This complex picture is inconvenient for Western countries who want to contribute to the relief effort but don’t want direct involvement in such a toxic situation. In the meantime, Israel’s decision to ban UNRWA entrenches these opposing positions even further.