Intelligence Reveals Details of U.N. Agency Staff’s Links to Oct. 7 Attack
Israel says it has documented deepening ties between Unrwa and Hamas since the militant group cemented its hold on Gaza in 2007. Unrwa has admitted to finding Hamas weapons stored in schools and Israel has repeatedly said Hamas tunnels run under and through Unrwa buildings as well as other civilian facilities. The former head of Unrwa’s union in Gaza was fired in 2017 after Israel found out he had been elected to Hamas’ top political leadership.Jonathan Tobin: UNRWA exists to help fight the war to eradicate Israel
The dossier is the most detailed look yet at the widespread links between the Unrwa employees and militants. It offers telling details regarding the events of Oct. 7. A math teacher belonging to Hamas was close enough to a female hostage in Gaza that he took a picture of her. Another teacher was carrying an antitank missile the night before the invasion.
One Unrwa employee set up an operations room for Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Oct. 8, the day after the attack. Three other employees, including another Arabic teacher at an Unrwa school, received a text from Hamas to arm themselves at a staging area close to the border the night before the attack. It was unclear whether they went.
A different elementary school teacher did cross into Israel and went to Reim, a district where a kibbutz, an army base and a music festival were attacked.
One of the intelligence reports seen by the Journal said a 13th Unrwa employee, who didn’t have a discernible affiliation with a terror group, also entered Israel. Hundreds of Gazan civilians flooded across the border as part of the Hamas-led attack, Israel says.
Teachers make up nearly three-quarters of Unrwa’s Gaza-based local staff. Unrwa schools, which use textbooks approved by the Palestinian Authority, have come under fire for using materials that allegedly glorify terrorists and promote hatred of Israel. Unrwa says it has taken steps to address problematic content, but a 2019 U.S. Government Accountability Office report said that measures haven’t always been implemented.
Unlike every other refugee population, the Palestinian Arabs were not resettled. They were kept in camps throughout the Middle East with the largest concentration in Gaza, which was controlled by Egypt from 1949 to 1967. They were prevented from finding new homes in Arab and Muslim countries, where they spoke the language and shared a common culture. Nor were they enabled to go elsewhere to make new lives.Brendan O'Neill: UNRWA is worse than you think
Instead, they were kept in place to wait for the day when they could “go home” to their former villages in what was now Israel. Their leaders and the rest of the Arab world opposed their resettlement, doing all they could to prevent it.
And the agency that enabled this policy to continue for generations was none other than UNRWA.
It’s important to understand that at the time when all these refugee problems arose, the United Nations created two refugee agencies. One, UNRWA, deals only with the Palestinians. The other, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (or UNHCR) has the responsibility for all of the other refugees in the world.
The UNHCR has its flaws, but its job is to help the refugees by giving them not just immediate aid in surviving being displaced by wars and other disasters but also assistance in resettling in places where it will be safe for them. Their goal is to ensure that their problems are resolved and that their children will make new lives rather than continue to live in camps.
By contrast, the UNRWA exists solely to ensure that Palestinian refugees are never resettled. That’s why almost all of the people who are called Palestinian refugees are the descendants of the people who fled the war the Arab world started in 1948. Several generations have been born in the camps but, contrary to the way other populations are treated, all are given the same status as those who were the original 1948 refugees.
Of all the tens of millions of refugees of the 1940s, the only ones whose descendants have not been resettled are the Palestinians. A humane and rational policy would have led to their being absorbed into other populations. But that’s not UNRWA’s job. It operates the ultimate welfare state in which generations are kept dependent on charity. Worse than that, its programs and policies all encourage the Palestinians to go on believing that someday Israel will cease to exist, and then they can return to where their grandparents and great-grandparents lived three-quarters of a century ago. Though it pretends to be a humanitarian force, it encourages its charges to look forward to the day when Hamas’s genocidal objective—the mass murder of Israel’s 7 million Jews—will be achieved.
Therefore, it’s little surprise that UNRWA is riddled with supporters of Hamas and that among its staff are people who take part in terrorist atrocities. And that much of the aid it receives from the world goes to help Hamas continue to function. UNRWA allows the very people its donors think they are helping to be used as human shields in a cynical hopeless war.
So, let’s not waste much time arguing about the details of UNRWA’s complicity in Oct. 7 or other acts of terror. The only discussion that needs to be held is one about its abolition and replacement by a genuine refugee agency. The world needs one that can give Palestinians new homes rather than keep them in misery awaiting another Holocaust for the Jews that they’ve been led to believe will magically solve their problems.
