The tunnel yawns from the earth beneath the Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. Once, Hamas terrorists would emerge from here to commit atrocities.
For them it was just one more node in a 300-mile-long tunnel network that sprawls across subterranean Gaza devoted to a single goal: spewing terror into Israel.
Like all Hamas tunnels it is sheathed in layers of concrete bolstered by bags filled with sand.
Wedged beneath its roof, though, is one sack that stands out. Lightly coloured with blue Arabic lettering, it bears the logo of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
As an image encapsulating so much about this war, it could not be more revealing. It is also utterly unsurprising.
The tunnel yawns from the earth beneath the Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. Once, Hamas terrorists would emerge from here to commit atrocities (file image of one of the tunnels)
Yahya Sinwar, Palestinian leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, holds a child in a soldier costume, with a weapon, for the cameras
‘I was not shocked to discover this,’ said the Israel Defence Forces officer whose unit found the tunnel last month.
‘After all, we have known for years that part of Hamas’s method is to use aid for terror purposes.’
An Israeli soldier is clearly no impartial observer, but my investigation into UN agencies working in Gaza proves that these words cannot simply be dismissed.
Gaza is a 25-mile stretch of land that survives on international aid. Foreign cash is the mortar that binds the strip together. The World Health Organisation, World Food Programme, Red Cross, Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, to name just a few, all work here.
From 2014-2020, UN agencies alone spent $4.5 billion in Gaza. In 2019, the UNRWA’s budget was $1.17 billion.
That is more than the combined budget of the International Atomic Energy Agency — charged with keeping the world safe from nuclear proliferation — the International Criminal Court, and the World Trade Organization for that year.
The theft and diversion of aid to Hamas is endemic, long-standing and well-known.
Hamas took over governance of the strip in 2007 and for a while UNRWA stood up to it. In February 2009, it temporarily halted all aid shipments to Gaza after Hamas seized hundreds of tonnes of food and other aid as it came into the territory.
But that changed, and over the years there have been many instances of Hamas reportedly stealing aid without consequences. In 2019, the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, accused Hamas of diverting aid — specifically 250,000 kilograms of cattle meat — sent by Saudi Arabia for Ramadan.
The Palestinian News Agency Wafa was unequivocal: ‘Hamas is stealing the sustenance of the poor,’ it reported. ‘Everything sent to Gaza is hijacked by Hamas and sold on the black market to the benefits of the lords of [Palestinian] division and their families.’
Of the $4.5 billion of UN aid sent in from 2014-2020, over 80 per cent went to UNRWA.
The agency was founded in 1949 to assist Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed the foundation of Israel, and it is funded entirely by donations, principally from UN member states.
This picture taken on October 11, 2023 shows an aerial view of buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City
An Israeli soldier sits atop of a military vehicle, as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas continues, near the border with the central Gaza, Israel January 22
Its website reports that in 2022, the United States was the biggest donor at $343 million, followed by Germany with $202 million and the EU $114 million. The UK gave $21 million.
Of all the aid agencies, UNRWA is most vital to the effective functioning of Gaza. It is the lifeblood of the strip. This, of course, makes it uniquely vulnerable among UN agencies to the influence of Hamas.
Not least because wherever they operate, UN agencies are mandated to work with the local authorities — and in Gaza the local authorities are, of course, Hamas.
What is more, significant numbers of people who work for it are members of the terror group or supporters of it.
According to its website, UNRWA has 30,000 employees globally. ‘Most of them,’ it says, ‘are Palestinian refugees [with] a small number of international staff’.
Its website claims to employ ‘over 10,000 in the Gaza field office’. A senior source in the Israeli Defence establishment confirmed this. ‘Of the thousands of UNRWA employees in Gaza, only around 27 or 29 are international; everyone else is local. Many will be Hamas members. And those who aren’t will have friends or relatives who are.’
The truth of these words have been confirmed by former UNRWA officials. In 2004, Peter Hansen, UNRWA’s former Commissioner-General, caused outrage when in an interview, he declared. ‘Oh I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don’t see that as a crime.’
A child holds a plastic gun in front of a portrait of Huthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi during a march in solidarity with the people of Gaza in the Huthi-controlled capital Sanaa on January 5
Given the 30 per cent support of Hamas in Gaza at the time, and UNRWA’s workforce of 11,000 Palestinians, at least some Hamas sympathisers were likely to be among its employees, he later explained. The effects of all this are plain to see.
