UNRWA Overlooks Terror Roles in Firing of 70 Staffers With Hamas Ties

On June 12, the acting chief of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Christian Saunders, terminated 70 Gaza employees with immediate effect over their ties to Hamas.Then, the agency did something that left watchdogs and governments stunned. UNRWA insisted the move was not an admission of guilt, but a decision taken “to mitigate safety and security risks” for refugees, personnel, and agency premises. The word “Hamas” did not appear in the official statement.For critics who have spent years documenting what they describe as a systematic infiltration of the United Nations’ largest humanitarian operation, the firings and the agency’s tortured explanation for them crystallized everything wrong with an institution that continues to collect hundreds of millions annually from Western governments while defending itself against mounting evidence of infiltration by terrorists.“Far from being a humanitarian actor, UNRWA has undermined the reputation of humanitarianism and the entire U.N. system,” the director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum, Michael Rubin, tells the New York Sun. “Hamas understood they could infiltrate and advance their terrorist cause shrouded in UNRWA affiliation.”So how deep does the infiltration go?What the investigation actually foundThe terminations did not come out of nowhere. The Office of Inspector General at the United States Agency for International Development, a statutorily independent law enforcement and oversight body, referred 108 subjects to the Department of State for suspension and debarment consideration, having linked them to participation in the October 7 attacks and/or Hamas affiliation.The case files read less like an audit and more like a counterterrorism dossier.Among those flagged: a deputy school principal serving as a deputy company commander in Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades; another deputy principal functioning as a squad leader for the Khan Younis Brigade’s 2nd infantry battalion; and a teacher with documented expertise as a Hamas sniper.A separate finding described a school principal whose facility housed three anti-tank positions and a tunnel shaft beneath the building, with the principal himself assigned to the chemical department of a Hamas military manufacturing unit.USAID’s Office of Inspector General has made clear that its investigation is continuing alongside a federal criminal probe into Hamas’s alleged ties to UNRWA, and that additional referrals to the Department of Justice are possible.The first known debarment of a terrorist affiliated with a UN humanitarian agency was handed down earlier this year. Hafez Mousa Mohammed Mousa, an operative of the Hamas East Jabaliya Battalion who coordinated communications with other suspected Hamas members during the October 7 attacks while serving as an UNRWA school principal, was barred from participating in any United States-funded aid organization for 10 years.A senior Trump administration official confirmed that the timing of UNRWA’s decision to terminate the staff members appeared to be a direct response to the USAID Office of Inspector General’s investigation.A drop in the oceanThe executive director of U.N. Watch, Hillel Neuer, called the firings “a drop in the ocean,” saying his organization’s research points to at least 1,500 additional Hamas members still receiving salaries from the United Nations. U.N. Watch’s own investigative work, including a terror network map identifying at least 400 persons, together with the USAID inspector general’s referrals, helped force the agency’s hand.Israeli security documents put the picture in even starker terms.“At least 440 of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees in Gaza were Hamas terrorists,” the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Asaf Romirowsky, tells the Sun. “An additional 2,000 were registered Hamas operatives, and more than 7,000 had immediate family members who are active in Hamas.”For Mr. Romirowsky, the problem did not begin on October 7.“Lies and corruption were built into UNRWA from the very beginning,” he tells the Sun. “Its unilateral redefinition of ‘refugee’ to include almost all Palestinians and their descendants always meant that it was going to be corrupted for local gain; it kept Palestinians in stasis while inculcating a perpetual victimhood mentality.”Many who welcomed the firings say the damage runs far deeper than 70 terminations.