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UNRWA Admits It Employed Hamas Leader in Lebanon Killed by Israeli Airstrike
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini in Beirut, Lebanon, Sept. 17, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants has acknowledged that the top Hamas commander in Lebanon, whom the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed in an airstrike on Monday, was employed as one of its teachers.
The revelation came as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which was established in 1949 to provide humanitarian and social services to Palestinian refugees, continued to face allegations from Israel, US lawmakers, and nonprofit research institutions that it was infiltrated and compromised by Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that rules Gaza and openly seeks the Jewish state’s destruction.
Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin was killed along with his wife, son, and daughter, in an Israeli strike that targeted their house in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre. The IDF and Israel Security Agency (better known as Shin Bet) confirmed Sherif’s death in a joint statement, describing him as “head of the Lebanon branch of the Hamas terror organization” who coordinated with Hezbollah, another terrorist group that wields significant influence across Lebanon.
“Sherif was responsible for coordinating Hamas’s terror activities in Lebanon with Hezbollah operatives. He was also responsible for Hamas’s efforts in Lebanon to recruit operatives and acquire weapons,” the joint Israeli statement read. “He led the Hamas terrorist organization’s force build-up efforts in Lebanon and operated to advance Hamas’s interests in Lebanon, both politically and militarily.”
Beyond his senior role with an internationally designated terrorist organization, Sherif also worked for UNRWA, according to the agency, which also noted in a statement on Monday that he was suspended in March due to his affiliation with Hamas.
Sherif “was an UNRWA employee who was put on administrative leave without pay in March, and was undergoing an investigation following allegations that UNRWA received about his political activities,” the agency said.
Later, the agency’s chief, Philippe Lazzarini, denied knowing of Sherif’s position in Hamas’s military hierarchy.
“The specific allegation at the time was that [he was] a part of the local leadership … I never heard the word commander before,” he told reporters in Geneva. “What’s obvious for you today, was not obvious yesterday.”
According to some reports, Sherif was head of UNRWA’s teachers’ union, although The Algemeiner could not immediately verify that detail.
The latest revelations about Sherif will likely fuel concerns that UNRWA has struggled to screen terrorists out of its staff.
Last month, UNRWA fired nine employees after discovering evidence “sufficient” to prove their participation in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. However, that number may only be a minute portion of UNRWA employees who are members of or continue to collaborate with terrorist organizations.
Israel has maintained that the agency still employs some 450 terrorist operatives in Gaza. Many countries, including the US, paused funding to UNRWA amid allegations that the agency aided Hamas terrorists.
UNRWA has insisted that its links to terrorist groups are not systemic and do not negate its humanitarian purpose, arguing its aid work in Gaza is crucial to alleviating the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
As The Algemeiner has reported previously, at least two UNRWA teachers from Gaza participated in the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, one of whom was heard saying on an intercepted transmission that “we have female hostages, I captured one.” Another — who was an UNRWA elementary school teacher as well as a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s (PIJ) Rafah Brigade — celebrated infiltrating Israeli territory during a phone call to family members, saying, “I’m inside! I’m with the Jews.”
Separately, an investigation by UN Watch found that a group of 3,000 teachers working in Gaza for UNRWA glorified and celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 pogrom across southern Israel in an internal Telegram group.
On Monday, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters that Sherif had been placed on administrative leave without pay “as soon as UNRWA received information about his possible involvement with Hamas at a senior level” and was never reinstated.
“As soon as information was received — in this case, from the Israeli government — action was taken,” Dujarric told reporters. “Anyone who works for the UN and engages in terror, terror-like activity is unacceptable and outrageous and an insult to all UN staff members around the world.”
Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva posted on X/Twitter saying that news of Sherfi’s connection to the UN agency “proves that there is a deep problem in UNRWA, the way they do due diligence about who they are hiring.”
Before Oct. 7, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) published numerous reports revealing the complicity of UNRWA schools in terrorist activity in the Middle East. From math and theology to literature and science, UNRWA content taught in the Palestinian territories has been found to promote hatred for Jews and Israel, indoctrinating students as young as six to commit their lives to “martyrdom” and inter-generational war. Compromise with Israelis is described as betraying Palestinian identity, while suicide bombings are portrayed as intrinsic to it and a prerequisite for entry into heaven.
