UN aid agency members’ role in Hamas attack revealed

News

By Melissa Koenig

The UN aid-agency staffers who took part in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel included some who actually killed and kidnapped Israelis — with a teacher doubling as a terror commander, a damning new dossier says.

Survivors of the attacks have described how some staff members at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency were “involved in actual murder — wielding guns and killing people,” said David Bedein, of Israel’s Center for Near East Policy Research, to the UK Sun.

“People under attack recognized their attackers,” said Bedein, who told the Jewish News Syndicate that some of the staffers killed children in front of their parents during the slaughter. 

Seven of the 12 known UN employees-turned-terrorists worked by day as elementary- and high-school teachers, according to reports by outlets that obtained the Israeli dossier given to the US.

About three-quarters of the agency’s local Gaza staff are teachers.

Of those seven, two taught math, and another pair were Arabic language instructors, the Wall Street Journal reported.

One of the language teachers had a second job as a terrorist commander — and participated in the Oct. 7 massacre at  Kibbutz Be’eri,  the intelligence said.

Israeli officials said they tracked the movements of UN aid workers on the day of the attack, using phone records and phone calls — and found that six were directly involved in the terrorist wave that attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

They said at least one staffer was told by text message to bring rocket-propelled grenades he kept at his house with him, the dossier said.

A UNRWA social worker also gave out ammo, coordinated vehicles — and toted the body of a dead Israeli soldier back with him to Gaza, according to Israeli intelligence.

The staffer-terrorist was eventually killed in the conflict.

In addition, a school counselor from southern Gaza teamed up with his son to abduct a woman who became one of the more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas terrorists that day, according to the dossier.

Other findings included a math teacher/Hamas terrorist who snapped a photo of a female hostage and a UNRWA staffer who established an operations room for the Islamic Jihad the day after the massacre, the report said.

At least three UNRWA workers were warned Oct. 6 to make sure they had their weapons on them when going to an attack staging area near Gaza’s border with Israel the next day, according to the intelligence.

Nine of the 12 accused UNRWA terrorists were fired last week by the United Nations agency. They were active members of Hamas, the report said. 

A 10th person in the group was allegedly affiliated with the Islamic Jihad. That person’s status wasn’t immediately clear.

The other two terror staffers in the group have been killed since Oct. 7.

Bedein said the staff members who were fired represent just the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of the agency’s ties to terrorists.

“We’ve been researching UNRWA for years and found it’s been thoroughly infiltrated by Hamas,” he said.

The US immediately cut funding to the agency in the wake of the allegations, the State Department said — marking a significant reversal from the Biden administration’s strong support for UNRWA.

“The United States is extremely troubled by the allegations that 12 UNRWA employees may have been involved in the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel,” the department’s statement said.

Other nations including Canada, Italy, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Finland have since announced they were pausing any additional aid to the agency.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell also said the 27-member bloc is looking to “assess further steps and draw lessons based on the result of the full and comprehensive investigation.” 

Hamas has slammed Israeli “threats” against UNRWA, urging the UN and other international groups not to “cave into the threats of blackmail.”

The Palestinian Authority is also urging countries to reverse their suspension of funds, calling for “maximum support for this international organization and not stopping support and assistance to it.”

Over the weekend, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, argued, “It would be immensely irresponsible to sanction an agency and an entire community it serves because of allegations of criminal acts against some individuals, especially at a time of war, displacement and political crises in the region.

“The lives of people in Gaza depend on this support, and so does regional stability.”

Most of UNRWA’s 30,000 staffers in Gaza and the rest of the Middle East are Palestinian, the Journal noted.

Johann Soufi, a lawyer and former director of the UNRWA legal office in Gaza, also said the agency “always had a zero-tolerance policy for violence and incitement to hatred.

“Sanctioning UNRWA, which is barely keeping the entire population of Gaza alive, for the alleged responsibility of a few employees, is tantamount to collectively punishing the Gazan population, which is living in catastrophic humanitarian conditions.”