The Israeli Knesset on Monday, October 28, took another step towards peace by voting overwhelmingly to outlaw the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees, otherwise known as UNRWA.
The fact that the bills barring UNRWA’s operations in Israel and Israeli officials from even being in contact with UNRWA officials passed overwhelmingly, with the support of three of the largest opposition parties and over three quarters of the Knesset voting in favor compared to less than ten percent voting against, reflects the reality that is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain: UNRWA is a deeply flawed agency that has been hopelessly corrupted by Hamas, supports terrorism, and actively perpetuates and inflames the conflict against the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people in the Middle East.
For more than half a century, UNRWA’s existence has been an anomaly. Whereas every other refugee in the world is taken care of by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Palestinian Arabs are the only people to have a dedicated refugee agency all themselves. When in the 1950s the surrounding Arab nations refused to repatriate or give citizenship to those Arabs who fled during Israel’s War of Independence, UNRWA gave in completely to their demands to turn the original refugees into permanent weapons against Israel.
Unlike UNHCR, which works to ensure that refugees are resettled as quickly as possible and limits refugee status to those who actually fled from one country to another, UNRWA created a definition of refugees entirely unique to the Palestinian Arabs whereby anyone descended from someone who fled their home in 1948 becomes a refugee for eternity. And thus the ‘right of return’ was born.
Only in the bizzarre world of UNRWA can someone living in ‘Palestine’ who is born in the same home in which his grandfather was born be called a “refugee.”
Only in the bizzarre world of UNRWA can a native-born citizen of Jordan born into wealth and luxury with all the rights of Jordanian citizenship be considered a “refugee.”
The few hundred thousand actual refugees from 1948 have ballooned to a population of over five million fake “refugees” in 2024.
For a normal, humane refugee agency, the goal is to raise people out of refugee status as quickly as possible, but for UNRWA, the goal is to create a permanent population of refugees who can never become anything other than refugees as long as a Jewish State exists.
UNRWA’s very existence has fuelled the conflict and the desire to replace Israel with a hostile Arab country where Jews will be massacred, expelled, and the few remaining survivors restored to their Dhimmi status. Rather than do anything to wean the Palestinian Arabs off of international aid or prepare them for any of the responsibilities of statecraft, UNRWA has kept generations on a permanent and growing welfare system that removes the burden of responsibility for education and economy building from the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria and from Hamas in Gaza.
Hamas has long seen UNRWA as one of its most important tools in its war to destroy the Jewish people. In 2009, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, the founder of the Palestine Land Society, an organization outlawed in Israel for its ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, gave a speech in London stating as much.
“The perseverance of the Palestinians in their quest to return home is enhanced by the increasing world support and also by the work of UNRWA and its records. These records are the building block of the Return Plan,” Abu Sitta said. “UNRWA of course will be the main instrument for repatriation.”
If Abu Sitta’s genocidal radicalism was not clear enough, in January of this year he wrote a piece in Mondoweiss saying that he “could have been one” of those Hamas terrorists who invaded southern Israel to carry out the October 7 massacre.
Abu Sitta called those butchers who committed the barbaric worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust “those young people who crossed the line to return home” and praised “the determination and courage of those young people.”
This is the sort of person for whom UNRWA is an important tool and an “unsung hero.”
Since the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2006, UNRWA has worked hand in hand with those genocidal madmen, turning every school into a recruiting office for a Jew-killing death cult and hiring Hamas terrorists to fill its staff.
Nearly a decade ago, UN Watch revealed support not only for Hamas, but for Adolf Hitler among a group of dozens of UNRWA teachers. Despite multiple reports on this incitement by United Nations employees, nothing was done. Nor was anything done as UNRWA allowed Hamas to dig terror tunnels and store large quantities of weapons and explosives under its schools and to build a command center directly underneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters.
After October 7, the corruption, terrorism, and genocidal nature of UNRWA became impossible to ignore except to those who think murdering millions of Jews is not a bad thing.
Already in November 2023, it was revealed that one of the Israeli hostages was held captive in Gaza in the attic of an UNRWA teacher, and he was not the only one. In March 2024, Israel released a recording of Yusef Al Hawajara, a teacher at an UNRWA school in Deir al-Balah who participated in the October 7 massacre, telling a friend over the phone, “We have female hostages, I captured one.” He used the Arabic word Sabayya, the same word used by ISIS to describe female Yazidi slaves.
