An UNRWA aid truck at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Photo: Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
A group of 3,000 teachers working in Gaza for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) — the global organization’s agency dedicated solely to the refugees and descendants of Palestinians who fled during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence — glorified and celebrated the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 pogrom across southern Israel in an internal Telegram group, according to a new investigation by UN Watch.
The Geneva-based NGO, which monitors the UN, found that on Oct. 7, when Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, massacred 1,200 people, and kidnapped 240 others as hostages to Hamas-ruled Gaza, the UNRWA teachers posted messages such as “welcome the great October” and “Allah is great, reality surpasses our wildest dreams.”
One principal, Iman Hassan, said the surprise attack was “restoring rights” of Palestinians. Other teachers called the terrorists “heroes” and said “foreign nationals should remain among the Israeli prisoners in the Gaza Strip until the siege … is lifted.”
UN Watch exposed 20 specific Gaza educators who celebrated the massacre, ranging from regular teachers to even directors of a training center.
“This is the motherlode of UNRWA teachers’ incitement to jihadi terrorism,” UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said in a statement. In a tweet accompanying the report’s release, he added that the agency was engaging in “the systematic incitement to terror.”
According to UNRWA, the agency has 702 schools with half a million students educated by nearly 20,000 teachers — including those who celebrated the Hamas attack.
Complaints that UNRWA is promoting antisemitism and terrorism are not new.
A report published in November by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), an independent research group, found that at least 14 teachers at UNRWA-run schools had praised the Oct. 7 pogrom carried out by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel.
Another UNRWA teacher was separately accused by an Israeli journalist of having held one of the hostages abducted during the onslaught, depriving him of food and medical attention. For its part, UNRWA has strongly denied that there is any basis to that claim.
The US is the largest donor to UNRWA and gave over $371 million to the organization in 2023. Former President Donald Trump cut funding to the group in 2018, a move that was ultimately reversed when current President Joe Biden took office.
UNRWA’s future role in Gaza after the Israel-Hamas war ends has been a point of discussion in the Jewish state. Hebrew media reported last month that the Israeli government has outlined plans to root out the agency completely from Gaza following the war.
Part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to endorse the idea of the Palestinian Authority governing Gaza should Hamas be wiped out is due to the education it supports via UNRWA that promotes incitement against Israel and Jews.
For example, a 2023 joint report by Impact-se and UN Watch found that UNRWA employees had created classroom material celebrating the firebombing of a Jewish bus as a “barbecue party,” encouraging students to pursue jihad and martyrdom, erasing Israel from maps, and encouraging students to “liberate the homeland” with “their blood,” among other examples of incitement to radicalism.
In its new report, UN Watch called for the immediate dismissal of the teachers it identified and the implementation of a zero-tolerance policy for any future instances of calls for incitement or glorifying terrorism.
