‘This is the motherlode of UNRWA teachers’ incitement to Jihadi terrorism,’ says UN Watch group that investigated their internal Telegram channel.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
An NGO that monitors the United Nations has found that the main UN agency that educates Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip is full of teachers who praised the October 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 people in Israel, including the elderly and infants.
In its investigation of the internal Telegram channel used by 3,000 teachers employed by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), UN Watch found it “replete with posts” celebrating the slaughter starting “minutes after it began,” said its pre-report release, published Wednesday.
There are thousands of posts that its full report documents, said Executive Director Hillel Neuer, giving just a few examples.
Among many other comments, one educator, Waseem Ula, called one of the slaughter’s perpetrators a “Qassami martyr” and “brother,” and prayed that Allah should “admit him to paradise without judgment.” He described the Hamas attack as “Al-Qassem threw a fireball into the Zionist stadium,” and posted a picture of a suicide bomb vest wired with explosives, with the caption: “Wait, sons of Judaism.”
Another teacher, Abdallah Mehjez, supported the Hamas demand for northern Gazan residents to stay put before the IDF’s ground incursion began in late October, which the terror organization backed by shooting at those who tried to flee.
They should “not… respond to text messages and audio recordings that call for the displacement of residents,” he wrote, calling it an element of Israeli “psychological warfare” rather than a desire not to have civilians caught in the upcoming battles with Hamas forces.
This essentially told them to become human shields for the terrorists, UN Watch pointed out.
In another documented case, after a colleague on the channel praised the terrorists as having been “breastfed Jihad and resistance with their mothers’ milk,” Shatha Husam Al Nawajha responded approvingly.
“May Allah protect them…be with them and grant them victory, and return them safe and sound,” she wrote.
“This is the motherlode of UNRWA teachers’ incitement to Jihadi terrorism,” said Neuer.
In a series of posts to X, Neuer emphasized that “All these acts are gross violations of the UN Code of Conduct,” and called on “the UN and Member States to recognize that UNRWA is infested with incitement to terror.”
He also pointed out that Western nations are indirectly backing all this glorification of Islamic extremism, writing, “If you’re from the US, EU, Canada or Australia, you’re funding this.”
UN Watch is not the only NGO that has documented UNRWA’s educators’ support for Hamas. The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) reported on the agency’s teachers’ celebrations of the terror organization’s atrocities in November.
According to Channel 12, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has initiated a plan to remove UNRWA from Gaza by the end of 2024, due to its promotion of terrorism and antisemitism.