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UNRWA let Hamas control its schools, report claims
“UNRWA’s classrooms have been hijacked by Hamas and turned into incubators of hate,” according to UN Watch director Hillel Neuer.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) knowingly employed Hamas terrorist leaders as principals and teachers in Palestinian schools, “turning classrooms into incubators of hate,” according to a report published on Wednesday.
UNRWA, which raises $1 billion annually from Western countries, knew about Hamas’s grip on schools “and did nothing,” according to the report by Geneva-based NGO U.N. Watch.
“For years, governments have been writing billion-dollar checks to UNRWA believing they were investing in peace and tolerance. Our investigation reveals the shocking truth: UNRWA’s classrooms have been hijacked by Hamas and turned into incubators of hate. Donor states must confront the reality that they are financing terror by proxy,” said U.N. Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer.
The report—titled “Schools in the Grip of Terror: How UNRWA Allowed Hamas Chiefs to Control Its Education System”—largely corroborates Israeli intelligence findings that more than 15% of UNRWA’s senior educators in Gaza, in 60 UNRWA institutions, are members of the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist groups.
The report explains that UNRWA’s operations on the ground are controlled by local Palestinian leaders, and not by the handful of international staff such as Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, who serves only as the public face, fundraiser and advocate for UNRWA.
Many of these local leaders are Hamas operatives, including the thousands of UNRWA teachers and staff, especially in Gaza and Lebanon, according to the report.
It adds that of UNRWA’s 30,000 employees, more than 99% are local Palestinians; only 120 are international staff.
The report moreover stresses that this is not new.
The international body has fostered a pro-terrorism environment in Palestinian schools for over 75 years of its existence, consistently betraying its vowed mission to educate Palestinian children with values such as peace, tolerance, and universal human rights, it states.
Instead, it has “handed them over to the very operatives who recruit child soldiers, glorify suicide bombers, and preach the annihilation of a UN member state.”
Some of the most infamous Palestinian terrorists were products of the UNRWA education system, the report claims, including the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Massacre and Mohammed Deif, the now-deceased commander of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, one of the masterminds of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel.
The report provides an example of Hamas’s total control over the UNRWA-run schools. Matthias Schmale was an international staffer who headed the agency’s Gaza operation in 2021. But after making one remark expressing support for Israel in a media interview, he was expelled in the span of 10 days. Amir al-Mishal, then head of the UNRWA Gaza Staff Union, together with his predecessor and a senior Hamas official Suhail al-Hindi, were responsible for Schmale’s dismissal.
Al-Hindi, on the other hand, publicly appeared with Hamas officials for years, and UNRWA never fired him.
The late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh himself praised the Palestinian U.N.-based unions for their “role in the path of jihad.”
“These case studies show in detail how Hamas has hijacked UNRWA’s education through its domination of the local UNRWA staff unions, particularly the teachers’ sectors of the unions, enabling Hamas to control UNRWA schools—the physical facilities, teachers, and curriculum—including by preventing the agency from implementing changes to de-radicalize the curriculum, blocking efforts by UNRWA to discipline staff for inciting antisemitism and jihadi terrorism, and placing Hamas operatives in senior educator positions in schools,” said U.N. Watch.
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