UN agency staff celebrated Oct. 7 massacre, part of ‘terror strategy’ at root of Hamas attack, watchdog says

Many reports by IMPACT-se found that UNRWA teachers and staff were celebrating the Hamas massacre and have been proven to breed terrorists through its education curriculum.

By Debbie Weiss, The Algemeiner

Teachers at Palestinian schools run by the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees celebrated Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre against Israel and are part of a “national strategy to commit acts of terror,” the head of a watchdog group told The Algemeiner following the release of the group’s new bombshell report on the matter.

At least 14 teachers at schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) publicly celebrated the Hamas atrocities on their social media accounts, with one calling the morning of Oct. 7 an “unforgettable glorious morning,” a report released on Monday by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) found.

The report also identified at least 100 Hamas terrorists who are graduates of UNRWA’s education system. It highlighted Amer Yaser Nazmi Sada, whose diploma was found in the vehicle of one of the terrorists who participated in the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israeli families. The diploma, granted to Sada in 2018 upon his graduation, was signed by the chief of UNRWA’s vocational program in Gaza, Farid Ajmi’an Abu Adhira.

One UNRWA employee in Gaza, Mahmoud Abu Adhm, uploaded several posts supporting the massacre by Hamas, the report showed. In one, posted three days after the attack, Abu Adhm urged the Palestinian terrorist group to kill Israeli hostages, citing Islamic texts: “Do not walk past a captive who has not been given amnesty without striking off his neck so as to terrorize the enemy.”

IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff told The Algemeiner: “When you teach young people to cut the neck of the enemy, do not be surprised when you see acts like that.”

“When you teach young people that Jews should be exterminated, do not be surprised when that is what they attempt to do,” he added.

In another instance, the official Facebook page of a UNRWA elementary school in the West Bank city of Nablus posted a video of a school rally held on Oct. 26 featuring a young boy, accompanied by what seems to be a UNRWA administrator, calling for victory for Hamas’ “jihad warriors” in Gaza and evoking the defeat of the Jews at Khaybar at the hands of Muhammad’s forces in 628 CE.

The student body utters “Amen” in unison following each of the boy’s statements. The video also features students studying a fifth-grade Islamic education textbook that includes passages promoting violence and glorifying martyrdom through jihad against Israel.

According to Sheff, it is “statistically more than likely that well over 1,500” of the 3,000 terrorists who infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7 were graduates of UNRWA schools, which comprise the majority of schools in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

“The school curriculum taught by UNRWA and written by the Palestinian Authority is the strategic and ideological basis for the acts of horror that we saw on Oct. 7,” he said, adding that UNRWA teachers also supplement the curriculum with their own hate-filled material.

A joint report released earlier this year by Impact-SE and UN Watch, another NGO, found that UNRWA employees had created classroom material celebrating the firebombing of a Jewish bus as a “barbecue party,” encouraging students to pursue jihad and martyrdom, erasing Israel from maps, and encouraging students to “liberate the homeland” with “their blood,” among other examples of incitement to radicalism.

Sheff called on the international community to stop funding the UN agency — to which US President Joe Biden has given almost a billion dollars since entering office — saying that despite European and US illusions that the incitement had been curbed, the curriculum had not changed at all since 2016. He went on to cite Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh as saying that the Palestinians “would sooner have their water and electricity budget impacted than change one bit of the Palestinian curriculum.”

Shtayyeh’s last post on X/Twitter blamed Israel for its “war crimes in Gaza,” and went on to allege that “water and electricity supply are completely cut off.”

Sheff said in a statement released with the report: “Time and again we have warned that UNRWA staff and school materials have created a breeding ground for terror. Our worst fears have now been tragically realized with the horrific attack on Oct. 7.”

On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from neighboring Gaza and killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The terrorists also kidnapped over 240 people and took them back to Gaza as hostages. Hamas’ brutality during the pogrom — documented cases of rape, torture, beheadings, and other gruesome acts — has shocked the world.

IMPACT-seMarcus SheffUNRWA