The United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA), employed at least 10 Hamas members, among whom were a school counselor who worked with his son to kidnap an Israeli woman and a social worker who distributed ammunition, US intelligence suggests, according to a report Monday in the New York Times.
A dossier, originating in Israeli intelligence and found credible enough by American officials to warrant action, has circulated among Western officials, the report said. The dossier charges that 12 employees of UNRWA, the UN agency that oversees a number of social services, including a majority of schools, and about 3,000 of whose 13,000 employees are still working in the Gaza Strip, actively participated in Hamas’s war with Israel.
Ten of them were described as “Hamas members,” and another is believed to be affiliated with Islamic Jihad, another terrorist group active in Gaza, according to the report.
The intelligence was reportedly gathered in part through monitoring of the employees’ cell phones by Israeli intelligence services: some discussed their involvement in the attack, according to the dossier, while three others received text messages directing them to a particular location while the attack was ongoing, and one was told to bring rocket-propelled grenades storied in his home. Another employee distributed ammunition.
In response to the intelligence, the United States has suspended aid to the agency, as have Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Finland. The US returned to being one of the organization’s largest funders in 2021 when US President Joe Biden restored $200m in funding that the Donald Trump administration had suspended in 2018.
Intelligence echoes report that UNRWA employee held abducted Israeli hostage
Some of the UN employees are believed to have participated in the deadly October 7 attack, during which thousands of terrorists from Gaza invaded Israel, killing more than 1,200 Israelis, a vast majority of whom were civilians, committing acts of rape and sexual violence against Israeli women, and kidnapping an estimated 260 people to hold hostage in Gaza.
Of those hostages, 110 have been released, almost all during a temporary ceasefire in November in which 105 Israeli civilian women and children, as well as foreign workers who were also taken hostage during the attack, were exchanged for 240 Palestinian prisoners, most of whom were detained for security offenses and many of whom were affiliated with Hamas and other terrorist groups. There are still an estimated 132 hostages held captive by Hamas or other terrorists in the Strip.
In November, one released hostage reported having been held in captivity by a UNRWA teacher, according to Israeli media. At the time, the UN agency dismissed the reports as “unsubstantiated claims.”
Following the revelation of this intelligence, the agency says that it has fired nine of the 12 employees and that two of the others are dead. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, said that he was “horrified by these accusations,” but that he “strongly appeal[s]s to the governments that have suspended their contributions to, at least, guarantee the continuity of UNRWA’s operations.”
The agency is responsible for handling much of the humanitarian aid that has flowed into the Gaza Strip since the Hamas attack on October 7 initiated the current war with Israel, as a result of which tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed— though official estimates are only available through the Hamas-governed health ministry and do not distinguish between combatants and civilians— and some 2 million have been internally displaced.
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