At the same time, Israel released another recording of a teacher at an UNRWA school in Khan Yunis telling a friend over the phone, “I’m inside, I’m inside with the Jews.”
In January, it was revealed that a Telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in was filled with posts celebrating the October 7 massacre minutes after the massacre began. UN Watch head Hillel Neuer called the group “the motherlode of UNRWA teachers’ incitement to Jihadi terrorism."
Also in January, UNRWA was accused of directly aiding Hamas by supplying the terrorist organization food, fuel and supplies meant for humanitarian relief in Gaza, and it was revealed that at least 12 UNRWA employees directly participated in the October 7 massacre.
The Wall Street Journal reported that at least 10% of UNRWA employees in Gaza had direct ties to terrorist organizations, meaning UNRWA was employing at least 1,200 people directly tied to Hamas and similar terrorist groups.
In April, it was found that UNRWA was continuing to teach Gazan children to destroy Israel and kill Jews. Books used by UNRWA teachers in makeshift schools set up for civilians evacuated from the combat zones taught children "to liberate" Israeli cities and to "carry the fire of the revolution from Haifa to Jaffa."
If ever anything proved that UNRWA is incapable of reform and is completely dedicated to the annihilation of Israel and its entire population, this was it.
Even when Gazans were facing the direct consequences of their genocidal onslaught, even when under the greatest scrutiny it had ever received for its role in the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, UNRWA’s employees could not help themselves from spreading more genocidal hate and teaching children to grow up to commit more October 7s, and UNRWA was still doing nothing to combat this hate.
In September, Sharif Abu al-Amin, the chairman of UNRWA's teachers' union in Lebanon, was eliminated in an airstrike in Tyre. Al-Amin, the man responsible for thousands of teachers and forty thousand students, was also a senior member of Hamas.
And this month, Mohammad Abu Itiwi, a Nukhba commander in the Al Bureij Battalion of Hamas' Central Camps Brigade and an UNRWA employee for the last two years, was eliminated in Gaza. Abu Itiwi did not merely participate in the October 7 massacre – he commanded Hamas forces in an assault on a bomb shelter where civilians who attended the Supernova music festival had fled to.
This UNRWA employee ordered his men to throw grenades into a bomb shelter where civilians were sheltering. 16 people were murdered on his orders, including Aner Shapiro who caught seven grenades and hurled them back until he was killed. Four were kidnapped from the bomb shelter, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American citizen who was brutally executed by Hamas terrorists after eleven months in captivity. Hersh’s arm was blown off by one of the grenades thrown by Abu Itiwi’s men.
The complete list of UNRWA’s evil acts and support for genocide would fill an especially long book. The evidence is overwhelming.
UNRWA is an anti-human rights organization. It is a human death organization.
Real human rights experts are calling for UNRWA to be treated as what it is. A Professor Anne Bayefsky, President of Human Rights Voices and Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights, told me recently, "October 7th and UNRWA's behavior have been a terrible wake-up call - demanding firm and immediate action to end the double-standards, discrimination and the inevitable lethal violence that has resulted - and will continue to result. The evidence is clear. So is the solution. Cut off UNRWAs political and financial support, period.”
Real peace, real human rights, cannot exist in any place where an organization as beholden to the evil of Hamas and its genocidal ambitions as UNRWA is operates. UNRWA condemns generation after generation to lifetimes controlled by hate. It bears direct responsibility for October 7 and numerous other crimes against humanity.
It is a mark of shame on the United Nations, but no surprise, that an organization as evil as UNRWA has ever been allowed to exist under its auspices. That UNRWA continues to be celebrated and defended by the UN and its despicable Secretary-General is only possible because of the antisemitic rot at the very core of the UN. A functioning UN with no tolerance for hate or crimes against humanity would have done something about UNRWA many, many years ago. There is no place for an organization like UNRWA in a real United Nations or a civilized world.
Unfortunately, even in the West, there are many moral cretins who continue to defend UNRWA such as UN Foreign Secretary David Lammy and many Biden Administration officials. Many of the officials who are now attempting to save UNRWA have also been attempting to save Hamas for many months.
Hopefully, after next week’s elections in America, the US will join Israel in working to put an end to the evil spread by UNRWA and to implement an alternative that does not create generations of eternal refugees taught nothing but to hate and kill, that does not serve as a tool for genocidal terrorists or employ murderers and kidnappers.
Ending UNRWA, that anti-peace, anti-human rights, anti-human life organization, is an important step on the road to real and lasting peace.
Gary Willig is a veteran member of Arutz Sheva's news staff.