I’ve already written at length about how corrupt the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is: it funds schools that teach hatred of Israel and Jews; many of its members are sympathetic to Hamas (and some are members of Hamas, with a dozen alleged to have engaged in the butchery of October 7); it allows some of its facilities (hospitals, health clinics and schools) to be used by Hamas (tunnels, weapons storage, areas of hospitals used for Hamas activities); and other forms of corruption.
But wait! There’s more, at least according to this new article in the Times of London.
UNRWA is unique in two ways: it’s the only UN organization that represents refugees from only one area, with all the other refugees in the world falling under the single umbrella of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Further, Palestinian refugees are considered by the UN to be not only those who fled from Israel in 1948, but also all their descendants unto eternity, said by pro-Palestinians to have retained the “right of return” to Israel. No other refugees in the world are regarded this way.
The article is by Neta Heiman Mina, an Israeli peace activist (i.e., one who advocates peace with Palestine). It documents her disillusionment after her mother was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7. Finding out who was holding the mother was one of Mina’s disillusionments, while the other is her discover of how some of the donations given to UNRWA go directly to Hamas.
After Labour was elected in the UK, the country resumed donating to UNRWA, as did many other European countries who suspended donations after confirmed revelations that some UNRWA employees participated in the butchery of October 7 and were closely allied with Hamas. (The EU itself gave UNRWA 50 million bucks.) This, I think, occasioned Mina’s article.
The U.S. still doesn’t give money to UNRWA—one indication that our moral compass is still pointed in the right direction—but that may be only temporary. At any rate, the money is back flowing into UNRWA’s hands. And Hamas has a clever way of siphoning off some of these UNRWA donations to use for terrorism.
To read, click on the headline below or find the article archived here.
Two excerpts: First, Mina’s mom’s kidnapping:
As a member of Israel’s peace movement, I have always believed that strangers can be turned into partners. That belief remains with me today. On October 7 last year, my 84-year-old mother Ditza was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. But she was taken by Hamas, an enemy that Israelis are all too familiar with, not by strangers.
I imagined her in a deep tunnel, with angry and armed young men lurching out from the shadows. But it turns out that my mother had not been held at gunpoint in Gaza by a gang of fanatical young men. After she was released in the last hostage deal, she revealed that Hamas had handed her to a middle-aged man called Abed.
Abed had kept my mother locked in a dark room of his home, with little food and no access to medication for almost two months. He told my mother that he was a teacher at a school run by UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees). A perfect stranger; instead of becoming one of this war’s better angels, Abed ended up as just another of its many demons.
It emerged that my mother was not the only hostage who had been kidnapped or held captive by UNRWA employees, but the ties between UNRWA and Hamas go much deeper than kidnappings alone.
Re the UK’s resumption of donations:
Last week, UNRWA opened its latest fundraising campaign at the United Nations in New York. Delegates from around the world signed a proclamation that the agency’s work is “indispensable” for Gaza, and many countries, including the United Kingdom, quickly committed to providing hundreds of millions more in funding.
Given all this, as well as what I’ll add in a second, it’s pretty clear that UNRWA should be disbanded and subsumed under UNHCR, with its “refugees” treated the same as other refugees. But Mina reveals something that I didn’t know: Hamas gets a cut of donations to UNRWA. It’s very clever (bolding is mine):
A just approach to rebuilding Gaza would be to give Palestinians the agency to solve their own problems. Despite the insistence in the declarations, UNRWA is only indispensable to Hamas. Beyond the weapons, rocket launchers, tunnels, dead hostages and server farms found in and underneath their facilities, and octogenarians held captive by their employees, UNRWA has been funnelling significant sums of cash straight from donors to Hamas for years.
The money laundering works like this: UNRWA insists on distributing cash aid to Gazans in US dollars, a currency they have to convert to shekels in order to use locally. In the West Bank, Jordan and other countries, UNRWA distributes cash aid in the local currency. Hamas, controlling the only licensed money changers in Gaza, charges Gazans a 10 to 20 per cent commission to convert their dollars to shekels. For more than a decade, over a billion dollars in cash from donations has been diverted into Hamas’s coffers.
In New York, diplomats and world leaders like Secretary General António Guterres only decried the delegitimisation of UNRWA as a partner to Hamas, and urged further donations with no end in sight. There was no attempt to counter the money laundering. No path to countering Hamas’s systematic desecration of UNRWA’s neutrality. No resolution to have UNRWA work to promote a sustainable peace between Palestinians and Israelis. By funding UNRWA as it is, we will only meet the same problems in the next generation.
That means that any country giving money to UNRWA—if that money is used for transactions in Palestine—is automatically giving 10-20% of that aid to Hamas. (UNRWA could stop this by giving the aid in shekels rather than dollars.)
You know what UNRWA does with the money. It goes for salaries of teachers, the purchase of goods and equipment for schools, direct payments to the “refugees” in Gaza, and of course many other transactions—from all of which Hamas gets a cut. The cut goes for buying weapons and paying Hamas members, i.e. fomenting terrorism. Although Islamic law forbids charging interest on money loaned out (they have devised clever ways of circumventing this), taking a cut of donations clearly doesn’t violate this religious dictum in spirit.
At the end, Mina mourns the fact that the very people who kidnapped her mother also teach hatred of Jews, and that her own children will be subject to this hatred in the future. She ends with a hope for peace and a change in UNRWA, but those hopes seem futile:
Gazans will need a lot of help to get back on their feet, and I continue to hope that one day we will live side by side in peace. The UK’s decision to continue to funnel much of that assistance through UNRWA is a mistake that will only help to bring about an avoidable repeat of this awful war.
h/t: Malgorzata
It’s bad enough that UNRWA is poisoning Gazan youth. It’s even worse that UNRWA operatives are holding Israeli—and possibly American and other—hostages. But it’s appalling that UNRWA is actively funneling money to Hamas. I didn’t know that before.
Thanks for the explanation of how the laundering works. Simple enough to be understandable by dimwits.
Canada is funding them too.
https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2024/05/canada-announces-65-million-in-international-assistance-funding-to-support-needs-of-palestinians.html#
UNWRA as it is defined, and therefore unsurprisingly also as it operates, is political and biased. Attempts at maintaining its neutrality, even when sincere, are pre-destined to be superficial and fail. Any alternative organization that distributes such aid would probably still employ local residents, or foreigners whose sympathies are with the local residents, resulting in an ongoing complication with vetting the employees and the recipients. Yet the countries that fund UNWRA can, and should, make more of an effort to replace UNWRA with an organization, or set of organizations, that is/are neutrally defined and is/are configured to operate neutrally. Whether there is too much aid, to the point that it is hindering the development of the economy, I defer to the experts. What is clear is that Hamas has been exploiting the aid both to finance themselves and to finance their war against Israel and everyone who has been funding UNWRA has ipso facto also indirectly co-funding HAMAS and their war against Israel.
One might expect that a Trump administration might create greater impediments to this criminal syndicate, and act to discourage other countries from donating to it. But I somewhat doubt that a Harris administration would have the inclination.
Oy! what a conundrum!