UNRWA meanwhile provides for many of the Palestinians’ needs and is primarily staffed by people sympathetic to their cause who have allowed UN facilities to be used by terrorists and looked the other way while Palestinians have victimized each other and attacked Israelis. Reuters reported, for example, that “by day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad” (Reuters, May 5, 2008). Some UNRWA employees have also had prominent roles with Hamas, such as teacher Saeed Seyam, who was interior minister in the Hamas-led government.
“UN schools in Gaza long ago stopped being just schools,” Public Security Minister and former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter noted in a report on how Hamas was also using hospitals as bases. “All these services and places are refuge for Hamas terrorists and commanders” (Jerusalem Post, January 12, 2009).
In 2004, Peter Hansen, commissioner-general of UNRWA admitted that the organization employed members of Hamas. “Oh I’m sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don’t see that as a crime,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (October 4, 2004). “Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion against another.” Although Hansen made specious distinctions between members of Hamas, the United States and the European Union, the two largest contributors to UNRWA, banned the military and civilian wings of the organization.
That same year, an Israeli television station aired footage of armed Arab terrorists in southern Gaza using an ambulance owned and operated by UNRWA. Palestinian gunmen used the UNRWA emergency vehicle as getaway transportation after murdering six Israeli soldiers in Gaza City on May 11, 2004.
In a 2002 report, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) reported how “buildings and warehouses under UNRWA supervision are allegedly being used as storage areas for Palestinian ammunition and counterfeit currency factories.” Cantor’s 2002 report also noted that UNRWA hosts summer camps in martyrdom for young terrorists-in-training. What is happening in Gaza now also should come as no surprise given Cantor’s finding that “while UNRWA claims to be a humanitarian organization, it allows terrorist organizations in Jenin to use local civilians as human shields. While terrorists launch attacks against the Israeli army out of occupied houses and apartment buildings, UNRWA turns its head” (Task Force on Terrorism & Unconventional Warfare, May 22, 2002).
Palestinian refugee camps have long been nests of terrorism, but the evidence was not publicized until after Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield in early 2002. The UNRWA-administered camps in the West Bank were found to have small-arms factories, explosives laboratories, arms caches and large numbers of suicide bombers and other terrorists using the refugees as shields. Here are two specific examples of UNRWA employees helping terrorists (Asaf Romirowsky, “How UNRWA Supports Hamas,” inFocus, Fall 2007):
Nidal Abd al-Fattah Abdallah Nazzal, an ambulance driver for UNRWA from Kalqiliya in the West Bank, was arrested by Israeli security services in August 2002 and admitted that he was a Hamas activist. He had transported weapons and explosives to terrorists in his ambulance, taking advantage of the freedom of movement afforded to UNRWA vehicles by the Israelis.
Nahd Rashid Ahmad Atallah, a senior official of UNRWA in the Gaza Strip, was also arrested by Israeli security in August 2002. He provided support to families of wanted Fatah and PFLP terrorists and used his UNRWA car to transport armed members of the “Popular Resistance Committees,” a militant faction of the Fatah movement, to carry out attacks against Israeli troops at the Karni Crossing.