How UNWRA Grooms Terrorists

by Bassam Tawil 

• By providing the residents of the Gaza Strip with various services, UNRWA exempted Hamas from its responsibilities as the governing body, such as creating a working economy that would pay for education and healthcare, and allowed it, instead, to invest resources in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons.
• "They [UNRWA] teach us that the Al-Aqsa Mosque belongs to us [Muslims], that Palestine belongs to us," said Atif Sharha, a student at an UNRWA school.
• "Yes, they teach us that the Zionists are our enemy," said Nur Taha, a third-year student from Kalandia. "We should carry out an [terror] operation against them [Zionists]."
• "The Palestinian matriculation exams [at UNRWA] have become a finishing school in extremism. It is as if the Palestinian Authority is cramming as much hate into the tests as possible, to ensure the twelve previous years of indoctrination stay with them into adulthood." — Marcus Sheff, CEO at the Institute for Cultural Peace and Tolerance in School Education, i24news.tv, July 23, 2023.
• Despite years of considerable condemnation of the textbooks, newly produced editions, approved by UNRWA, are exponentially worse....
• Whatever hopes that anyone may have held for the trustworthiness of UNRWA have long expired, and were arguably misplaced at the outset. UNRWA, in its current state, has proven itself irremediably defective, unworkable and yet another massive stain on the already scandalously stained UN.
• It is high time for the international community and those who actually want a better future for the Palestinians to liquidate UNRWA and take actions that truly help the Palestinians move forward to a golden life.

More than 50% of UNRWA's annual budget of $1.6 billion is dedicated to funding Palestinian schools. These schools have been fostering war-mongering hatred against Israel, and against Jews in general, while predictably churning out their final product: terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Pictured: A still shot from the documentary film "Camp Jihad," featuring a summer camp in Gaza sponsored and funded by UNWRA. (Image source: Nahum Bedein Center for Near East Policy Research)

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was originally a small agency mandated to provide basic humanitarian relief for Palestinians, including a vote for renewal every three years. Seventy-three years and four generations later, and with more than 30,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $1 billion, it has astonishingly become one of the largest UN agencies.

In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, UNWRA has, in fact, long been operating as the de facto government. By providing the residents of the Gaza Strip with various services, UNRWA exempted Hamas from its responsibilities as the governing body, such as creating a working economy that would pay for education and healthcare, and allowed it, instead, to invest resources in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons. If UNRWA were not there, Hamas would have been forced to fill the vacuum and, for example, build hospitals and schools and find solutions to economic hardship, including unemployment and poverty.

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