How the UN Paved the Way to Hamas’s Jihad Against Israel
UN technocrats have blood on their hands. Here’s the story.
It was meant to be a non-partisan organization aimed at supporting the relief and development of Palestinian refugees, but it has turned into a powerful tool in the hands of a terrorist group: Hamas.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has been, over the years, aiding and abetting Hamas in its war against Israel, but despite calls for its boycott, most Western countries have never cut off its funding.
Here is the chronicle of a jihad waged against the only democratic state in the Middle East, a jihad in which the United Nations organization has been complicit for decades.
A Decades-Old Problem
The EU, the United States, and Canada are the main sponsors of the UNRWA, despite the scandals that have damaged the organization’s credibility. These scandals date back to at least 2002 when then-Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, went to bat for the organization, insisting that it didn’t “harbor terrorists in its camps.”
At the time, there were concerns about the schools run by the UNRWA being used to conceal weapons and distribute textbooks containing anti-Semitic content. The UNRWA operates 706 schools, educating just over 543,000 students, with 380 schools and around 340,000 students located in Gaza and the West Bank.
In 2007, Annan’s successor, Ban Ki-moon, didn’t show as much restraint as his predecessor when he condemned rocket attacks launched from Gaza schools run by the UNRWA. Ki-moon had even asked the organization to conduct a full investigation into the “incident”. The results of that investigation, if there was any, have never been known.
In a January 2009 article, Forbes underscored the many rocket attacks launched again from UNRWA schools. The same story was back in the headlines in 2014, but with a slight change of mood: the UNRWA itself was forced to admit that rockets hidden in one of its Gaza Strip schools had been discovered.
Years later, the problem persists.
Nothing Has Changed
In July 2022, the Israeli army shared footage of three previously unknown areas of Hamas tunnels and weapons storehouses, “including a tunnel that runs adjacent to a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees school”, as reported by Israel Today.
After the European Parliament passed an unprecedented resolution in late summer of 2022 condemning the UNRWA for teaching jihad and inciting violence, the organization’s Commissioner General, Philippe Lazzarini, acknowledged that some of the textbooks distributed in its schools contained problematic material.
Lazzarini had already made a move in June when he fired six employees who had written posts on social media in support of Hamas. According to the advocacy group UN Watch, some of these employees, like Hana Daoud, a UNRWA teacher in Jordan, and Elham Mansour, another UNRWA teacher in Lebanon, called for the “slaughter of Zionists.”
This was nothing new. A 2021 report, titled Beyond the Textbooks, had pinpointed 113 instances where UNRWA employees stationed in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan celebrated the death of Israelis. Among those employees was Nahid Sharawi, a mathematics teacher in Gaza who shared a video of Adolf Hitler with quotes that “enrich and enlighten your thoughts and minds.”
Another one, Husni Masri, who teaches in the West Bank also on behalf of the UNRWA, peddled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Jews control the world, seek to destroy Islam and are behind the creation of COVID-19.
UNRWA Facilitated the October 7, 2023 Attacks
It is safe to say that without the UNRWA, the October 7, 2023 attacks wouldn’t have been possible.
A former U.S. Congressman, Steve Israel, spent 16 years investigating programs in Palestinian schools. He discovered that these schools have turned Palestinian kids into raging warriors who reject peaceful coexistence and see Israel as evil. “I saw firsthand that a generation of Palestinian children (was) being taught at an early age to reject living peacefully with Israel”, he said. “The roots of this generation of Hamas terrorism resides in ideas fomented in Gaza’s education system for decades.”
Israel is right, especially since UN Watch has recently uncovered a Telegram channel in which 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza celebrated the Hamas massacres of October 7th minutes after they began.
A few names came out, such as Safaa Mohammad Al Najjar, from Rafah, who posted videos of Hamas’s “holy warriors” as they massacred, mutilated and raped Israelis. Another one, Moreed Abdulaziz Issa, also celebrated Hamas’s October 7 massacres: “What we did exceeded expectations”, he stated. Then there is Abdallah Mehjez, who urged Gaza civilians to serve as human shields.
Human shields? According to UN Watch, the Israeli government released a video of a Gaza civilian who said that a Hamas operative herded people into Al Shifa Hospital just as they were trying to follow IDF instructions to flee south. “I felt that we [were] human shields”, the civilian said.
Members of the UNRWA did not only glorify and celebrate Hamas, but they also directly helped it. The Epoch Times has reported that a teacher within the organization held one of the Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7 in his attic for nearly 50 days. And he was certainly not the only one.
Sources
CBC, Commentary, Eureporter, European Commission, European Jewish Press, Forbes, France 24, Government of Israel, Hillel Neuer, Israel Today, Jihad Watch, Kuwait News Agency, Maroc Diplomatique, Radio-Canada, The Epoch Times, The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, UN Watch #1, #2, #3, UNRWA
