Staff at the United Nations relief agency at Gaza are being accused of “stealing aid and selling it for profit,” while the United Nations is directing the blame toward Israel for the issues emerging in delivering aid to people at Gaza. 

The allegations against Unrwa are being voiced by a watchdog group, UN Watch, citing posts in an Unrwa-related chatroom run by a former agency employee, Haitham al-Sayyed.

“The displaced people in the external shelter do not get their right to food and non-food aid, but rather it is distributed at night and sold in front of our eyes,” an Unrwa employee working at a shelter school, whose name has been redacted by Mr. al-Sayyed, writes in one post. The stolen items include 150 bags of baby Pampers and diesel fuel, the latter of which deprived the school of electricity for a month.  

In another case, the director of a school warehouse sold 50 cartons of food that were distributed in Unrwa schools to a merchant for 350 shekels a carton, another chat group member, Izzat Shatat, claims. Attempts to stop the thefts have allegedly been blocked. With the diesel theft, “the thief was exposed and the principal was informed, but to this day he is still working with us,” the Unrwa employee says.

A spokeswoman for the agency’s Washington-based committee, Unrwa USA, did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment on the matter. 

Leaders at the United Nations have laid the blame for humanitarian aid shortages elsewhere. “There is more food available on the market,” the Unrwa commissioner-general, Phillipe Lazzarini, said at a press conference at UN’s Geneva headquarters last week, yet “it still does not mean that the food is accessible.” He says the problem is that “there is absolutely no cash circulating in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.”

On Wednesday, Israel reopened the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza following days of closure after a Hamas rocket attack killed four Israeli soldiers nearby. On Tuesday, the Israeli military said its troops have taken “operational control” over the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. 

The UN’s secretary-general, António Guterres, urged both crossings to be reopened immediately given the humanitarian risks, according to a press briefing on Tuesday by the deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq. He asked “both parties to show political courage and spare no effort to secure an agreement now” — meaning Jerusalem and a Hamas-run Gaza — yet only “urged the Government of Israel to stop any further escalation.”

While UN leaders are mostly silent on the issues surrounding Unrwa, members of Congress are stepping in. Some are seeking a return of American tax dollars that went to the UN relief agency. Congressman Brian Mast, who sponsored that legislation alongside Congressman Josh Gottheimer, told Fox News, “The state department needs to do everything it can to recoup this money.”

The move came after reports that a dozen or more employees at Unrwa participated in Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel. Those claims prompted the Biden administration to announce in January that it would stop additional taxpayer dollars from going to the UN agency, though the government had already granted $51 million for Unrwa’s work at the West Bank and Gaza for 2024.