Will Israel lock out UNRWA over Oct. 7 complicity?

Like many others, Yonatan Samerano was murdered during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre and his body abducted to Gaza, where it remains to this day.

According to Israel, his killers were employees of UNRWA, the United Nations aid agency for Palestinians.

Hundreds of UNRWA workers are believed to have engaged in terrorism in recent years. Unusually, though, UNRWA social worker Faisal Ali Mussalem al Naami and a colleague were caught on film, providing evidence that’s helped focus attention on UNRWA and its well-documented, yearslong record of complicity in terrorism and incitement.

Following Oct. 7 this record has put UNRWA under unprecedented scrutiny and pressure, including through proposed Israeli legislation that experts say would make it difficult for it to even operate in Judea and Samaria, as well as complicate its work in Gaza and eastern Jerusalem.

The bill, which last week passed committee toward its first reading in the Knesset this year, would make it illegal for any Israeli official or a state entity to engage in contact with UNRWA, making it impossible to issue UNRWA staff visas. This bill would also ban UNRWA from operating in Israeli territory.

The bill is the most robust legislative move on UNRWA to date, according to Einat Wilf, a former Knesset lawmaker, Middle East analyst and expert on the refugee agency. Its passing and enforcement, she added, will be a major test for a conceptual change within the defense and political establishments following the Oct. 7 national trauma.

Ayelet Samerano, Yonatan’s mother, told JNS: “UNRWA, who kidnapped my child, should have been outlawed by Israel years ago.” She cited UNRWA employees’ long track record of glorifying terrorism and the rejection of Israel in UNRWA textbooks and schools—some of which have been used as rocket storage and launch sites by Hamas.

In August, she confronted UNRWA’s chief officer while he was giving a speech in Lausanne, Switzerland. She has also protested the candidacy of the group for the Nobel Peace Prize (which it ultimately did not get).

The onslaught of Oct. 7, 2023, in which thousands of Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 Israelis and abducted another 251, exposed new levels of complicity by multiple employees of UNRWA, the full name of which is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

According to Israel, over 450 terrorists belonging to terrorist organizations in Gaza, mainly Hamas, are also employed by UNRWA.

UNRWA’s chief officer, Philippe Lazzarini, has flatly denied these allegations.

“This is totally untrue. There is no Hamas operative in U.N. schools and U.N. warehouses,” he told the BBC in November. “If there were a Hamas operative at a U.N. school, the State of Israel would inform UNRWA. This has not been the case so there is no proof.”

In August, UNRWA admitted that nine of its employees were suspected of ties to terrorists and said it had fired them. Previously after Oct. 7, UNRWA had fired 12 employees for similar reasons. Israeli officials called this action unsatisfactory and symptomatic of the organization’s refusal to address Hamas’s penetration of its ranks.

On Sept. 29, Hamas admitted that Fatah Sharif Abu al-Amin, a chairman of UNRWA’s Teachers’ Association, was its commander in Lebanon. UNRWA suspended  Abu al-Amin in March as a teacher following reports that he was a terrorist, yet after his death denied knowing he was involved in terrorism.

UNRWA-employed Arabic teacher Yusef Zidan Suleiman al-Hawajara was recorded bragging to a friend about capturing a female hostage. (“We have female hostages, I captured one!” he said in a recording released by the IDF.)

In July, Israel’s foreign ministry published a list of names and ID numbers of 108 UNRWA employees that Israel said were also Hamas terrorists. It was a “small fraction,” a Foreign Ministry official wrote, of a much larger list including hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members who also worked for UNRWA. The wider list could not be released due to security considerations.

Following these revelations, the Israel Land Authority last week announced that it was re-zoning the land currently being used to house UNRWA’s Jerusalem complex. It will be turned into an apartment complex—an action that Israel can take because it’s not obligated by any international treaty to facilitate UNRWA’s work.

Israeli officials have also begun using harsher language regarding UNRWA than prior to Oct. 7.

Gilad Erdan, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, in August said that it was “proven that the U.N. agency is not only an accomplice of terrorism but that it also employs despicable terrorists.” He called for UNRWA’s dismantling.

UNRWA, which had a budget of about $1.1 billion in 2023, has about 30,000 employees working in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza and Judea and Samaria. It also has three offices in eastern Jerusalem, one of which is located on about nine acres of land that Israel says the group is using without permission. Last week, the Israel Land Authority allocated the land to a residential building project and issued UNRWA with a zoning and eviction notice.

