How the UNRWA Helps Hamas

Only the Palestinians have their own UN Refugee agency - the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. Here's how they help Hamas...

Originally headquartered in Beirut, UNRWA moved its main offices to Vienna after the Lebanese Civil War, then moved again in 1996 to its current headquarters in Gaza. There, it serves as a core fundraiser and rallying point for donations from around the globe, many from sovereign states.

While not all charity to Gaza flows through UNRWA, it is UNRWA that enjoys pride of place, with its UN stamp of legitimacy and direct, easy access to the UN's world stage.

Since late December, when Israel began its campaign to end the thousands of rocket and mortar attacks launched by Hamas from Gaza, UNRWA officials have given a parade of briefings via UN headquarters in New York.

Teleconferencing in, they have ignored what UNRWA Commissioner General Karen Koning Abuzayd has described as their "nonpolitical" mandate. With Abuzayd in the lead, they have detailed their outrage on behalf of the Palestinians, excoriated Israel and stepped further into the political arena to demand an immediate ceasefire--something these same UNRWA officials did not do when the attacks were one-way out of Gaza into Israel.

Given the structure and location of UNRWA, such bias comes as no big surprise. Headquartered inside a terrorist enclave, sharing with terrorist authorities such basic interests as keeping the local lights on and the water running, UNRWA officials have plenty of incentives to slam Israel as the culprit--not themselves, or their Hamas cohabiters.

And while blaming Israel, UNRWA officials also have plenty of incentive to present the worst possible picture. The greater the perceived distress, the better the prospects not only for immediate relief, but for future fundraising.

UNRWA's interests in Gaza are by now so entwined and, in many ways, so aligned with Hamas' interests that it is often hard to tell them apart.

And, as UNRWA officials have aired their views and demands from the UN stage, handouts for Gaza have been rolling in from all sides--some via UNRWA, some through other channels.

This goes way beyond Israel allowing hundreds of aid trucks into Gaza, even as the Israeli military is battling to shut down the rocket launchers and destroy the arms-smuggling tunnels and weapons caches of Hamas.

Support in cash and kind, in dollars and tons, has been pledged by donors ranging from Iran to Japan to the European Union to the Arab Gulf States to the U.S. (already the top donor to UNRWA, with $148 million in contributions last year, and now promising an immediate $5 million in response to UNRWA's latest flash appeal for Gaza, plus another $80 million for the agency to spread around in places including Gaza).

Plane-loads of relief, both in goods and services, have been announced by donors ranging from Russia to Libya to Sudan.

When this largesse eventually arrives in Gaza, how exactly will it be spent, distributed and supervised? UNRWA and the surrounding constellations of aid operations in Gaza are by and large areas of deep murk.

In a 2006 U.S. congressional briefing, Abuzayd said it was too difficult for UNRWA to run checks against terrorist watch lists because "Arab last names sound so familiar."

This was a strange comment coming from Abuzayd, a woman who is married to a Sudanese professor, holds a degree in Islamic studies and has worked for UNRWA in Gaza since 2000, first as deputy commissioner of UNRWA and since 2005 as the top boss.

These days, UNRWA officially runs periodic reviews that are supposed to winnow out terror connections. But donors must by and large rely on UNRWA's word that this is a serious process.

The history of terror out of Gaza in recent years suggests that, at best, a lot falls between the cracks. In response to e-mailed queries this week, a UNRWA spokesman said the agency now runs periodic name checks for relief recipients against a UN watch list named for counter-terrorism resolution number 1267 and has found no matches.

That's no big surprise; the 1267 watch list is for major players among al-Qaeda and the Taliban, not Iranian-backed Hamas.

For years, various U.S. lawmakers, including the late Congressman Tom Lantos, have tried introducing bills asking for genuine transparency and accountability from UNRWA--which has never been subject to a genuinely independent external audit.

Such efforts have gained no traction, opposed by a UN that even under the most benign circumstances is hostile to opening its books, plus a U.S. State Department that prefers to close its eyes and shovel millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into terrorist-controlled infrastructure.

This past September, Democratic Rep. Steve Rothman, with a bipartisan group of five co-sponsors, submitted a concurrent resolution noting that "UNRWA has employed staffers affiliated with terrorism."

The resolution cited specific examples of UNRWA ambulance and schools having been used to abet terrorism and mentioned a number of figures, including Awad al-Qiq, headmaster of an UNRWA school in Gaza, "who also led Islamic Jihad's engineering unit that built bombs and Qassam rockets."

However humane the intent of UNRWA officials, they have become de facto enablers of Hamas' terrorist fiefdom in Gaza.

In pushing for an ever-bigger dole and in using the UN stage as a megaphone to help elicit sympathy, drum up funds, denounce Israel and drape in UN baby blue the interests and demands of the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hamas, they do a terrible disservice not only to the cause of world peace, but to the prospects of the Palestinians themselves for forsaking terror and building better lives.