Delivering Aid
To end the Hamas threat, donors need to abandon failed policies in Gaza
(Gaza City on February 8th, 2024 [Jack Guez/AFP])
Every humanitarian crisis requires life-saving assistance. It is absolutely crucial that such aid reach the most vulnerable. There are always, almost inevitably and very rightly, debates about how to deliver aid best, while ensuring humanitarian agencies remain impartial and reach the largest number of victims. Yet one active conflict today has seen every rule in the humanitarian book broken: Gaza.
In a previous essay, we tackled the ill-timed and ill-considered decision by Canada, France, the UK and others to recognize a Palestinian state that is still run, in part, by terrorists. We gave an overview of Israel’s successful military operations, on multiple fronts, since 2023. Another essay looked at the world’s refusal to join Israel’s self-defence, even after the unprecedented Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel in 2023. We noted the hair-raising and escalating phenomenon of institutionalized Anti-Semitism at the United Nations, which stokes and sustains anti-Israeli sentiment.
As the Cold War evolved towards détente over the course of the 1970s, the main player actively orchestrating, promoting and spreading Anti-Semitic propaganda was the Soviet Union. Moscow has long been the world’s main longue durée sponsor of Anti-Semitism. Starting in the 1960s, it had been scaling up support for Palestinian and Arab extremism, including a wide range of terrorist groups.
On November 10th, 1975 – almost exactly half a century ago — Moscow had a decisive hand in the General Assembly’s adoption of resolution 3379, which declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” With the ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution, as it came to be known, the UN — which had itself established the postwar legal basis for Israel with resolution 181 adopted by the General Assembly on November 29th, 1947 — effectively branded its own creation as ‘racist’. Ever since this ugly act of hypocrisy fifty years’ ago, Anti-Semitism has been a fast-growing blight on the UN and its agencies, funds and programmes.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (better known as UNRWA) was established by resolution 302, adopted by the General Assembly on December 8th, 1948. It was left separate from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), created a year later by resolution 319 on December 3rd, 1949. The aim was to prevent integration of 750,000 Palestinian refugees into Arab host societies and safeguard a ‘right of return’ to an eventual Palestinian state. These refugees were effectively made hostages to fortune. If events had taken a different course — if Arab states and later Iran and its terrorist proxies had ended their aggression against Israel — such a Palestinian state might have been created much earlier, as envisioned by resolution 181.
But no functioning Palestinian state was ever created. Efforts to fold UNRWA back into UNHCR were made in 1951, 1961 and after the Oslo peace accords in the 1990s: all were rejected. Today UNRWA has over 30,000 employees, running over 700 schools and over 140 clinics that serve about six million Palestinians, still with no opportunity to integrate into host societies. The vast majority are stateless, which alone should give a failing grade to UNRWA and its defenders.
Instead, UNRWA has engaged in far graver forms of dereliction. Said Siam was an UNRWA teacher in Gaza from 1980 to 2003. Starting as early as 1989, he was a Hamas operative recruiting colleagues and channeling resources to Hamas cells during the first intifada (1987–1993). By the early 1990s, he was a Hamas leader in Gaza and later interior minister (2006–2009) for Hamas until he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Over the same period Hamas operatives began to store weapons in UNRWA schools, divert aid supplies for militant use and hold rallies in UNRWA compounds.
While Israel still occupied Gaza, thirteen UNRWA employees were detained for terrorism between 2000 and 2004. After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 under heavy pressure from the international community, Hamas infiltration of UNRWA sky-rocketed. By 2024, Israeli intelligence had identified 1,200 UNRWA staff as members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A 2025 database compiled by UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO founded in 1993, has identified “verifiable cases of 490 UNRWA staff who are members of terrorist groups, educators who glorify mass murder, and facilities used for the storage and launch of weapons.” The chair of the UN Watch board is former Canadian senator Linda Frum and its executive director is Canadian-born Hillel Neuer, who is from Montreal.
The level of Hamas infiltration of UNRWA has been comprehensive and appalling. For both Israel and Gaza, the consequences of this dangerous institutional rot, which went unaddressed over decades, have been beyond devastating. Israel Defence Forces have been fighting a terrorist monster that literally spent well over four decades embedding itself in the civilian fabric of Gaza, as well as in a massive relief organization funded by international donors. To understand the deadly complexity of fighting terrorists who have zero regard for civilian life — who deliberately locate the centre of gravity of the combat capabilities in the densest, most populated areas — I recommend reading urban warfare expert John Spencer.
Despite this mountain of evidence, the UN still denies there is any serious problem at UNRWA. This outrageous inaction, which amounts to acquiescence in terrorist infiltration, led Israel to ban UNRWA from operating on its territory.
In 2010, under prime minister Harper, Canada was one of the first donors to stop funding UNRWA: we were never satisfied with answers we got from senior UN officials at that time. The Trudeau government reinstated Canadian funding, which continues today. Many European donors (including Switzerland) paused their support for UNRWA, but most have resumed it. The US suspended funding in 2018, re-started it under Biden, then discontinued it again after Trump’s re-election. Sweden and the US remain the only major donors whose funding stopped.
No donor should back an agency that is riddled with terrorist operatives. Full stop. If we had ever found Taliban operatives among our thousands of UN employees in Afghanistan, there would have been hell to pay. UNRWA should be no exception. Any UN or donor official who still believes there is ‘no alternative’ to UNRWA needs to get out of the way of those who know such claims to be false.
UNRWA has not only been infiltrated by terrorists. It was not only silently complicit as Hamas, Iran and Qatar built a huge terrorist war machine all around them. They also presided over schools that literally preach hate and teach an ideology of Anti-Semitic destruction. When students in Canada, the US or Europe chant ‘globalize the intifada’ — when BBC Arabic or the BBC itself spread false stories orchestrated by terror propagandists — they are spreading Hamas hate that was normalized and propagated by UNRWA programmes over decades. Channelling aid through an agency with such grotesque flaws is not aid, but its opposite.
To bring peace, we need to challenge deeply mistaken assumptions that fuelled decades of war, extremist hate and Anti-Semitism. Donors have failed in their basic duty to hold UNRWA to account since at least the first intifada. They have failed to curb Anti-Semitism at the UN. They have failed to prevent attacks on Israel, a democracy, since its proclamation in 1947. Israelis, Palestinians and taxpayers worldwide now deserve action, at long last, to clean house at the UN, to restore the impartiality of its agencies, and to ensure aid is never again a front for terrorism or the hate-filled ideologies that sustain it.