The United Nations has found little evidence of Hamas infiltration of UN bodies in Gaza — conveniently enough, after investigating itself.
This is a whitewash.
On Monday, the UN’s internal oversight arm released a report that found nine employees of the UN Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, took part in terrorist activities on Oct. 7 and in its aftermath.
That admission is awful enough — but the greater scandal is that investigators ignored evidence indicating that hundreds or even thousands of UNRWA employees are Hamas operatives.
The purpose of this charade is to protect UNRWA’s funding, but Congress should not be fooled.
Rather, it should permanently ban UNRWA from receiving US taxpayer dollars and impose terrorism sanctions to cut off the agency’s remaining sources of income.
Like the United Nations itself, UNRWA does not recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization.
This opens the door to pervasive infiltration in an area controlled by Hamas and dependent on local hires.
Of UNRWA’s approximately 13,000 employees in Gaza, Israeli security documents revealed that 440 are active in Hamas’ military operations, 2,000 are registered Hamas operatives, and another 7,000 have an immediate family member who is a Hamas terrorist.
In July, Israel sent the relief agency a list of 100 UNRWA employees who were active in Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad — including UNRWA teachers who participated in the massacres and held Jews hostage in their homes.
Israel has also found several UNRWA facilities being used by Hamas.
But despite the overwhelming evidence of the agency’s outright collaboration with the terrorist organization, the UN’s investigative shop chose to investigate just 19 people accused of complicity in the Oct. 7 massacre.
Of those, the UN determined that only nine may have taken part in the attack — just may — while effectively giving UNRWA a clean bill of health on terror finance at an institutional level.
UNRWA, however, is more than nine bad apples — it is rotten to the core.
UNRWA was established after Israel’s founding as a relief agency for Palestinian refugees, but in practice, it has helped perpetuate the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Today, its employees teach millions of Palestinians to internalize a false narrative that they will one day push the Jews into the Mediterranean and reclaim their land.
Multiple investigations of UNRWA schools and their staff have found widespread dissemination of antisemitism, support for terrorism and even praise of Hitler.
Oct. 7 was the logical conclusion of decades of UNRWA hate-mongering and incitement.
Averting its gaze from UNRWA’s inexcusable ties to Hamas, the Biden administration recently joined a multilateral effort to affirm the agency’s central role in Gaza, encouraging US allies to give money — even though Congress has (for now) blocked American funding.
If the Biden administration had its way, this latest UN whitewash would permit the resumption of American taxpayer support to UNRWA.
Congress must stop that from happening.
Ample evidence exists for Washington to impose terrorism sanctions on UNRWA. Secondary financial sanctions would force banks to halt transactions conducted on UNRWA’s behalf, cutting off its access to other donor funds as well.
Congress can impose such sanctions via legislation — just as it can make the funding ban on UNRWA permanent, too.
The White House, the State Department and some foreign leaders often claim that UNRWA is indispensable and irreplaceable to Palestinians’ well-being.
But that’s only true if the goal is to prop up Hamas.
If the objective is something else — like helping Palestinians fulfill their economic and political potential, free of violence and hate — alternatives exist.
Many other groups, such as the World Food Programme, operate in conflict zones around the world, providing many of the same services as UNRWA without the ideological baggage.
More importantly, international organizations are not supposed to be substitutes for good governance, and people should not be deprived of their human rights by remaining wards of the United Nations.
It’s time to end the UN’s addiction to Hamas and incitement toward Israel. It’s time to end UNRWA.
David May is a research manager at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Richard Goldberg is a senior adviser.