Most striking is the left’s attempts to downplay the seriousness of the charges against UNRWA. These people pose as ‘anti-fascists’ yet they seem alarmingly blasé about the possibility that a UN agency employed people of such an intense fascistic persuasion that they were happy to take part in an orgy of anti-Jewish murder. It’s ‘10 or 12 individuals’ from a ‘workforce of 13,000’, said LBC’s James O’Brien. This is a man who said the right-wing media’s defence of Boris Johnson during Partygate was proof that Britain is moving in a ‘fascistic direction’. It seems a handful of pro-Boris thinkpieces is fascism, but ‘10 or 12’ UN employees allegedly kidnapping and murdering Jews is not something we should overreact to.
The Guardian’s Owen Jones dismissively says these are ‘allegations against 0.04 per cent of [UNRWA’s] staff’. Is there an acceptable number of alleged Jew-killers for a UN agency to employ? If 12 isn’t a particularly big deal, how about 50? Or 100? A hundred alleged pogromists would still only be 0.77 per cent of UNRWA’s workforce – is that cool?
Mehdi Hasan speaks of ‘the alleged acts of a handful of UNRWA employees’ and slams the ‘demonisation campaign’ against UNRWA. This is the same Mehdi Hasan who once said Donald Trump’s description of lefties as ‘vermin’ was ‘right out of Hitler’s Nazi propaganda playbook’ and that Trump should ‘terrify’ us all. If a privileged member of America’s media elites can feel ‘terrified’ of Trump’s bluster, surely Jews can feel terrified of Jew-killers, even if it is ‘just’ 12. To a Jew, a ‘handful’ of murderous anti-Semites is still a terrible thing.
The speed with which the woke left went from handwringing over racists to saying, ‘Well, it’s only 12 racists’, has been mind-blowing. These are the kind of people who denounce gender-critical feminists as ‘fascist-adjacent’ if some alt-right arsehole attends one of their demos. Who will damn the entire Tory party as irretrievably Islamophobic if one of its lowly local councillors makes a joke about Muslims. Who insisted that Wayne Couzens – the London police officer who murdered Sarah Everard – was not a ‘bad apple’ but rather was symptomatic of the entire sexist, murderous rot of the Metropolitan Police. ‘Sarah Everard’s killer isn’t one bad apple – the whole police force is rotten’, cried Novara Media in 2021 – a mag whose fanboys are no doubt all over social media saying the 12 alleged Jew-killers in UNRWA were just bad apples. Funny that.
When a British cop was unveiled as a misogynistic murderer, the left cried ‘Defund the police!’. Yet when 12 employees of UNRWA were accused of taking part in a carnival of racist rape and murder they said the opposite: fund UNRWA; give it more money. In response to Britain and other nations’ suspension of donations to UNRWA, the activist class took to X to drum up support for UNRWA. They seem blissfully unaware of how horrendous, how sick, these optics are. It boils down to this: within hours of Israel saying, ‘We believe UNRWA staff participated in the mass murder of Jews’, leftists were on social media saying, ‘Give money to UNRWA’. In all my years observing the left’s abandonment of reason and Enlightenment, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as appalling as that.
Most importantly, they’re just wrong to push the ‘bad apples’ argument about UNRWA. To haughtily tweet about the tiny percentage of UNRWA staff who are alleged to have bloodied their hands on 7 October. To go around saying ‘10 or 12’ possible pogromists does not a wicked organisation make. For the truth is that UNRWA has long been morally and politically compromised. The Wall Street Journal reports on intelligence dossiers that suggest up to 10 per cent of UNRWA’s employees have links with ‘Islamist militant groups’. A study of a Telegram channel made up of 3,000 UNRWA-employed schoolteachers found thousands of messages praising Hamas’s pogrom and expressing hatred for Jews. Analysts have found that some UNRWA-run schools ‘glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonise Israelis and incite anti-Semitism’. The truth about UNRWA, as a writer for Haaretz put it, is that it is ‘riddled with Hamas’.
And yet on Saturday, Holocaust Memorial Day, we had the chilling spectacle of the West’s supposed anti-fascists rattling the tin for UNRWA. We witnessed the self-righteous woke classes helping to fundraise for an organisation that is ‘riddled’ with links to a terror outfit that was founded with the express purpose of killing Jews and destroying Israel. The very people who claim to hate racism spent a day when we remember the victims of the worst act of state racism in history drumming up support for a UN agency that is ‘riddled’ with supporters of an avowedly racist terror group. We must be nearing the nadir of woke, surely?