The latest UN Watch report, Schools in the Grip of Terror (Sept 2025), is yet another devastating indictment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Building on years of documentation, this comprehensive study exposes how Hamas operatives have not only infiltrated UNRWA’s education system but effectively run parts of it — from Gaza to Lebanon.
UN Watch meticulously shows that senior Hamas leaders, such as Suhail Al-Hindi in Gaza and Fateh Sharif in Lebanon, simultaneously served as UNRWA school principals, heads of teachers’ unions, and high-ranking Hamas officials. These were not hidden affiliations. They were public, celebrated, and often flaunted. UNRWA knew, and did nothing. In some cases, it even caved to pressure from Hamas-backed unions, reinstating suspended staff and agreeing not to discipline employees for “external activities” — in other words, terrorism.
The implications are staggering. A UN agency funded by Western democracies, including New Zealand, has been turned into an institutional incubator of extremism. Its classrooms have become platforms for glorifying “martyrs,” erasing Israel’s existence, and rejecting peace. Worse still, UNRWA’s unions are dominated by Hamas loyalists who use strikes and protests to paralyse services whenever international staff attempt reform.
The numbers tell the story: 99% of UNRWA’s 30,000 employees are local Palestinian Arab staff. Control is not in the hands of Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini in New York or Geneva, but in Hamas’s Gaza stronghold and in Lebanon’s refugee camps. That explains how a 3,000-member UNRWA staff Telegram group openly celebrated the atrocities of October 7.
For New Zealand, the question is unavoidable: why are we still sending taxpayer money to an agency so deeply entangled with Hamas? Wellington rightly designates Hamas as a terrorist entity. Yet through UNRWA, we are indirectly subsidising its infrastructure. Aid intended for schools and humanitarian relief is captured and redirected to entrench a jihadist agenda.
Supporters of UNRWA will argue that the agency is “indispensable.” But indispensability is not a licence for complicity. The Colonna Review (an independent UN-commissioned assessment) already admitted that neutrality breaches are systemic. UN Watch’s new report confirms what many have long warned: UNRWA is not merely flawed, it is compromised.
New Zealand prides itself on promoting peace, human rights, and the international rule of law. That commitment rings hollow if we continue to fund an organisation that has become a political tool for Hamas — a group committed to Israel’s destruction and responsible for mass murder, including the massacre of October 7.
It is time for moral clarity. Our government should immediately suspend all contributions to UNRWA until ironclad reforms are enacted, if such reforms are even possible. Better still, New Zealand should join allies like the United States and Germany in redirecting aid to vetted organisations that deliver humanitarian support without empowering terrorists.
UN Watch has done the world a service by shining light on UNRWA’s capture by Hamas. It is now up to responsible democracies (including New Zealand) to act. Anything less is complicity.
