A group of at least 20 staffers and teachers affiliated with the U.N. Rights and Works Agency (UNRWA), a Palestinian aid organization, celebrated the Hamas slaughter of Israeli civilians following its surprise invasion, a new report from UN Watch found.
Shortly after thousands of Hamas terrorists flooded across the Israeli-Gaza border on October 7, massacring, raping, and torturing civilians, UNRWA staffers and affiliated teachers took to social media to celebrate the atrocities as a justified response to Israeli aggression, UN Watch revealed in a report released Monday entitled, “UNRWA: Hate Starts Here.”
“Allah is Great, Allah is Great, reality surpasses our wildest dreams,” wrote Osama Ahmed, a UNRWA teacher in Gaza, in a characteristic Facebook post.
The report documents numerous senior-ranking members of the organization gloating about the October 7 atrocities, including Rawia Helles, the director of a training center in Khan Younis, a town in the southern Gaza Strip. Helles applauded the depraved acts of Palestinian terrorists, calling one operative a “hero” and “prince” for his actions. She was also featured in a UNRWA appeal on YouTube in October raising awareness about the organization’s work.
Mohammad Adwan, an English teacher within a UNRWA-funded institution in Rafah, justified the Hamas attack against “a people [Jews] that Europe wanted to get rid of.”
“We have owned this land for thousands of years. Our ancestors were the ones who planted its olive trees for hundreds of years until a people came that Europe wanted to get rid of, so they sent them to occupy our homes and displace our ancestors with massacres,” Adwan wrote four days after the Hamas invasion. “What we do is resistance, regaining our rights and defending our land, and what they do is called occupation and colonialism (I think the West understands this word well).”
Rafiq Kuheil, another English teacher affiliated with UNRWA, wrote, “7th, October, 2023! Sculpture the date! ❤️,” on Facebook.
The publication shared close to two dozen screenshots and translations of UNRWA employees reveling in the death of Israeli civilians. The report was released one day before the German government decided to release nearly $100 million in funding to the organization after an internal review it conducted.
In mid October, UNRWA deleted social-media posts accusing Hamas of stealing humanitarian supplies earmarked for Gazans to support its ongoing war with Israel. “@UNRWA received reports that yesterday a group of people with trucks purporting to be from the Ministry of Health of the de facto authorities in #Gaza, removed fuel and medical equipment from the Agency’s compound in #GazaCity,” the agency wrote on X without explicitly naming Hamas. “@UNRWA fuel & other types of material are kept for strictly humanitarian purposes – any other use is strongly condemned.”
Following the uncomfortable admission, UNRWA issued an “URGENT CLARIFICATION” on X, seeking to contextualize the now-deleted post. “With regards to reports on social media of looting of an UNRWA warehouse. UNRWA would like to confirm that no looting has taken place in any of its warehouses in the Gaza Strip,” the group afterward. “The images circulating on social media were of a movement of basic medical supplies from the UNRWA warehouse to health partners.”
Within hours of its initial post, UNRWA quietly deleted the message, though sources familiar with the situation confirmed to Haaretz, a left-leaning Israeli publication, that the story is accurate.
While serving as ambassador to the U.N. in 2018, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley led an effort to cut off American funding for UNRWA amid reports that school textbooks used by the agency glorified violence against Israel and parroted antisemitic theories. Haley’s concerns about UNRWA arose after poems in textbooks used by the agency were publicized showing that Palestinian students were taught about the “hobby” of dying as a martyr by killing Israeli civilians. Lesson plans also described Jews as impure and “inherently treacherous,” and accused them of sullying the Holy Land.
“Ambassador Haley’s perspective on all of this was to investigate, to get access to the textbooks that were being used in these facilities,” Carrie Filipetti, the executive director of the Vandenberg Coalition and former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations (USUN), told National Review in late October, “And it really did bear out that this was promoting hatred, violence, and terrorism.”
During various conflicts with Hamas, Israeli authorities have repeatedly highlighted the terrorist group’s exploitation of international aid. In 2016, an Israeli investigation into humanitarian resources sent to the Gaza Strip accused the terrorist outfit of stealing 95 percent of cement originally aimed at rebuilding civilian infrastructure. “From our own investigations, we found that out of every 100 sacks of cement that come into the Gaza strip [from Israel], only five or six are transferred to civilians,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry director general Dore Gold told the U.N. World Humanitarian Summit at the time. “A hundred sacks is what is necessary to rebuild a home, the rest are confiscated by Hamas and used for military purposes.”
In response to those concerns, the Trump administration cut off aid to the UNRWA. But the funding was resumed under President Biden.
Hillel Neuer, the leader of UN Watch, is expected to present the report’s findings before Congress on Wednesday. Since March, the group has found over 130 UNRWA employees were “promoting hate and violence.”