The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), established in 1949 to assist Palestinian refugees, has long occupied a uniquely controversial position within the United Nations system. Its singular mandate, its multi-generational definition of refugee status, and its deep operational footprint inside the Gaza Strip have made it unlike any other UN humanitarian body. Following the catastrophic Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 — in which approximately 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were murdered and over 250 taken hostage — Israeli intelligence and investigative journalism revealed evidence of direct participation by UNRWA employees in the assault. These revelations triggered a global crisis of confidence in the agency, prompted dozens of donor nations to suspend funding, and ignited a broader debate about whether UNRWA had become structurally compromised by the very terrorist organization responsible for governing — and brutalizing — the population it was meant to serve.
Background and History of UNRWA's Role in Gaza
UNRWA was founded by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1949 to provide education, healthcare, relief, and social services to Palestinian refugees displaced in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Unlike the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which works toward the resettlement or integration of refugees elsewhere, UNRWA operates exclusively for Palestinians and applies a hereditary definition of refugee status, meaning descendants of original refugees — now numbering in the millions — continue to be registered with and served by the agency. In the Gaza Strip, UNRWA became the dominant provider of schooling and basic services, employing approximately 13,000 local staff, the overwhelming majority of whom are themselves Palestinian. This workforce is drawn from and embedded within Gaza's civilian society, which Hamas has ruled since violently seizing control of the territory in 2007. Critics, including Israeli officials and watchdog organizations such as UN Watch, have long argued that this structural reality made UNRWA vulnerable to — and in many cases complicit with — Hamas infiltration of its ranks and facilities. Prior to October 7, there were multiple documented incidents of Hamas using UNRWA schools to store weapons, fire rockets at Israeli communities, and access tunnel infrastructure beneath agency buildings, including a 2014 episode in which rockets were found stored inside an UNRWA school on three separate occasions. These warnings went largely unheeded by the international community.
Key Facts Regarding UNRWA Staff and October 7
- Israeli intelligence identified at least 12 UNRWA employees as direct participants in the October 7 attacks, including six who crossed the border and participated in the massacre, two who helped abduct Israeli hostages, and others who transported weapons and coordinated logistics; seven of the twelve were teachers at UNRWA schools, and one Arabic-language teacher was simultaneously identified as a Hamas commander who participated in the assault on Kibbutz Be'eri, where 97 civilians were killed in their homes.
- Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant subsequently stated that over 30 UNRWA workers in total had participated in the October 7 massacre, and that Israeli intelligence assessed approximately 1,468 UNRWA employees were known to be active members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad — including 185 in Hamas's military wing and 51 in PIJ's military branch — out of an estimated 12,000 UNRWA staff in Gaza, representing roughly one in ten employees.
- Following the October 7 attacks, the Israel Defense Forces discovered a sophisticated Hamas data center and tunnel complex directly beneath UNRWA's Gaza headquarters, connected to the agency's own electricity infrastructure; IDF troops also found caches of weapons, military equipment, and Hamas operational documents inside UNRWA office spaces themselves, and UNRWA-branded supply bags were found in tunnels used by Hamas to hold Israeli hostages and in the underground hideout of Hamas Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar.
Analysis of the Systemic Failure and International Response
The revelations surrounding UNRWA's employee involvement in October 7 did not emerge in a vacuum. The American Jewish Committee has documented how the structural intertwining of UNRWA with Hamas governance in Gaza made meaningful neutrality increasingly difficult to maintain. UNRWA's Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini initially responded to Israeli allegations by terminating contracts of implicated staff and announcing an investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). The OIOS ultimately concluded that 9 of the 19 employees formally named by Israel had indeed been involved in the October 7 attacks — a finding that, while narrower than Israeli claims, nonetheless confirmed that UN humanitarian workers had taken part in what was the deadliest single day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The international community's response was swift but uneven: the United States, European Union member states, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other major donors suspended contributions to UNRWA in late January 2024. The Biden administration had provided UNRWA with over one billion dollars in funding since 2021, and funding was later resumed by most European states following the OIOS report. By contrast, the incoming Trump administration took a far harder line: in August 2025, the U.S. State Department formally assessed that UNRWA was "irredeemably compromised" and called for its full dismantlement. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further in October 2025, publicly describing UNRWA as "a subsidiary of Hamas." The administration also weighed formal terrorism-related sanctions against the agency. These assessments reflect a growing consensus among American and Israeli policymakers that the problem of Hamas infiltration was not incidental but structural — a consequence of UNRWA's decades-long dependence on local Palestinian hiring within a territory under Hamas control, and of an institutional culture that resisted meaningful oversight. The Wall Street Journal, which first broke the story of UNRWA employees' involvement in October 7, noted that agency employees were embedded in a society where Hamas membership confers social status, economic benefits, and, at times, physical security — factors that any honest reform of the organization would need to confront directly. UNRWA's defenders have argued that the agency serves an irreplaceable humanitarian function and that wrongdoing by a minority of its staff should not invalidate its mission. Critics counter that this framing understates the depth of penetration and ignores evidence of institutional facilitation stretching back years.
Significance for Israel and the Broader Conflict
For Israel, the documented connections between UNRWA staff and the October 7 massacre carry profound strategic and moral significance. They validate years of Israeli warnings — long dismissed by much of the international community as politically motivated — that UNRWA had ceased to function as a neutral humanitarian body and had instead become part of the infrastructure that Hamas used to sustain its grip on Gaza. The presence of a Hamas data center beneath UNRWA's headquarters, weapons caches inside UNRWA offices, and UNRWA-logo supplies in Hamas tunnels together illustrate how systematically the terror organization co-opted the international community's aid apparatus. For Israel's ability to defend itself and explain its military operations to the world, this matters enormously: each Israeli strike on UNRWA facilities or targeting of UNRWA-associated individuals was publicly condemned as an attack on humanitarian infrastructure, yet the evidence suggests that that infrastructure was itself militarized. More broadly, the UNRWA affair raises urgent questions about the UN's governance of its own agencies, the adequacy of donor oversight, and whether the perpetuation of Palestinian refugee status across generations — a policy unique to UNRWA — has served political ends that are fundamentally incompatible with genuine humanitarian neutrality. As Israel continues to rebuild and reimagine the post-Hamas governance of Gaza, the question of what replaces UNRWA is not merely administrative but existential: any successor mechanism must be designed from the outset to be impervious to the infiltration and co-optation that transformed a relief agency into a tool of terror.