UNRWA and Hamas Joined at the Hip

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Sept 25, 2025

UNRWA school, southern end of Derekh Ha’ophel,Jerusalem.  Photo By rusticus80 –Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikipedia

UNRWA staff in Gazan schools, both teachers and principals, include thousands of active members of Hamas. Hamas terrorists hide themselves and their weapons in UNRWA schools without any complaint from UNRWA itself. UNRWA teachers turn classes, no matter what the subject, into occasions for brainwashing students to hate the Jews and to encourage them to pledge themselves to commit violence against the hated Israelis. More on UNRWA and Hamas, joined at the hip, can. be found in the new report by the watchdog group UN Watch here: “UNRWA ignored Hamas ties in schools, fostering terrorism – UN Watch report,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, September 22, 2025:

UNRWA turned a blind eye as Hamas terror chiefs held top positions within the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) educational system and promoted terrorism and radicalization, a scathing new report by the watchdog UN Watch has revealed.

UNRWA raises over $1 billion annually from Western states under the stated aim of educating Palestinian children with values such as peace, tolerance, and universal human rights. However, the report argued that “by knowingly employing Hamas terrorist leaders as school principals and teachers, and by allowing terror chiefs to head the unions that oversee thousands of their teachers, UNRWA didn’t just tolerate extremism, the Western-funded UN agency institutionalized it, turning classrooms into incubators of hate.”

Despite seemingly being led by an international team under Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, UN Watch found that the majority of UNRWA’s operations on the ground are led by local leaders, who, especially in Gaza and Lebanon, are Hamas members or leaders. In fact, over 99% of UNRWA’s 30,000 employees are area staff. Only 120 employees at the agency are international staff, funded by the United Nations in New York.

Of the local staff, support for Hamas is rampant. UN Watch previously revealed that a 3,000-member UNRWA staff Telegram chat group cheered the October 7 atrocities. Prior to October 7, UNRWA school principal and UNRWA Gaza Staff Union head Suhail Al-Hindi was publicly revealed to be involved with Hamas terror chiefs, but was not fired.

Similarly, in Lebanon, UNRWA management failed to fire Fateh Sharif, who had served for years simultaneously as the head of the UNRWA Lebanon Teachers’ Union and as a senior leader of Hamas in Lebanon.

As such, UN Watch claims that Hamas has “hijacked UNRWA’s education through its domination of the local UNRWA staff unions, particularly the teachers’ sectors of the unions, enabling Hamas to control UNRWA schools.”
Methods of control include, it argues, preventing the agency from de-radicalizing the curriculum, blocking efforts by UNRWA to discipline staff for inciting antisemitism and jihadi terrorism, and placing Hamas operatives in senior educator positions in schools.

Suhail Al-Hindi and UNRWA Gaza
As mentioned, Suhail al-Hindi was both a leader in Hamas and a prominent figure in UNRWA, overseeing approximately 8,000 teachers and 220,000 students.

When Al-Hindi was elected to the Hamas politburo in 2017, he was forced to resign from UNRWA. He went on to lead the Hamas “March of Return” committee, billed as “peaceful protests,” but which in fact was designed to test and study Israeli defenses in preparation for the Hamas invasion, which eventually took place on October 7.

Al-Hindi lauded October 7 as an achievement and has since served as a key Hamas spokesperson and member of the Hamas ceasefire negotiating team.

However, UN Watch notes that UNRWA had been aware of Al-Hindi’s long-standing Hamas involvement for many years prior to his eventual resignation….

Despite having officially left UNRWA, Al-Hindi has remained influential among its staff. UN Watch notes that he became head of the Gaza Professional Unions Assembly, which oversees the UNRWA Union, and therefore continued to influence decisions.

Fateh Sharif was an UNRWA school principal at the Deir Yassin school in Lebanon and head of the UNRWA Lebanon Teachers’ Union, in charge of 2,000 teachers and 39,000 students.

Simultaneously, Sharif was Hamas’s leader in Lebanon (according to the terror group itself)….

When questioned at a UN press conference in Geneva on the day Sharif was killed as to why Sharif had not been fired, Lazzarini responded that “the investigation was still ongoing” into Sharif’s Hamas ties.

What more did Philippe Lazzarini, the Director-General of UNRWA, have to know about Sharif to conclude that he was an important member of Hamas, in fact the leader of Hamas in Lebanon? Didn’t Lazzarini know of Sharif’s praise of the “knife intifada,” of his posts praising individual terrorists, of his praise, too, of the October 7 attacks, of his decade of praise on social media for the Hamas terrorists? Why was Sharif suspended from his duties at UNRWA for only three months, because of his praise of Hamas attacks, when he should have been discharged altogether?

So compromised is UNRWA in Gaza, with so many of its staff being members of Hamas, especially and so many of its school buildings having been taken over by Hamas, that it will take a great effort to rid UNRWA of its terrorists. The U.S. has already stopped all payments to UNRWA, but now it should withhold all further payments to the UN itself until that body carries out a thorough cleansing of the UNRWA personnel in Gaza, making sure that all those connected to the terror group Hamas are fired, to be replaced by Gazans — there are many desperate for work — who have no ties to Hamas.