IN THE MEDIA
The Australian Government refuses to see UNRWA’s terrorism
Oct 31, 2024 | Justin Amler
Daily Telegraph – 31 October 2024
On October 28th, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) passed legislation effectively outlawing UNRWA operations in Israel. The bills passed with an overwhelming majority of 92 to 10, including support from left-leaning opposition parties. According to the legislation, UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees) would still be able to operate in Gaza and the West Bank, but Israeli institutions and agencies would be banned from dealing with it.
This legislation comes despite international pressure being placed on Israel, including a joint statement on October 27th from Australia, France, Germany, South Korea and the United Kingdom in which they stated their “grave concern” over the legislation – which revoked the privileges and immunities of UNRWA in Israel and forbids contact between Israeli state entities and UNRWA.
The statement maintained that UNRWA provides “essential and life-saving humanitarian aid” and without it, there would be “devastating consequences.”
What these Foreign Ministers have failed to understand is that UNRWA is not really an international aid agency, but an internationally-funded Palestinian entity (99% of UNRWA staff are Palestinian) complicit in terrorism, which masquerades as an international aid organisation, and an ineffectual one at that.
The evidence is damning.
On October 24th,2024, UNRWA confirmed that one of its staffers, killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza a day earlier, had been named by Israel as a commander in Hamas’ elite Nukbha force.
The IDF said that Muhammad Abu Attawi, employed by UNRWA since July 2022, had led the killing and kidnapping of Israelis seeking shelter in a roadside bomb shelter on October 7. Sixteen Israelis were murdered in that attack and a further four kidnapped, including US citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was later executed by Hamas after almost eleven months of captivity.
UNRWA had been informed by Israel about Attawi, but took no action, saying Israel had not responded to a request for further information.
On October 1st, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, confirmed that the leader of Hamas’s Lebanon branch, Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, killed in an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon, was a principal of an UNRWA school. However, he denied knowing that el-Amin was a senior Hamas commander, only that he was allegedly “part of the local leadership”.
Further, when October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar was killed on October 16, his bodyguard had a passport identifying him a UNRWA teacher.
Finally, a major Hamas IT and intelligence bunker was located directly under UNRWA’s main Gaza headquarters in such a way that UNRWA employees working there must have been aware of it.
None of this should come as any surprise.
In January 2024, Israeli intelligence estimated that 10% of UNRWA’s Gaza workforce, equalling roughly 1,200 employees were members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Up to 50% have immediate family members who are affiliated with these groups. This was in addition to 12 employees who directly participated in the October 7 massacre, according to publicly-released evidence by Israel.
Yet aside from its terror links, UNRWA has been failing in its mandate to deliver aid to Gazans. On October 23rd, Israeli Government Spokesperson David Mencer reported that, despite claims that no aid was reaching Gaza, 600 trucks with supplies waited at the Kerem Shalom crossing, with delays due to UNRWA’s logistical shortcomings. This inability to effectively distribute aid, Mencer argued, contradicts UNRWA’s self-proclaimed role as the “humanitarian backbone” of Gaza.
There is also ample evidence that large portions of the aid UNRWA is managing in Gaza is being seized by Hamas for its own purposes.
Meanwhile, the assertion in the Foreign Ministers’ statements claiming that only UNRWA can provide needed humanitarian aid is just false. On the UN’s own campaign website “What it takes”, it boasts that since its creation, the UN Central Emergency Relief Fund (CERF) “provided more than $6 billion in life-saving assistance in more than 100 countries and territories.”
The idea that only UNRWA can do in Gaza what the CERF does routinely everywhere else is farcical. Meanwhile, with Israel committed to humanitarian aid continuing, the Israeli legislation deliberately includes a three month transition period, allowing ample time for aid provision duties to be taken over by CERF, the World Food Program and other agencies.
Australia doubled its funding to UNRWA to $20 million in 2022, and in March this year contributed another $6 million. With UNRWA’s strong links to terrorism, it’s a very real risk that a significant portion of Australia’s contribution ended up funding Hamas operations.
UNRWA is an obstacle to any peaceful future. It is the only organisation in the United Nations dedicated to a single group of people – yet the poisonous rhetoric it teaches in its schools and its continued collusion with Hamas means that unlike other aid organisations committed to helping people from around the world rebuild their future, UNRWA is dedicated to keeping the Palestinian people and their descendants in the past, mired in eternal war with Israel and wedded to perpetual victimhood.
It’s time Australia recognises that reality, as well.
