Israel’s national security as well as Jewish lives in Israel and beyond are at gravest threat as employees of the United Nations, including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) are involved in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish terrorist activities by forming alliances with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PJI) while there also are information on growing communication between a section of UNRWA and other UN agencies and global terrorist outfits such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS).
Meanwhile, in a January 21, 2024 report, The Wall Street Journal, citing intelligence sources said, a dozen employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, were part of the wave of Hamas terrorists who slaughtered more than 1,200 Israelis on October 7 of last year.
According to WSJ, the intelligence reports estimated that at least 1,200 – 10 percent of the refugee agency’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist terrorist groups.
It may be mentioned here that the Trump Administration suspended US funding for UNRWA in 2018, saying the agency’s mission was fundamentally misguided. The Biden administration renewed funding to the agency in 2021 along side removing Yemeni Houthis from list of terrorist organizations.
According to intelligence report, two of the UNRWA workers helped kidnap Israelis. Two others were tracked to sites where scores of Israeli civilians were massacred. Others coordinated logistics for the assault, including procuring weapons.
“The information in the intelligence reports — based on what an official described as very sensitive signals intelligence as well as cellphone tracking data, interrogations of captured Hamas fighters and documents recovered from dead militants, among other things — were part of a briefing given by Israel to US officials that led Washington and others to suspend aid to UNRWA”, the report said.
“UNRWA’s problem is not just ‘a few bad apples’ involved in the October 7 massacre,” said a senior Israeli government official. “The institution as a whole is a haven for Hamas’s radical ideology”.
The report said 23 percent of UNRWA’s male employees had ties to Hamas, a higher percentage than the average of 15 percent for all adult males in Gaza.
UNRWA “has emerged as one of the loudest voices decrying the impact of the fierce fighting on Palestinians” in Gaza, the report said. UNRWA says at least 152 of its own staff have been killed in the conflict.
An editorial published in the Wall Street Journal said a new UN Watch report, to be discussed in Congress on January 30, shows “how a Telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza celebrated the October 7th Hamas massacre”.
The message group’s administrators, identified by name and UNRWA contract number, praised Hamas’s “holy warriors” and prayed for them to murder Israelis: “O God, tear them apart”, “kill them one by one”, “leave none of them behind”.
The intelligence reports revealed details regarding the events of October 7.
- An UNRWA math teacher belonging to Hamas took a picture of a female hostage in Gaza. Another teacher was carrying an antitank missile the night before the invasion.
- One UNRWA employee set up an operations room for Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Oct. 8, the day after the attack. Three other employees, including another Arabic teacher at an UNRWA school, received a text from Hamas to arm themselves at a staging area close to the border the night before the attack. It was unclear whether they went.
- A different elementary school teacher did cross into Israel and went to Reim, a district where a kibbutz, an army base and a music festival were attacked.
Teachers make up nearly three-quarters of UNRWA’s Gaza-based local staff. UNRWA schools, which use textbooks approved by the Palestinian Authority, have come under fire for using materials that allegedly glorify terrorists and promote hatred of Israel.
Since October 7, Hamas has stolen more than US$1 million worth of UNRWA supplies, including fuel and trucks, according to the intelligence reports.
Meanwhile, according to a credible intelligence source, members of the UN organizations in African continent in particular are maintaining secret connections with Boko Haram as well as African chapters of Al Qaeda and Islamic State while it also is reported that several key-ranking UN officials in the Middle East and African nations are also involved in transnational drug trafficking rackets operated by Afghan Taliban and Lebanese Hezbollah and small and medium-sized drug consignments are travelling from one country to another under the garb of UN materials.