On October 17, UNRWA tweeted about Hamas’s theft of its fuel, saying it had ‘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 Gaza City’.
But it later deleted the tweet, and the subject did not arise again.
UNRWA says it does not work with Hamas, but photos and videos, on the Facebook page of the Hamas-run Rafah Governate of Police no less, show their armed security forces on aid trucks being driven into UNRWA facilities.
‘So now either it’s Stockholm syndrome where in order to do anything in Gaza they have to keep quiet about everything, or they are actively complicit,’ observes the senior Israeli defence source. ‘UNRWA benefits from UN marketing and the United Nations logo, but it operates completely differently,’ he adds.
‘It should be viewed as essentially the civil wing of Hamas.’
Whether true or not, there is no doubt UNRWA plays a leading role in helping to govern Gaza.
According to Hector Sharp, the agency’s head of field legal office: ‘Essentially, for the last few decades we have been operating a parallel government in Gaza.
‘We had an education department, a healthcare department. We were building more schools, healthcare clinics. We had projects to build roads and playgrounds.’
UNRWA’s responsibilities for schooling in Gaza are colossal — the organisation spends 58 per cent of the donations we send it on education. For many this is a cause of deep concern.
A report from the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, an Israeli non-profit organisation that monitors the content of school textbooks, found that between October 7 and November 6, at least 14 teachers and staff at UNRWA schools publicly celebrated the October 7 atrocities and other Hamas attacks on social media.
One UNRWA teacher in Gaza called Sarah Alderway posted a video clip to Facebook on the day of the massacre depicting Hamas members roaming Israeli streets with rifles while shooting at cars, alongside a Quranic verse reading: ‘We will surely come to them with soldiers that they will be powerless to encounter, and we will surely expel them in humiliation, and they will be debased.’
Flares fired by Israeli forces are seen over the sky at different parts of the city of Deir Al-Balah, Gaza as the Israeli army’s air, sea and land attacks against the Gaza Strip continue uninterruptedly on January 22
A picture taken from Rafah shows smoke billowing over Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli bombardment on January 22
In a Facebook post on October 10, Mahmoud Abu Adhm, a UNRWA employee in Gaza, encouraged Hamas to kill hostages, saying: ‘Do not walk past a captive who has not been given amnesty without striking off his neck so as to terrorise the enemy,’ citing Islamic texts that advocate harshness towards the enemy.
Another UNRWA teacher, Ranoosh Salah, published a post praising Hamas on October 7, using fire emojis and saying: ‘This is an unforgettable glorious morning.’
These might be dismissed as isolated examples — albeit numerous and unacceptable — but the truth is that the rot is often structural.
Of the 500,0000 students at school in Gaza, over half attend UNRWA-operated schools and use Palestinian Authority textbooks that regularly depict Jews as enemies of Islam, glorify martyrs who commit attacks, and promote jihad for the liberation of historic Palestine.
In September 2021, the EU Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee approved withholding €20 million in aid to UNRWA if immediate changes to its education curriculum were not made.
According to the resolution, the Parliament was ‘concerned about the hate speech and violence taught in Palestinian Authority school textbooks and used in schools by UNRWA’.
It also found that an Islamic education lesson designed for ten and 11-year-olds instructs students to discuss the ‘repeated attempts by Jews to kill the Prophet’ and then asks them to think of ‘other enemies of Islam’.
Another lesson centres on Dalal Mughrabi, a female terrorist and one of those responsible for the so-called Coastal Road massacre in 1978 that killed 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children.
‘Our Palestinian history is full of many names of martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the homeland,’ it reads, ‘including the martyr Dalal Mughrabi whose struggle took the form of defiance and heroism, which her memory is immortal in our hearts and minds’.
How can the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever end when the next generation of Palestinians are taught such lessons?
Smoke rises from Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, as seen from southern Israel, January 22
A report from the Impact Institution claims it is ‘statistically probable’ that the majority of the estimated 3,000 Hamas terrorists who committed acts on October 7 were educated in UNRWA schools, as the agency operates the majority of schools in Gaza.
The results are depressingly inevitable: a UNRWA diploma belonging to a terrorist called Amer Yaser Nazmi Sada was found in a car used in the October 7 massacres.
Of course, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza means that getting aid to the strip is unquestionably critical and the UN is vital in dispensing it.
But there seems little doubt that there are those within the organisation who tend to advocate on behalf of Hamas and ignore the atrocities the terror group perpetrated against Israel.
