Designed to fail: What the new US report reveals about UNRWA

The USAID Office of the Inspector General (an investigative body with law enforcement powers, separate from the now-dismantled aid agency) submitted a report on Friday, June 5 to the State Department recommending that 101 current and former employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) be added to the federal blacklist. The reason: involvement in the October 7, 2023, massacre or affiliation with the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas.

They are not anonymous administrative staff. According to the dossier, those named include school principals and vice principals, teachers, security personnel, psychosocial counselors, and health professionals. One school vice principal was also a company deputy commander in al-Qassam. Another was a squad leader in the Khan Yunis Brigade. A math and computer science teacher had ties to an al-Qassam intelligence cell. A third instructor was listed as having “experience as a sniper” for Hamas. And a school vice principal served as a platoon commander in the Nuseirat battalion, with communications responsibilities on October 7 itself. Another teacher had orders to move two anti-tank missiles to a specific location during the attack. And a school principal was assigned to the chemical department of a Hamas military manufacturing unit: his school had three anti-tank positions and a tunnel shaft beneath the building.

With this latest batch, the total number of individuals referred by the investigation to the State Department for suspension or disqualification rises to 108, including the effective disqualification of Hafez Mousa Mohammed Mousa, a UNRWA school principal and operative with the Hamas battalion in East Jabaliya, who coordinated communications during the attack, making him the first employee of a humanitarian agency to be disqualified by the United States for terrorism. The agency anticipates further referrals, possible criminal cases before the Department of Justice, and warns that it is working to prevent the “re-circulation” of individuals linked to terrorism among Washington-funded aid organizations.

According to the previous report by Free Beacon, the investigation, dubbed "Operation Stop the Carousel," reportedly involves at least 1,500 individuals linked to the agency who are suspected of having ties to terrorism, and several UN agencies have allegedly attempted to obstruct it. State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott summarized the official position bluntly: it is no surprise that another hundred UNRWA employees were involved in the attack, and the administration will not give a single dollar to an agency "completely infiltrated by Hamas." In fact, it is a pattern, not an exception.

The predictable reaction will be the same as always: bad apples, isolated cases, a massive agency where a few individuals committed crimes. But it is worth dismantling that argument from the outset, because the evidence is overwhelming. As early as January 2024, Israel informed UNRWA about twelve employees allegedly involved in the events of October 7. The agency fired ten of them—because the other two were dead—before any investigation took place, precisely to avoid losing funding.

The subsequent investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services concluded that, in nine out of nineteen cases, the evidence could indicate participation in the attacks. UNRWA terminated those nine contracts. And the problem is not limited to those who took up arms on October 7. The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) documented that at least fourteen UNRWA teachers and school staff publicly celebrated the massacre on their social media accounts, and that at least one hundred of the terrorists who carried out the attack are graduates of the agency’s own education system.

UN Watch, for its part, revealed a Telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza flooded with messages celebrating the killings minutes after they began, calling the perpetrators "heroes," and demanding the execution of hostages. Its director, Hillel Neuer, described it as "the mother of all incitement" to jihadist terrorism by the agency's teachers. When teachers celebrate the massacre, principals command platoons, and schools house anti-tank positions and tunnels, we are no longer dealing with infiltrators who slipped through the checks. We are dealing with an institution permeated to its very core.

New reports confirm this deliberate permeability: if the initial count was a dozen and today the investigation covers 1,500, the exceptional is not the terrorist within UNRWA, but the employee who has nothing to do with Hamas. Why does UNRWA still exist, then? Because if it is evident that infiltration is the symptom and not the disease, it is also evident that the disease is the design.

The UN has a single agency to serve all its refugees: UNHCR. It currently serves millions of people in every conflict on the planet. Its definition of a refugee is individual and personal: someone who cannot return to their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution. The status is not inherited, and the institutional goal is explicit: to reduce the number of refugees, integrate them, resettle them, and resolve the problem. There is a single exception in the entire international system: UNRWA, an agency dedicated exclusively to a single group—the Palestinians—operating on exactly the opposite logic. It is sufficient to claim that one lived in the British Mandate between 1946 and 1948 to be a “refugee,” even if the person has been resettled for decades and built a full life in another country, and that status is inherited indefinitely, generation after generation, with no time or demographic limit.

The arithmetic consequences are staggering. Some 700,000 Arabs were displaced during the war that five armies waged against the nascent State of Israel in 1948. Today, UNRWA counts nearly six million “Palestinian refugees.” Applying the definition that applies to any other human being on Earth, the actual figure would fall below 1%: the vast majority of those registered are descendants of people who never set foot on the territory, many of them full citizens who have been integrated into their countries for two or three generations. Among the registered “refugees” are real estate magnate Mohamed Hadid and his supermodel daughters. It is the only refugee population in the world that is growing rather than shrinking. UNRWA does not manage an emergency; it perpetuates a cause.

An agency designed to ensure the problem is never resolved needs the grievance to be perpetuated. And an apparatus that employs tens of thousands of people in a territory where Hamas controls every aid distribution channel cannot help but end up captured by terrorism. The infiltration of October 7 does not contradict UNRWA’s mission; rather, it can be said to crown it.

UNRWA often defends itself by saying that the accusations are not evidence, which is why the USAID Inspector General’s report—which is preparing criminal cases—takes on special importance. When the UN’s own internal investigation ends up canceling nine contracts due to possible involvement in a massacre, the argument that “the accusations are not evidence” ceases to be a shield and becomes an admission of just how deep the problem runs. The agency does not deny having terrorists in its ranks: it disputes how many. It is a lost cause.

The Inspector General’s report accelerates a debate that was already underway in Washington: stripping UNRWA of its diplomatic immunity, exposing it to lawsuits from victims of terror, and formally designating it as a foreign terrorist organization. As a senior State Department official noted, if UNRWA were not a UN agency, it would be facing terrorism sanctions based on the investigation’s findings.

As more details come to light, one must wonder if there was a single employee not involved in this murky UN agency, including its leadership, which has played a deplorable role in covering up and justifying the agency’s actions from October 7, 2023, until the evidence crushed them under its own weight. It is also necessary to ask why the world funded for seventy-six years an agency whose raison d’être was never to resolve the issue of displacement but rather to preserve it, multiply it, and turn it into a weapon. We now know that those who educated entire generations of Gazans not only indoctrinated them and used them as human shields, but also openly commanded Hamas platoons. It seems that these terrorists did not betray their employer’s mission. They fulfilled it.