EU the latest to pull funding for UN agency with links to Hamas

The European Union has joined the United States and a host of other countries in ceasing funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) after intelligence dossiers revealed that some 10 per cent of its staff in Gaza have links to terror organisations.

Intelligence reports reviewed by The Wall Street Journal showed that 12 UN workers in Gaza had links to the 7 October Hamas attacks which killed 1,200 Israelis. Two UN workers kidnapped Israelis while another two were traced to locations in Southern Israel where Israelis were murdered, raped, and kidnapped. 

The UNRWA was established in 1949 after the creation of the state of Israel to provide humanitarian aid for the displaced Palestinian population. The organisation is funded by foreign government donations and it currently provides humanitarian aid for almost 2 million Gazans. According to the Geneva-based NGO UN Watch, in 2022, just some of the donations the UNRWA received were: $344 million from the US, $202 million from Germany, $114 million from the European Commission, $61 million from Sweden, $34 million from Norway and $21 million from the UK. 

The reports suggest that 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A senior Israeli official said the organisation was systemically antisemitic and dangerous: “UNRWA’s problem is not just ‘a few bad apples’ involved in the October 7 massacre. The institution as a whole is a haven for Hamas’ radical ideology.”

This is not the first time UNRWA has been accused of anti-Israeli bias. More than 40 percent of schools (288) in Gaza are run by the UNRWA and their teaching material has been accused of indoctrinating children to support Islamist terrorism. The European Commission has previously identified what it called “anti-Semitic material” in school textbooks, “including even incitement to violence”. According to Natasha Hausdorff, a lawyer at UK Lawyers for Israel, three out of four of the 3,000 terrorists who committed the attacks on 7 October, would have been taught at a UNRWA school.

The intelligence reports estimate that the percentage of male UN workers in Gaza with links to Jihadi terrorist groups is higher than the wider Palestinian population. UN Watch has also published a report revealing that a Telegram group chat of over 3,000 UNRWA teachers contained messages that celebrated the 7 October attacks. 

So far, the US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and many other European countries have suspended funding for the UNRWA. Scotland, however, has insisted that while no more aid donations are planned due to a £1bn fiscal deficit, it has not suspended funding. Humza Yousaf, the Scottish first minister whose wife is Palestinian, said: “To be clear, scotgov has not paused or withdrawn aid to UNRWA. We have previously provided as much as we can within our financial constraints. We will always seek to do more where we can and urge others to continue to provide aid to the people of Gaza.”

Saudi Arabia has voiced caution on what it sees as a knee-jerk reaction to the allegations and it is calling on the Israeli government to produce fact-based evidence. Also disapproving of the funding cuts is Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner General of UNRWA. He said: “[The] UNRWA is the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival. Many are hungry as the clock is ticking towards a looming famine.”

This recent scandal shows just how integrated the militant Islamists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are in all aspects of Gazan society. Once more, their stranglehold over every part of life in the Strip betrays a total disregard for the Palestinian people who now, because of Hamas, look set to lose the little aid remaining in the enclave.

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