Take UN Women, for example, a charity that in its own words works to ensure that, among other things, ‘all women and girls live a life free of violence’.
The sexual violence on October 7, when Israeli women were beaten and raped by laughing terrorists, and the subsequent abuse of female hostages, were surely the kind of abhorrent acts it was set up to oppose.
But it was only on November 28, 2023, more than 50 days after the massacres, that UN Women posted — and then inexplicably deleted — its first condemnation of Hamas.
In fact, it took until December 2 for it to finally tweet a condemnation of attacks that it was content to leave up.
But even this was disingenuous.
An Israeli soldier stands in a room containing a sink inside a tunnel underneath Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, amid the ongoing ground operation of the Israeli army against Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in the northern Gaza Strip, November 22
The tweet itself was no condemnation at all: ‘We reiterate that all women, Israeli women, Palestinian women, as all others, are entitled to a life lived in safety and free from violence.’
It was only those very few who clicked on and actually read the linked report who finally found the words, ‘We unequivocally condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on October 7.’
I recently spoke to Tal Heinrich, a spokeswoman from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office. ‘The conduct of UN Women since October 7 has been preposterous,’ she told me.
‘It took around two months for them to start taking note of Hamas using rape as a weapon of war. And it only acted after the Israeli Mission announced that it was organising a conference on the subject.’
She continued: ‘These murdered women of October 7 were killed twice. Once when they were raped, and once when they had a bullet put in them. We will not allow them to be murdered a third time — by silence.’
UN Women is relentlessly vocal about Gaza online. Between October 7 and November 23, 2023, it tweeted 26 statements on the conflict; only three tweets — always using the pro-Palestinian hashtag #Gaza — even mentioned Israel.
It also published testimony from Palestinian women in Gaza, citing data from the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry, and calling for a ceasefire.
It has still to publish any testimony from an Israeli woman about the events of October 7, a state of affairs so contrary to its professed mission that it looks wilful.
Meanwhile, UNICEF, the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide, posted a total of 264 tweets between October 7 and November 29, 99 of which were tweets about the unquestionably heart-breaking situation of those in Gaza.
But absent was any footage relating to October 7. Astonishingly, UNICEF could not even bring itself to mention Hamas in any of its posts from that day.
For its part, the World Health Organisation, also part of the UN, did not even refer to Hamas in its initial assessment of October 7.
Smoke rises over the residential areas following the Israeli attacks on Khan Yunis, Gaza on January 22
This behaviour strays into the realms of the perverse. And make no mistake, it can be dangerous: if international agencies don’t acknowledge Hamas’s atrocities, it incentivises the terror group to commit more. The result of this is more death: of Israeli civilians, and then, when Israel responds, of yet more Palestinians.
On Friday afternoon, I spoke with Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s Director of Communications. She had just left Gaza and sounded unsurprisingly affected at witnessing the slow motion tragedy there.
She dismissed allegations of Hamas infiltration of UNRWA. ‘Every UNRWA employee goes through a vetting process,’ she told me. ‘We send the list of employees to host governments across the region — including to Israel as an occupying power.
‘We have never had a response let alone an objection of any staff.[The Israelis say the list is shared but with not enough information that it can actually be used.]
‘We can also confirm there is no diversion of UNRWA aid in Gaza,’ she added. ‘UNRWA are direct implementers. We have control of aid at every step of the delivery process, from beginning to end.’
On the subject of education and UNRWA employees reportedly celebrating the October 7 atrocities, she was clear. ‘For us at UNRWA, the education issue is not new; the agency takes it very seriously. Let me also reiterate our utter condemnation of the horrific October 7 attacks carried out by Hamas.
This handout picture released by the Israeli army on January 21, 2024 shows an underground tunnel, which Israeli forces said they found during a raid in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas
‘When we faced previous similar allegations in the past, we investigated and terminated contracts when enough evidence was found about breach of UN values and principles. We have now requested an independent review of claims of the Agency’s alleged affiliation with Hamas.’
There are many people like Touma doing vital work in UN agencies in Gaza and around the world, but when parts of these organisations fail to adequately hold Hamas to account — to say nothing of reinforcing its hold through vile educational materials throughout Gaza — these agencies end up, whether intentionally or not, becoming complicit.
And we should care about this. Because it stokes a conflict that has the potential to throw the entire world into turmoil.
We should care because it contributes to the deaths of thousands of civilians on both sides.
And finally, we should care because everything these organisations do is paid for by us.