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As Israel cuts all ties with UNRWA amid charges that it is irreparably tied up with terrorism, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly has doubled down on her support for the agency, which Canada continues to fund to the tune of $25 million per year.
This week, the Israeli Knesset overwhelmingly supported a pair of bills to cut all contact with UNRWA, and for the agency to end its activities in Gaza and the West Bank within 90 days.
The action comes after months of Israeli-provided evidence that UNRWA facilities allegedly did double duty as Hamas command posts, and that about 100 Hamas commanders and operatives were on the UNRWA payroll.
“It is not just a few rotten apples … in Gaza is a rotten tree entirely infected with terrorist operatives,” said the Israeli foreign ministry in a Tuesday statement.
The ministry added that it would still work with other UN agencies to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians, but that UNRWA was out.
On Saturday, while Israel was still considering the legislation, Joly signed onto a joint statement condemning the action, and saying that UNRWA’s efforts to rid itself of terror ties were proceeding apace.
“UNRWA has taken steps to address allegations regarding individual employees’ support for terrorist organizations and demonstrated its willingness to pursue and implement reform of internal processes,” read the statement, co-signed by Joly’s equivalents in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the U.K.
Within months of forming government in 2015, one of the first major foreign affairs actions of the Trudeau government had been to restore federal funding to UNRWA.
The prior Conservative government of Stephen Harper had suspended payments in 2010 amid evidence that UNRWA resources were being directed to Palestinian terror organizations such as Hamas.
In restoring the money, International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau had assured Canadians that their tax dollars wouldn’t be funding terrorism thanks to UNRWA’s "very robust oversight and reporting framework."
In the 12 months since the Hamas-led October 7 attacks, Israel has provided Canada with a steady stream of intelligence charging that this was not the case.
This included a dossier alleging that as many as 2,000 UNRWA employees had ties to Palestinian terror organizations, that multiple UNRWA schools had served as entrance points to Hamas’s underground tunnel network, and that Israel had information on more than a dozen specific UNRWA employees who had participated in the October 7 massacres.
They included Faisal Ali Mussallem Al-Naimi, a UNRWA social worker who was allegedly caught on surveillance video dragging the murdered body of a victim at Kibbutz Bee’ri, where more than 100 civilians were murdered.
In January, the charges would prompt Canada to join the United States in suspending aid to UNRWA.
But, unlike the United States, Canada would restore funding less than two months later, with International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen saying in March that he had been assured by UNRWA’s pledge that they had “taken immediate measures to strengthen oversight, accountability and transparency.”
Given that Canada’s brief aid suspension came between scheduled grant payments, UNRWA never actually missed any of the $100 million that the Trudeau government promised to pay the agency between 2023 and 2027.
All the while, the Israeli case against UNRWA has strengthened.
In August, UNRWA fired nine employees, saying it appeared credible that they had indeed participated in the October 7 attacks.
The next month, after Hamas’s Lebanon chief Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin was killed in an Israeli air strike, UNRWA confirmed that he was an employee and had even been a past chairman of the UNRWA Teachers' Association.
In an interview with AFP last month, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said that el-Amin had been placed on administrative leave in March for alleged political activities, but that they didn’t know he was a senior Hamas commander.
“The specific allegation at the time was that (he was) a part of the local leadership.… I never heard the word commander before,” said Lazzarini.
UNRWA was established in 1949 to serve Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and it differs from other UN refugee agencies in that the refugee status of its charges never expires, and is simply passed generation to generation.
The agency has long been the main purveyor of schooling to Palestinians living in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, as well as Gaza and the West Bank.
Even when UNRWA is working as intended, it’s had a longstanding track record of curricula and school materials filled with anti-Israel rhetoric.
In April, 2023 — just five months before the October 7 attacks — Germany’s BILD published an investigation showing rampant antisemitism and calls for violence among UNRWA teachers and textbooks.
“In an exercise for students in a 9th grade class in Gaza, a Palestinian arson attack on a bus carrying Jews is referred to as a ‘barbecue,’” read the feature, which was headlined “Germany continues to pay for hatred of Jews.”