“Firing a relatively significant number of employees could only be a first, minimal step,” the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, Hans-Jakob Schindler, tells the Sun. “What would be necessary would be a large-scale, deep reform of UNRWA procedures, HR management and control systems and changes in policies to harden against future attempts of Hamas or any other terrorist group to exploit and undermine its work.”Since the October 7 massacre, Israel has alleged that some UNRWA staff took part in the assault and that over 10 percent of the agency’s employees in Gaza had ties to terror groups. Several freed hostages have also testified that they were held captive in UNRWA schools and facilities, and security footage from October 7 captured a UNRWA employee loading hostage Yonatan Samerano into a UNRWAjeep.When the IDF troops moved through UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters in February 2024, they found a Hamas tunnel network running directly beneath the building — electricity cables from the tunnel were wired straight into the compound’s own power grid.UNRWA and its supporters argue the agency’s record on the ground cannot simply be written off. The agency serves as the largest primary health care provider in Gaza, delivering services through health centers and medical points that account for roughly one in five consultations across the entire strip.A look at the 2025 numbers goes further. A single round of polio vaccinations reached more than 603,000 children under age 10; medical staff logged nearly 3.8 million consultations; and food reached more than 2.1 million people. The organization has been embedded in the daily life of Gazan society for over seven decades in ways no outside organization has ever duplicated.Pulling that out from under a civilian population already on the edge, supporters argue, is not reform. It is simply removal. UNRWA has also long maintained that it is not a police force or an intelligence service, and that running humanitarian operations inside a territory Hamas controls means navigating conditions that would compromise any aid organization — not just this one.The agency also claims it has “repeatedly asked the Israeli authorities to provide information and evidence to substantiate allegations against individual UNRWA staff members in Gaza but has received no response to date.”Israel’s Foreign Ministry has rejected that characterization as a distortion, saying extensive intelligence has been provided through multiple channels. U.N. Watch also described UNRWA’s official statement accompanying the firings as “a cynical cover-up,” arguing that Hamas membership had become simply acceptable within the agency’s ranks.An agency running out of lifelinesThe money is drying up, and so is the political cover. President Trump signed into law a 2026 defense budget that permanently bars United States financial support for UNRWA, with Congress pointing directly to the involvement of agency personnel in the October 7 massacre. That matters more than it might for any other organization. Washington was historically the agency’s single largest donor, contributing between $300 million and $400 million annually.Israel banned the agency from operating on Israeli soil in 2024, effectively strangling its ability to coordinate access into Gaza and the West Bank.What makes the current moment so striking is this: The UN General Assembly voted 151 to 10 to extend UNRWA’s mandate through June 2029, even as a United States law enforcement body was actively investigating more than 100 of its employees for terrorist activity and potential participation in a mass atrocity. The world’s governments, in other words, overwhelmingly voted to keep the agency alive at the precise moment Washington was building a criminal case against it.In April, UNRWA’s internal oversight office completed an investigation into 19 employees accused of involvement in the October 7 attacks. It terminated 12 of them — findings the agency accepted without applying the same logic to the 70 let go last week, whom it insists were fired for “safety” reasons.There are also active efforts to prevent terminated employees from simply migrating to other UN posts. Mr. Romirowsky notes that the United States inspector general has initiated a probe titled “Operation Stop the Carousel,” designed to guarantee that UNRWA employees cannot recycle and repurpose themselves to work for other UN agencies.“If Hamas-linked UNRWA employees are found, the Inspector General will report them to federal officials and potentially hand them over to the Department of Justice for criminal action,” he explains.Mr. Schindler, however, says the prospects for meaningful political reform look dim.“A deep-rooted UNRWA reform would depend on a lot of international stakeholders putting pressure on the agency,” he says. “Given the significant anti-Israel sentiment in several regions of the world, some outright bordering on antisemitism, it seems unlikely that sufficient political pressure can be mustered to achieve this.”Supporters of the agency point to that near-unanimous mandate renewal as evidence that the international community has reached its own verdict.Mr. Rubin sees it differently.“UNRWA is not salvageable,” he tells the Sun. “The only way forward is to dissolve UNRWA and hand the portfolio over to UNHCR, which has a track record of ending crises rather than perpetrating them.”A fellow for American strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, Jonathan Ruhe, agrees that the agency has passed the point of no return.“UNRWA is too far gone to put much faith in serious and effective accountability reforms,” Mr. Ruhe tells the Sun. “Palestinians deserve much better than an agency more interested in keeping the refugee issue alive than serving their needs.”

UNRWA Overlooks Terror Roles in Firing of 70 Staffers With Hamas Ties

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