How the United Nations’ refugee agency in Gaza fell under the spell of Hamas
Involvement of UNWRA staff in the Oct 7 massacre has shone a spotlight on its pro-Palestinian sympathies
You don’t need to look far for links between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and Hamas. On the day of the Oct 7 massacre, Sara al-Dirawi, an UNRWA teacher in Gaza, took to Facebook to publish a video clip of Hamas fighters shooting up Israeli cars. She added a verse from the Quran, suggesting the terrorists were on a mission from God: “For we will surely come to them with soldiers that they will be powerless to encounter, and we will surely expel them therefrom in humiliation, and they will be debased.”
This is not an isolated example. Ever since Hamas was elected to power in Gaza in 2006, the UN agency has been forced to work cheek by jowl with the terrorist group. As such, says Israel, a “mutual dependence” has grown up between them.
“The rule of the terrorist organisation over the Gaza Strip forces UNRWA to act under the authorization and supervision of Hamas in a way that extends Hamas’s influence over the agency,” an Israeli official told
The Telegraph.
This dynamic is evident in Hamas’s most senior appointments. For example, Suhail al-Hindi, who was elected to the Hamas Politburo in 2017 to sit alongside Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza and the author of the Oct 7 attack, was a headmaster at an UNRWA school and chairman of the UNRWA Gaza workers’ union.
Hamas’s economy minister Jawad Abu Shamala, killed just three days after the Oct 7 massacre in an Israeli air strike, had a similar pedigree. He “earmarked the funds for financing and directing terrorism inside and outside the Gaza Strip”, says the IDF, but previously worked as a teacher at an UNRWA school in Khan Yunis.
Political support is one thing, direct involvement in terrorism another.
Ten days ago, UNRWA’s leadership in Jordan announced that Israel had provided it with evidence that agency staff had been involved in the Oct 7 massacre.
According to a briefing given to The Telegraph by a senior Israeli official, Israeli intelligence has established that at least 13 UNRWA employees are “associated with the infiltration attack”.
Of those, 10 were Hamas operatives and two belonged to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said the official. A total of six UNRWA employees “infiltrated into Israel as part of the attack”, and four were “involved in kidnapping Israelis”, two of which also infiltrated Israeli territory.
“Three additional UNRWA employees were invited via SMS texts to arrive at an assembly area the night before the attacks on Oct 6th and they were directed to equip with weapons, but it was not confirmed that they arrived at that point,” added the official. “At least one UNWRA employee was asked to supply logistic support … and an additional employee was directed to establish an operations room on Oct 8th”.
UNRWA has sacked all the workers named by Israel but many of the organisation’s biggest funders, led by the US, have since paused financial support, threatening its ability to continue operating in the region.
“The UK is appalled by allegations UNRWA staff were involved in the Oct 7 attack, a heinous act of terrorism that the UK government has repeatedly condemned,” a spokesman said.
Israel’s relationship with UNRWA has always been complex. It was established in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 to look after Palestinians (and, initially, some Jews) uprooted in the conflict.
On the one hand, it helps Israel by looking after a displaced population it would otherwise be responsible for. But it has also, in the eyes of many Israelis, prolonged the conflict because the support it provides sustains the Palestinian population in the region.
It also delivers. Literacy rates in Gaza are high at over 97 per cent, for example. Unlike other UN bodies which provide emergency assistance, UNRWA operates as a quasi-state body delivering everything from education, healthcare, social services to infrastructure and microfinance.
When the agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5.9 million are eligible for UNRWA services. The population has grown because, under international law, the children of refugees and their descendants are considered refugees until a new home is found.
Israel is now pushing for UNRWA to be disbanded and replaced with another UN agency or NGO. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week accused it of providing “false” information to the international court considering genocide charges against Israel. “Many of the charges, false and unfounded, that were levelled against us in The Hague were brought by UNRWA officials,” Netanyahu told visiting ambassadors.
Supporters of UNRWA, which has 13,000 staff in Gaza, say it had no option but to work with Hamas as Hamas is the elected government in Gaza. They point out that Israel itself co-operated with the terrorist organisation, freeing Sinwar from prison to lead it and enabling millions of dollars to flow into the enclave.
In March 2019, Netanyahu told his Likud colleagues: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
But UNRWA accepts it has a neutrality problem. Getting staff to put aside their sympathies with the Palestinian cause “has been an issue in some ways or another since UNRWA’s establishment,” a former long-serving staffer told The Telegraph this week.
There is also an acknowledgment that UNRWA lacks capacity to vet staff. “The agency would need half a dozen international staff to do systematic screening of prospective candidates,” said the former official. “I know they are thinking of that and it may well be that the US or UK perhaps may make earmarked funding available.”
‘The rule of the terrorist organisation over Gaza forces UNRWA to act under Hamas’s supervision’