Officials of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency meet “routinely” with Lebanese and Gazan terror groups, “mutually praise each other for ‘cooperation’ and describe each other as ‘partners.’”
That’s according to the December 2024 report “The Unholy Alliance: UNRWA, Hamas and Islamic Jihad” from UN Watch, a watchdog based in Geneva.
Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA commissioner-general, “and his colleagues knowingly allow Hamas and other terrorist groups to infiltrate UNRWA’s employee base, indoctrinate impressionable Palestinian children to pursue a path of terrorism against Israelis and Jews and install military infrastructure underneath or next to UNRWA facilities,” per the report.
The report noted that more than 10% of UNRWA’s senior educators in Gaza are members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel has that said hundreds of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gazan staff members, including teachers, are active Hamas terrorists.
The cooperation between UNRWA and terror groups involves the U.N. agency complying with the demands of the terror organizations, according to the report.
Hamas foiled the U.N. agency’s attempts to introduce biometric identification to ensure an accurate refugee count for financial aid, formulate an ethics code to protect gay rights and suspend employees for violating its neutrality, per the report.
“This secret relationship allows the terrorist organizations to significantly influence the policies and practices of a U.N. agency with 30,000 employees, and a $1.5 billion annual budget that is funded primarily by Western states,” the report states.
One of many examples that the report cites is a deal that Lazzarini made with Islamic terror groups in May 2024 at a meeting in Beirut. “UNRWA allowed Hamas leader Fathi al-Sharif to remain as principal of a major UNRWA school, and as the head of the UNRWA Teachers Union,” per the report. “For years, al-Sharif had openly glorified Hamas terrorist attacks, including on his Facebook page, and published photos of his fraternization with heads of terrorist organizations.”
“Contrary to its claims of robust neutrality mechanisms, UNRWA for years allowed al-Sharif to occupy a senior position overseeing thousands of UNRWA teachers and students,” it adds. “Only when a formal complaint was made to UNRWA by a government, in early 2024, did the agency give al-Sharif a slap on the wrist by suspending him.”
Israel killed al-Sharif on Sept. 30, 2024. “Hamas announced that indeed he had been their leader in Lebanon, and eulogized the senior UNRWA figure for his ‘Jihadi education,’” the report adds.
Another example in the report is Leni Stenseth, a former UNRWA deputy commissioner-general, going to Gaza in June 2021 “to kowtow before Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas terror chief who masterminded the Oct. 7 massacre.”
“Hamas had been angry with UNRWA after its then Gaza director Matthias Schmale, an ardent supporter of the Palestinian narrative, unwittingly admitted in a TV interview that Israeli strikes on Hamas, during the May 2021 war, were ‘very precise,’” per the report. “The interview was widely shared by supporters of Israel. Outraged, Hamas declared Schmale a persona non grata, and orchestrated mob protests to threaten him.”
“Stenseth obediently removed Schmale from his post, throwing him under the bus to appease Sinwar, and called Schmale’s interview ‘indefensible,’” the report states. “She went to visit Sinwar in Gaza to personally thank him ‘for his positivity and desire to continue cooperation in facilitating the agency’s work in the Gaza Strip.’”
The Israeli government has long criticized UNRWA’s operations in the Gaza Strip and said that they are controlled by Hamas. That criticism sharpened after Oct. 7 and revelations that UNRWA employees took part in the mass slaughter.
Israel terminated relations with UNRWA on Nov. 3, a week after the Israeli parliament voted 92 to 10 to pass legislation on Oct. 28 banning the organization’s operations in the Jewish state’s territory.
The Israel Land Authority, a governmental body, announced on Oct. 10 that it plans to turn the UNRWA field office in Jerusalem’s Ma’alot Dafna neighborhood into a complex with 1,440 housing units.
On Jan. 3, The New York Times reported that UNRWA planned to fully suspend its operations in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. UNRWA quickly denied the report, which Juliette Thom, UNRWA’s communications director, called “grossly inaccurate.”