U.N. Rights and Work Agency (UNRWA), the main international Palestinian aid organization, has had a checkered history.
UNRWA teachers are routinely called out for teaching hate of Israel. According to the Jewish News Syndicate, “UNRWA teachers and schools regularly call for the murder of Jews and create institutional teaching materials that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism,” citing a recent UN Watch report.
Advertisement
It shouldn’t surprise you that the United States is the primary source of funds for UNRWA. In 2022, the U.S. gave $344 million to the agency. Nor should it surprise you that UNRWA schools, hospitals, and other facilities are being used by Hamas to attack Israel.
Donald Trump cut off funding to UNRWA in 2018. One of Biden’s first acts as president was to restore it. In fact, the Biden administration has sent more than $730 million to UNRWA since 2021.
That massive contribution has gone to an agency whose employees celebrated the October 7 massacre of 1,400 Jewish men, women, and children.
Entitled “UNRWA: Hate Starts Here,” today’s report uncovers 20 UNRWA teachers and other staff members who celebrated the October 7th Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on their social media accounts, collected by the non-governmental organization UN Watch, an independent human rights monitoring group based in Geneva.
The new cases are in addition to 133 UNRWA educators and staff who were exposed for promoting hate and violence in UN Watch’s last report, released in March 2023.
UN Watch’s Executive Director Hillel Neuer will be presenting the report on Wednesday before U.S. Congress.
Advertisement
“Allah is Great, Allah is Great, reality surpasses our wildest dreams,” wrote Osama Ahmed, a UNRWA teacher in Gaza, on Facebook. There were more than a dozen such Facebook posts from other Hamas-supporting UNRWA teachers like Mohammad Adwan, an English teacher within a UNRWA-funded institution in Rafah.
“We have owned this land for thousands of years. Our ancestors were the ones who planted its olive trees for hundreds of years until a people came that Europe wanted to get rid of, so they sent them to occupy our homes and displace our ancestors with massacres,” Adwan wrote four days after the Hamas invasion. “What we do is resistance, regaining our rights and defending our land, and what they do is called occupation and colonialism (I think the West understands this word well).”
The Israeli military says that Hamas stole “24,000 liters of fuel” from UNRWA while Gaza hospitals don’t have the fuel to keep the lights on.
“UNRWA not only teaches the hate-filled Palestinian curriculum but produces in its own extremist teaching materials,” said Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se (the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education).
Advertisement
Trump was right to cut off funding to this agency of hate. Unfortunately, his call for immediate reforms of UNRWA went unheeded. Perhaps it’s just as well. The entire, rotten, infrastructure of hate and anti-Semitism has to be torn down before anything approaching a legitimate aid agency can take UNRWA’s place.
“it won’t be enough to do just a rehabilitation of Gaza,” said one Israeli military briefer. “It must go through a process of ‘de-Nazification,’” continued the official. “This culture [of seeking to kill Jews] still exists in the Palestinian Authority.”