A new report says that 13 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is responsible for Palestinian refugees, praised the Hamas terror attack of October 7, in which more than 1,200 people were murdered in Israel.
U.S. President Donald Trump ended funding to the agency in 2018 over concern that it supported terrorism. But President Joe Biden restored the funding. The U.S. is the single largest donor to the agency, which is separate from other UN refugee agencies.
A report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), a non-governmental organization (NGO), says that UNRWA played a role in promoting and celebrating the deadly October 7 terror attack:
The first section of the report details how 13 UNRWA staff members have publicly praised, celebrated or expressed their support for the unprecedented deadly assaults on civilians on 7 October. In the short time since the horrific massacre of around 1,200 Israelis, mainly civilians, IMPACT-se has used open source material to analyze the social media activity of UNRWA staff and schools. This analysis has also uncovered how an UNRWA school in the West Bank city of Nablus held a rally for its students, during which a young boy supplicates God to support the Jihad warriors in Gaza against Israel, to which the students respond with affirmation.
The second section of the study documents the profiles of 18 Hamas terrorists who graduated from UNRWA schools, using material from the Hamas website which confirms that they died carrying out acts of terror. This research indicates that by Hamas’ own admission more than 100 UNRWA graduates have become active Hamas terrorists.
The third and final section of the report highlights select examples of educational material distributed to students in UNRWA schools, which either harness antisemitism or encourage martyrdom or violent jihad. This section also includes examples from Palestinian Authority teacher guides that accompany the textbooks used in UNRWA schools. These examples include geography and history resources, language comprehension exercises, science and math problems. An unmistakable strand of hatred and incitement traverses these diverse teaching materials.
The report emphasizes that the pro-terror influence within UNRWA is probably larger than researchers have been able to document.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect a revised number on the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel. The Israeli government estimate of 1,400 was revised to around 1,200, according to Reuters.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.