Earlier this month, UN Watch released a report showing the enthusiasm among UNRWA teachers for the Oct 7 atrocities.
A Telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza is replete with posts celebrating the Hamas massacre of October 7th minutes after it began, praising the murderers and rapists as “heroes,” glorifying the “education” the terrorists received, gleefully sharing photos of dead or captured Israelis and urging the execution of hostages.
The Telegram chat group is meant to support UNRWA teachers, and contains dozens of files with UNRWA staff names, ID numbers, schedules and curriculum materials.
In addition, UNRWA teachers regularly share videos, photos and messages inciting to Jihadi terrorism, and openly celebrating the Hamas massacre and rape of civilians.
Now, the Biden administration and a number of other countries are pausing UNRWA funding after employees of the UN agency were tied to the Oct 7 attacks.
The United States and a number of other countries have suspended funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency over accusations that a number of its employees took part in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre.
United Nations Secretary Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Sunday that out of the 12 UNRWA employees implicated, nine had been terminated, one was dead and the identities of the other two were being clarified.
UNRWA fired the 12 employees after Israel provided intelligence regarding their complicity.
In the wake of the accusations and dismissals, the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, Italy, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Scotland suspended their funding to the U.N. agency.
UNRWA has in the past made little secret of the fact that it employs Hamas members and has refused to fire them.
Back in 2014, I wrote a little article titled simply, “Defund UNRWA”.
The UNRWA’s Gaza staff has its own union. In the 2012 election, a pro-Hamas bloc won the support of most of the union with 25 out of 27 seats on a union board.
“I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll,” a former UNRWA Commissioner General said, “and I don’t see that as a crime.”
“Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant, and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another,” he added.
When there was talk of reforming the UNRWA by removing Hamas members from its ranks, the editor of a Hamas paper wrote that, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance,’ in its various forms.”
“They are all members of the ‘resistance,’ in its various forms.”
Hamas and UNRWA leadership have occasionally clashed, but the bottom line is that it’s impossible for UNRWA to operate without ceding control to Hamas, without employing Hamas members and without allowing them to control day-to-day operations.
There are no surprises here. Only a deliberate blindness to what was going on.