Hillel C. Neuer
The Free Press, Jan. 29, 2024
“What we found was a chat group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers with discussions about when to expect their next UNRWA salaries mixed together with messages, photos, and videos celebrating the Hamas massacre of October 7 and other acts of terrorism.”
Many who watched the October 7 massacre likely wondered how a man’s mind can become so warped that he not only commits heinous acts of murder, rape, and mutilation, but proudly films this carnage for the world to see.
It is a complicated question. But one of the primary answers is found in the schools that mold the minds of young people in their formative years. In Gaza, the organization that does much of the molding is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. That organization pays the salaries of teachers who call for the murder of Jews.
On Friday, UNRWA said it had fired some employees accused of participating in Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel. Over the weekend, in an unprecedented rebuke of the agency, more than a dozen of its donor states, including the U.S., Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands, announced their suspension of funds to UNRWA. The latest revelations follow numerous other reported cases of UNRWA’s entanglement with Hamas terrorism.
This agency was chartered after the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Since 1950, UNRWA has provided the bulk of social services at Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, including the crucial task of teaching Palestinian children and adolescents.
But the notion that it is primarily an agency for the relief of refugees is a front. UNRWA’s main task is political. Palestinians who work for UNRWA call it “the main political witness to our cause.”
Hillel C. Neuer is the executive director of UN Watch, a nongovernmental human rights organization in Geneva. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @HillelNeuer.