As the Biden administration frets over Israel’s new ban of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a UN watchdog group, UN Watch, is exposing the agency’s “unholy alliance” with terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad in a new report.

The 51-page dossier offers a new trove of evidence supporting UN Watch’s claim that top Unrwa officials “routinely” meet with terrorist groups in Lebanon and Gaza and “mutually praise each other for ‘cooperation,’ and describe each other as ‘partners.’” 

These illicit relationships, the report charges, have allowed terrorist organizations to “significantly influence the policies and practices” of a UN-backed agency that boasts 30,000 employees and receives $1.5 billion annually primarily from Western countries. UN Watch insists that the rot runs deep, with the report linking terrorist groups to Unrwa officials at both the international and local levels.

In one example, the report discloses that Unrwa’s commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini, brokered a deal with Jihadi terrorist groups during a Beirut meeting in May 2024 to allow a Hamas leader, Fathi Al-Sharif, to keep his role as principal of a major Unrwa school and as head of the Unrwa teachers union. Al-Sharif, who oversaw thousands of students, “openly glorified Hamas terrorist attacks” and, after his death, was eulogized for his “Jihadi education,” UN Watch claims. 

Another Unrwa leader exposed in the report is Pierre Krähenbühl, a former commissioner-general, who, during his tenure at the aid agency, met with terrorist leaders from both Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to emphasize “the spirit of partnership” between the terror groups and Unrwa. He even invited the terror leaders to privately challenge any decision made by the agency, which he says he could subsequently change or “tear up” in light of their concerns. 

The terrorist groups, as the report shows, took these Unrwa officials up on their offers. According to UN Watch, they successfully foiled the implementation of several Unrwa initiatives, including the introduction of biometric IDs for beneficiaries of Unrwa financial assistance and an ethics code affirming LGBTQ rights, and prevented the suspension of employees for promoting terrorism. 

The chummy relationships between Unrwa officials and terrorist leaders are brought to life via a series of 68 newly uncovered images included in the dossier. One picture shows a smiling Mr. Krähenbühl standing among a gang of terrorist leaders, including Hamas’s chief of foreign relations, Ali Baraka, who was sanctioned by America in 2024 for “heinous crimes.” 

The report offers yet more evidence of the UN-backed group’s complicity in terror and further challenges Unrwa’s prevailing claim that any examples of corruption are isolated incidents. In November, UN Watch offered a harrowing look into the hate-filled curriculum being fed to Unrwa students in Gaza. 

The report concludes: “In the words of Swiss foreign minister Ignazio Cassis, UNRWA ‘supplies the ammunition to continue the conflict,’ and ‘by supporting UNRWA, we keep the conflict alive. It’s a perverse logic.’ It is time for donor states to put an end to this perverse logic, by dismantling UNRWA, and working together to provide alternative frameworks to help Palestinians build a better future for themselves and for the world.”