Any ‘reputational damage’ that UNRWA suffers as a result of its own rot and complicity in a terrorist regime is its own fault.

Twelve employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) participated in Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7. Hundreds more are Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives. More than a thousand others are linked to Hamas. Many of the UNRWA buildings bombed in Gaza are Hamas headquarters or hideouts, in which weapons caches and tunnel entrances have been found. Under the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza lay a “subterranean data center — complete with an electrical room, industrial battery power banks and living quarters for Hamas terrorists operating the computer server,” Israel Defense Forces discovered earlier this year, the Times of Israel reported.

So forgive me for not giving much credence to the idea that the State of Israel has engaged in a dishonest campaign to label the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) a “terrorist agency,” which could count as hate speech, as the U.N. body put it in a statement on Wednesday.

“This campaign is creating immense reputational damage to UNRWA, currently the largest humanitarian provider for people in Gaza living through an excruciating war.  These ads can put the lives of UNRWA personnel at serious risk,” the statement read. “Since the war began, 251 UNRWA team members were killed in the war in Gaza. Two thirds of the UNRWA buildings in Gaza have been hit, many directly or several times.”

UNRWA’s “reputational damage” is self-inflicted; its record speaks for itself. The agency calls the incidents of which this record consists coincidences. The twelve terrorists in its employ, two of whom were present at the southern kibbutzim in Israel when Hamas stormed into villages, and participated in the slaughter of families in their own homes, the rape of young girls in their own beds, coincidentally happened to be among the thousands of other UNRWA employees who, we’re told, do good, honest work for Palestinians in Gaza. The multiple UNRWA schools in which terrorists have hid, hidden weapons, or planted their intelligence servers, are coincidentally UNRWA property. UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters coincidentally contained an entrance to a Hamas tunnel and a data center; “UNRWA did not know what is under its headquarters in Gaza,” the agency’s head, Philippe Lazzarini, said after the IDF’s discovery.

The body of 22-year-old Yonatan Samerano, who was murdered at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 after escaping from the Nova music festival, was coincidentally seized by a Hamas terrorist and UNRWA employee, Faisal Ali Mussalem al-Naami, and driven into Gaza in an UNRWA vehicle. Samerano’s body remains in Gaza. His family announced a lawsuit against UNRWA this week, that will force the agency to “stand trial for the act of massacre and kidnapping of my son,” Samerano’s father said. Every night, Samerano’s mother has said, she “scream[s] in silence. Every morning, I cry on my way to work. Every waking moment, I think about my son, and I live like that through each day, over and over again.”

The U.N. agency has feigned ignorance since the start of the war. If it were true that the agency was bamboozled by terrorists who were so savvy that they built 700-meter-long tunnels under UNRWA headquarters and stashed guns in classrooms before any of those 30,000 good, honest UNRWA employees could notice, the world would still have to evaluate if UNRWA deserves a “good” or “bad” reputation. Israel’s media campaign persists because UNRWA gave it a reason to begin — and any “reputational damage” that UNRWA suffers as a result of its own rot and complicity in a terrorist regime is its own fault.