Watchdog groups long warned about UN agency in Gaza

The primary United Nations relief agency working in the Gaza Strip is facing a crisis of confidence after Israel in recent days accused a dozen of its employees of participating in the Hamas terror attacks of Oct. 7.

As of Monday morning, more than 10 nations—including top donors the United States and Germany—have suspended funding to the UN agency, known as UNRWA, or the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, pending further investigation of employees’ conduct. UNRWA employs around 13,000 people in Gaza, mostly Palestinians.

The development renews scrutiny of an agency that critics have long accused of harboring employees with ties to terror. The United States paused funding to the agency in 2018 under the Trump administration, which called UNRWA “irredeemably flawed.”

An Israeli intelligence dossier claims 12 employees were directly involved in the Oct. 7 attacks, including a UNRWA school counselor who helped his son abduct an Israeli woman, a social worker who coordinated trucks and weapons, and several other employees who joined rampages on Israeli border towns. The dossier also alleges that an additional 190 UNRWA employees, including teachers, are Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants—and that nearly 10 percent of all UNRWA employees in Gaza have ties to terror organizations.

UNRWA announced Friday it was investigating the allegations. According to the UN, one of the employees accused of being directly involved in the attacks is dead, the identities of two are still being verified, and UNRWA has fired the other nine.

Dina Rovner, legal adviser for UN Watch, a nonprofit that monitors the United Nations, doesn’t trust UNRWA to carry out its own investigation of its employees. She said UNRWA previously ignored over 100 UN Watch reports on alleged anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist statements by its staff. Rovner said in an email that “the participation of UNRWA staff in the October 7th atrocities is very likely not limited to the 12 staff identified by Israel.”

UN Watch plans to make that case before U.S. members of Congress at a House hearing scheduled for Tuesday.

“Donors must demand an independent external investigation here,” Rovner said.

Asked about the allegations against UNRWA employees, Bill Deere, director of the agency’s Washington, D.C., office, referred to U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby’s comments at a Friday press briefing. Kirby said the allegations of UNRWA employees’ involvement in terror attacks gave the United States “cause to be concerned” but should not “impugn the entire agency” and its lifesaving humanitarian work.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Gaza depend on UNRWA for basic needs, including food and education. The United Nations founded UNRWA in 1949 to address the needs of 700,000 Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The number of refugees UNRWA serves, including the original refugees’ descendants, has now ballooned to about 5.9 million in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. UNRWA’s Palestinian employees include teachers, supply movers, and relief workers. According to the agency, 152 of its employees have so far died in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

About 90 percent of the agency’s funding comes from voluntary governmental donations. Following the Trump administration’s defunding of UNRWA, the Biden administration resumed U.S. donations in 2021. In 2022, the United States gave the agency $344 million.

On Sunday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres promised a thorough investigation of the latest claims. “Any U.N. employee involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution,” he said in a statement. Though Guterres said he was “horrified” by the “abhorrent alleged acts” UNRWA employees committed, he urged countries to resume funding the organization to ensure the flow of vital humanitarian aid amid the war in Gaza.

The new allegations against UNRWA employees came just two weeks after a report from UN Watch claimed the agency’s teachers had posted messages celebrating the Oct. 7 attacks in a Telegram channel. UN Watch said the 3,000-member chat, called “UNRWA Gaza Daily Vacancies,” was started by UNRWA employees to disseminate information about short-term teaching jobs. The chat contained official documents, employee lists, contracts, and training materials.

Minutes after the attacks began, the chat filled with messages celebrating the terrorists’ actions. UN Watch said it matched many of the messages to UNRWA employee names and ID numbers. According to the watchdog group, one account, which appeared to be owned by teacher Waseem Ula, posted a photo of a suicide bomb vest wired with explosives, captioned: “Wait, sons of Judaism.”

Deere, the UNRWA representative, said the UN Watch report was inaccurate and overhyped. He said the Telegram chat group was unofficial.

“Anyone can join [the Telegram chat], using any name, using any alias,” Deere said. “It’s almost impossible to discover who the real identities of these people are.” Deere added that UNRWA is conducting an internal investigation of any real employee names and ID numbers found in the group.

Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch said the UN Watch allegations are unsurprising since UNRWA hires Palestinian employees. He pointed to a recent poll from the Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research that showed 72 percent of Palestinians supported the Oct. 7 attacks. “You expect the UNRWA people to be different. Of course, they’re not going to be different,” he said.

UN Watch and other watchdog groups have raised concerns over UNRWA for years, saying the agency’s employees have published social media posts supporting terrorism and that UNRWA-approved teaching materials have promoted anti-Semitism. Former ambassador Alberto Fernandez, vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute, said UNRWA’s oft-touted accountability and neutrality measures aren’t sufficient to keep the organization free of ties to terror.

“I don’t think there is any way that UNRWA cannot be contaminated by having to work under politicized Palestinian rule, whether Hamas or the [Palestinian Authority],” Fernandez said. The Palestinian Authority governed Gaza until 2007, when it was ousted by Hamas.