UNRWA has several schools in eastern Jerusalem, with a combined student population of about 600, according to research by Yulia Malinovsky, a Knesset lawmaker from Yisrael Beiteinu’s opposition party. Her bill was merged with a similar one by Boaz Bismuth of the Likud Party.

Eighteen countries suspended funding to UNRWA following the Oct. 7 attack, including the United States, which provides roughly a third of the organization’s budget. The U.S. froze its donations to UNRWA until March 2025. Only it and New Zealand have not yet reinstated their funding.

The change in Israel’s tone on UNRWA after Oct. 7 helped focus public attention on Israel’s own relationship with the agency, whose work it facilitates in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem in multiple ways, including letting in personnel and materials through Israeli-controlled borders.

Separately, Israeli firms have won tenders and signed deals with UNRWA. At least 25 Israeli firms—including the Paz energy corporation, the Tadiran electrical appliances giant and Champion Motors—have benefitted from UNRWA’s funds in 2020-2023, receiving $60 million in revenues overall from the agency, according to research by Malinovsky that was published in Calcalist.

Ayeket Samerano repeated to JNS remarks she had previously made in Israeli media, suggesting there’s a link between the benefits some Israelis are deriving from UNRWA to its ability to avoid serious Israeli limitations on its work so far.

“When you’re pushing and pushing to achieve a no-brainer, you have to stop for a second and ask: Who benefits from the status quo?” she said. On X, Malinovsky named and shamed Israeli firms that do business with UNRWA, vowing to follow up at every quarterly report by the agency. “Despite the horrors we’ve seen, some Israeli enterprises find that money has no smell. As long as there’s profit to be made, the client doesn’t matter—so they provide services to UNRWA,” she wrote in March.

UNRWA has often been treated as an asset also by Israel’s defense establishment, for which “it’s convenient to have an address in UNRWA for day-to-day humanitarian issues,” said Wilf, reflecting a view shared by multiple observers of UNRWA, including Hillel Neuer, the founder of the U.N. Watch group.

For decades that establishment has insisted that “as bad as UNRWA may be, the alternative is worse,” Wilf added.

But Oct. 7 has proven the opposite, she said. “UNRWA simultaneously relieves Hamas of responsibility for the local population and provides a mantle of legitimacy for its terrorists, operating under UNRWA’s auspices. It’s the worst of all worlds, really,” she said.

JNS queried the National Security Council, an official arm of the Defense Ministry in charge of strategic issues. A NSC spokesperson referred JNS to the ministry’s spokesperson, who has not replied to requests for a comment on the matter.

Foreign leaders and U.N. officials have often warned over the years that a major humanitarian crisis would break out if UNRWA were prevented from administering its services, which include food, medicine and education, to millions of Palestinians.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres repeated those warnings in a letter he sent last week to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the proposed legislation, the passage of which “would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster,” he wrote.

U.N. Watch’s Neuer disputed these assertions. The services provided by UNRWA can be easily taken over by other international agencies, he said.

“The World Food Program, or UNICEF, or WHO, or UNDP are all able to give out boxes of food and other aid to millions of refugees in Sudan, in Syria, in all kinds of countries. The idea that they can’t do it in a few square kilometers in Gaza is absurd,” he argued.

The reason the United Nations insists on doing this through UNRWA, he added, is because “the whole point of UNRWA,” which was established in 1949, “is to continue the war of 1948 and to dismantle Israel.”

Through UNRWA, the United Nations employs a unique refugee definition to Palestinians. UNRWA defines as refugees not only those who fled war in 1948, but their descendants in perpetuity until a “just solution” emerges for their status. The United Nations has a different definition for all other refugees, who cannot give the title to their descendants and often lose it when they are naturalized elsewhere.

This means that the number of people defined as Palestinian refugees— about 5 million at present—grows continuously. Under UNRWA’s education system, children in five regions are taught to aspire to “return” to Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, or “Palestine” in general.

The events of Oct. 7 have refocused attention on this aspect of UNRWA, too, Neuer said, leading a growing number of Western leaders to view their countries’ donations to the agency as an undesired contribution to the perpetuation of Palestinian nationalist agenda. But UNRWA’s supposed leadership is powerless to stop it, he said.

UNRWA commissioners-general, including incumbent Lazzarini, are the organization’s titular heads only, according to Neuer. “Lazzarini is the spokesman. In reality, the leading figures at UNRWA, 99% and more, are Palestinian. And certainly in Gaza and in Lebanon, we know that they’re Hamas,” he said.