By Dr Anthony Bergin (senior fellow at Strategic Analysis Australia) and prof. Gregory Rose (research Director thinc.)
It is time to look to arrangements for the day after UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians in the Near East) is dismantled.
UNRWA is the largest aid body operating in Gaza, where it has 13,000 employees, almost all Gazans. Established on 8 December 1949, UNRWA has after three-quarters of a century become a government, welfare provider, and indulgent patron for Palestinians.
UNRWA is the only UN specialised agency in the world exclusively for a distinct group of refugees, and the only one ever not to resettle them but to endow them with intergenerational status as refuges. Its implicit objective is to maintain Palestinian refugee status in perpetuity. It has grown its refugee numbers eightfold, from 700,000 to 5.6 million people.
This is a political mandate designed to delegitimise and pressure the Jewish state. The majority of UNRWA’s $US1.6 billion annual budget promotes policies that variously support the “right of return” for Palestinians into Israel, in effect ending Israel as a Jewish state.
To operate in Gaza, which has been ruled by Hamas for almost a generation, UNRWA has been thoroughly infiltrated and utilised by Hamas. According to Israeli intelligence estimates, approximately 1.5% of UNRWA employees are terrorist operatives, 10% are associated with terror organisations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and 50% have at least one close relative associated with them.
The Israel Defence Forces now in Gaza find that UNRWA facilities there have Hamas tunnels, missile launchers, weapons or other terror infrastructure installed. UNRWA forms a part of the Hamas defence strategy of civilian shielding, which is more effective if the civilian infrastructure is UN-operated.
Moreover, UNRWA’s international Gaza leadership has had to accommodate Hamas. As Professor Gerald Steinberg at Bar-Ilan University has pointed out, the evidence is that “UNRWA international officials maintained a code of silence and cooperation with Hamas and associated terror groups, including promoting their propaganda and incitement and training of children for terror. Many UNRWA teachers have participated in antisemitic social media platforms, as documented repeatedly by UN Watch and other watchdogs.”
UNRWA teachers are particularly problematic. Western governments have requested UNRWA to remove sections from its textbooks that contain incitement to violence against Israel and that promote anti-Semitism. UNWRA has refused. The UNWRA teachers Telegram channel of 3000 subscribers celebrated the 7 October 2023 massacre of Israelis. An Israeli hostage girl related upon her release that her captor was an UNRWA teacher who held her in his house. Last week, Israel provided evidence that a dozen UNRWA staff were terrorists actively involved in the 7 October massacre, identified through their mobile phones, locations, calls, texts, video footage, or on confession in interrogation. Most of them were teachers.
It is impossible that UNRWA leaders were unaware of Hamas activities in their facilities. They have long been accused of complicity in Palestinian terrorism but dismissed these accusations as smears.
Last Friday, Philippe Lazzarini, an Italian national who is the UNRWA Commissioner-General, terminated the contracts of nine staff members and launched an investigation, to protect his organisation from further reputational damage. Is he doing vital humanitarian work, committing crimes against humanity, or both? Does humanitarian work allow systematic terrorism?
By providing Gaza with education, health, welfare and civil infrastructure, UNRWA frees Hamas’s tax funds to develop its tunnels, weapons and terrorist infrastructure. Money is fungible, of course. As Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk opined in October last year, ‘it is the UN’s responsibility to protect them [Gazan civilians]’, not Hamas’s. Funding Hamas in this indirect way, and diverting UNRWA funds directly into Hamas hands, is more than bad practice, it is criminal.
Donors have no oversight or control mechanisms for UNRWA expenditures of our tax-paid dollars. Pious warnings not to fund terrorism have no effect anywhere in reality. Channelling aid money into ISIS-controlled areas and agencies in Syria was never suggested when ISIS, at its height, was the only government there.
In light of the revelations of UNRWA participation in terrorism through its staff and facilities, temporary pauses in disbursement of funding to UNRWA has been announced by 12 countries so far, including Canada, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, UK and USA. The evidence is so credible that this pause is to continue until the allegations are addressed.
Donor governments have known for a long time that UNRWA is complicit in terrorism but could plausibly deny this, until now. Israel has called for end to UNRWA and for its replacement by an alternative aid mechanism in Gaza. Donors should support a replacement of UNRWA. Instead of a UN agency exclusively privileging Palestinians, the regular UN High Commissioner for Refugees should be engaged to serve Palestinians, the same as for all other refugees in the world.
To oversee grants of our dollars and ensure that the festering corruption that we see in UNRWA does not happen again, donor country officials could act constructively to become part of a new joint donor oversight mechanism in Gaza, separate to and independent of UN staff. If it can’t be done, then the aid should not be provided. It is simply counterproductive to fuel the fire of violence and hatred.
Perhaps, after the war, donors might also fund young Gazans to come for education and training, together with an equal number of young Israelis impacted by the violence of 7 October. While visiting, both groups might try to reach a shared understanding about a more positive peaceful future.
