Just three weeks before he pulled off one of the greatest upsets in recent American political history, becoming the next mayor of New York City at age 34, Zohran Mamdani went for a jog in Prospect Park. He was participating in a 5K for Gaza, with all proceeds going to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) an organization charged with aiding Palestinian refugees.
The event received little attention in New York or elsewhere. It should have. In recent decades, UNRWA has become a de facto front for Hamas, used as a front to syphon humanitarian resources into Hamas’s genocidal agenda.
The numbers speak for themselves: Of the 12,521 UNRWA employees in the Gaza Strip, at least 1,462, or 12%, are bona fide members of either Hamas or other groups designated as terrorist organizations by the US Department of State.
UNRWA employees took active part of October 7
Many of these employees, such as Faisal Ali Mussalem Al-Naami, participated in the October 7, 2023, massacre. A social worker on UNRWA’s full-time payroll, Naami is also a member of Hamas’s Nuseirat battalion. Security camera footage shows him clearly entering Israel’s Kibbutz Be’eri, slaughtering innocent civilians, and kidnapping others.
Mohammad Abu Itiwi, an UNRWA employee since 2022, who is seen chasing down survivors of the Supernova music festival, attacked a group of young adults, killing 16 and kidnapping four.
The list goes on, and it goes all the way to the top. While there is no record that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was employed by UNRWA, the passport of UNRWA teacher Hani Zourob, who was in Egypt at the time of Sinwar’s death, was found near the Hamas leader’s body. There was no better get out of jail free card for a terrorist, as Sinwar so clearly understood, than to hide under the all-too-welcoming wing of UNRWA.
Serious scholars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been warning about UNRWA’s misdeeds for decades, and a compelling new documentary, Unraveling UNRWA, tells the sordid story of just how big a part the agency played in perpetuating the suffering of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
The only UN agency dedicated to perpetuating the Arab-Palestinian refugees provides an assurance that the conflict will never end. UNRWA, now in its 75th year, is clearly a shadow-state-like organization today.
Rather than promoting a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some leaders and operatives framed it as a zero-sum game – one that could only end if Israel accepted the return of over six million Palestinians, classified by UNRWA as refugees and their descendants from the 1948 war, effectively ending the Jewish state demographically. When the international community brokered the Oslo Accords and UNRWA’s role appeared to be winding down, the agency continued operating. UNRWA-run schools became complicit in promoting a radicalized curriculum that rejected the peace process and glorified martyrdom. Critics have long pointed to problematic content in textbooks and educational materials that perpetuate these messages.
Some UNRWA officials, speaking on the record now for the first time, are acknowledging this failure outright. In a searing report, James G. Lindsay, the agency’s former legal advisor and general counsel, surveyed its many failings – from harboring hundreds of terrorists on its staff to “recognizing as ‘refugees’ millions of people who do not meet the international definition” – and advocated that the agency be shut down posthaste.
“Articulating a plan for the incremental dissolution of UNRWA – death by a thousand cuts, as it were – should the agency and its allies prove resistant to change would be a powerful tool to advance the cause of systemic reform,” Lindsay wrote.
“And if reform is still blocked, dissolution could then become the default option. Whichever path donor countries take, reform or dissolution, the result will be a dramatic improvement over the bloated, politicized, antisemitic, reportedly terrorist-infiltrated UNRWA of today.”
Many in the international community are much slower to come to this realization. Governments around the world continue to praise it as essential and fund it accordingly. And while the Trump administration – wisely and courageously – cut its funding to UNRWA earlier this year, just as the president had done during his first term in office, many, particularly in the Democratic Party, continue to cheer for the organization.
Sadly, New York’s mayor-elect is one of them. And while support for a UN agency doing work thousands of miles away may appear insignificant to anyone concerned about issues closer to home, Mamdani’s misstep on this issue matters.
By now, UNRWA is a perfect litmus test not only on moral clarity – no one should support an organization riddled with terrorists – but also on executive efficacy. Anyone who claims they’re serious about governing should not endorse any group that has been addressing the same problem for nearly a century and has only succeeded in making it worse.
Here’s hoping that New Yorkers, and Americans at large, hold Mamdani accountable and inform him that terrorism and corruption are not the values we wish to embrace.