One report released in November by the NGO UN Watchwhich oversees the actions of the United Nations (UN), revealed that employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) celebrated and justified the attacks by the terrorist group Hamas against Israel, which took place on October 7, 2023 , which left around 1,200 dead in the Jewish State.
The report documented 20 UNRWA staff profiles in Facebook which contained incitement to hatred, violence and genocide against Jews. Among the employees exposed by the report are teachers, school principals, doctors, psychologists and UNRWA administrators working in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and Jordan.
The report showed that, shortly after the news of the massacre perpetrated by Hamas in Israel, UNRWA employees celebrated and praised the action on their social media accounts.
One of the examples cited in the document is that of Mohammed A. Adwan, an English professor at UNRWA in Gaza, who, according to the report, endorsed the massacre and incited the genocide against the Jews. The UN Watch document shows that he wrote on his social networks that “what we do is resistance, recovering our rights and defending our land”, an action that, according to UN Watch, aimed to “legitimize” all acts of terror perpetrated by the Hamas in October.
Another example shown in the document is that of Iman Hassan, director of a UNRWA school in Gaza, who justified the Hamas massacre in Israeli territory as a kind of “restoration of rights” and “reparation” of Palestinian “claims”.
In addition to showing some of the agency's members justifying Hamas' terrorist acts, the report also exposed that other UNRWA employees posted anti-Semitic content on their social media, such as Holocaust denial, conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world and glorification of terrorists who were directly involved in the October attacks that killed several Israeli civilians.
The UN Watch report was developed through the NGO's search for keywords related to UNRWA in Facebook. Using this method, the organization was able to collect all publications from these employees, which were posted openly and publicly on their respective social media accounts.
Celebrations in Telegram groups
Last Wednesday (10), UN Watch also revealed that more UNRWA employees celebrated the Hamas terrorist attacks, this time through a group on the messaging app Telegram.
In the group, which had around 3 thousand teachers linked to the UN agency, the organization pointed out that the participants “praised the murderers and rapists [do Hamas] as 'heroes'”.
UN Watch also stated that participants were sharing in this group “photos of dead or captured Israelis and calling for the execution of hostages” who were kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the October attacks.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, revealed through his account on X (formerly Twitter) that one of the participants, identified as Waseem Ula, a professor at UNRWA, asked, in messages sent in the group, for Israelis to be killed and celebrated the October attacks carried out against the Jewish State.
For Neuer, the discovery of the group was “the greatest example of incitement to jihadist terrorism by UNRWA professors”.
“All of these acts are serious violations of the UN Code of Conduct. We call on the UN and Member States to recognize that UNRWA is infested with incitements to terror,” wrote the director of UN Watch on X.
In its report released in November, UN Watch had already called on countries that help fund UNRWA to take “rigorous measures” to ensure that the agency maintains “an impartial stance and free from any incitement to prejudice or terrorism”.
Furthermore, UN Watch also called at that time for an independent investigation into the incidence of anti-Semitism and terrorism among UNRWA staff, as well as the educational materials that are provided by UNRWA.
According to André Lajst, executive president of StandWithUs Brasil, an organization that believes in education as a way to promote peace, the case is “regrettable”, but not surprising.
“UNRWA has a long history of inciting racism, prejudice and hatred, which has been highlighted continuously for some years by complaints from initiatives such as UN Watch,” he said.
“This dissemination of hateful messages against Jews and Israelis has already become systematic in Palestinian education, even being seen in the content of their schools’ textbooks. If the education children receive is always based on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, it is very difficult to imagine lasting peace in the region in the long term”, he analyzed.
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