Antisemitic and violent themes taught in Palestinian schools administered by UNWRA, as well as their employment of teachers linked to terrorist organizations, fostered the extremism that underpinned the Oct. 7 massacre, Impact-se chief executive officer Marcus Sheff told a US congressional committee in January.
“We know that UNRWA employees took part in this massacre, but these were not a few bad apples, rather, the institutional bowel is rotten,” Sheff told the US House Foreign Affairs Committee on Oversight and Accountability. “How do we know? We know by researching UNRWA’s educational infrastructure. In it, textbooks teach that Jews are liars and fraudsters that spread corruption, which will lead to their annihilation. Students are taught about cutting the necks of the enemy, that a fire massacre of Jews on a bus is celebrated as a barbecue party.”
Palestinian curricula also teaches girls that women are inferior to men and demands that they sacrifice their bodies and families for “jihad,” according to an Impact-se report published in March. Describing women as a problem to be managed by the authority of religion and patriarchy, the lessons assert that Palestinian women are valuable only insofar as they contribute to the community’s population of terrorists and capacity to wage holy war.
Such ideas are ancillary to larger political goals, Impact-se explained. In denouncing women as transgressors of sexual morality and inherent sources of corruption, the Palestinian textbooks aim to rationalize subordinating women to men and limiting their role in public life. They also advocate dressing in accordance with Islamic law, women accepting fault for being sexually harassed and assaulted, and the notion that gender equality is a western fiction.
With all avenues for personal growth and achievement sealed off, what is left to Palestinian women is the option to commit violence, to become martyrs and the mothers of terrorists of the future, the report stated.
“In a chapter discussing the role of women in combat at the time of the inception of Islam, Palestinian girls are encouraged to kill, be killed, and to send their children to die,” it said. “These include the first woman who was martyred in the name of Islam; a woman who stabbed a Jews to death, described as ‘justly an example of a brave Muslim woman in defense of the Muslims’; and a woman who praises Allah after her four children died on the battlefield while performing jihad.”
On Monday, Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told The Algemeiner that the latest revelation of yet another UNRWA link to terrorism is part of a larger pattern of connivance and dishonesty.
“UNRWA’s ties to terror go back decades, as do their denials of the obvious,” he said. “Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini’s claim of being unaware that Hamas was literally beneath them with wires running from the headquarters to the server farm through the floor is as absurd as when the headquarters parking lot collapsed in 2014 as a result of Hamas’s underground construction or when rockets were found hidden in UNRWA schools twice.”
Israel has discovered that Hamas used UNRWA facilities in Gaza, including its schools, to run operations and attacks against the Jewish state and to store weapons, both in and under UNRWA institutions. The Israeli military claimed that in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Hamas terrorists were found in UNRWA’s central logistics compound alongside UN vehicles.
“Lies and corruption have been built into UNRWA from the very beginning,” Romirowsky told The Algemeiner. “The organization’s ever expanding missions revolving around the slippery term ‘rehabilitation’ and its unilateral redefinition of ‘refugee’ to include all Palestinians and their descendants meant that from the start, it was going to be corrupted for local gain and would play along for its survival. It kept Palestinians in stasis, inculcating a perpetual victimhood mentality.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post UNRWA Admits It Employed Hamas Leader in Lebanon Killed by Israeli Airstrike first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Security Warning to Israelis Vacationing Abroad Ahead of holidays

A passenger arrives to a terminal at Ben Gurion international airport before Israel bans international flights, January 25, 2021. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – Ahead of the Jewish High Holidays, Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) published the latest threat assessment to Israelis abroad from terrorist groups to the public on Sunday, in order to increase the Israeli public’s awareness of the existing terrorist threats around the world and encourage individuals to take preventive action accordingly.
The NSC specified that the warning is an up-to-date reflection of the main trends in the activities of terrorist groups around the world and their impact on the level of threat posed to Israelis abroad during these times, but the travel warnings and restrictions themselves are not new.
“As the Gaza war continues and in parallel with the increasing threat of terrorism, the National Security Headquarters stated it has recognized a trend of worsening and increasing violent antisemitic incidents and escalating steps by anti-Israel groups, to the point of physically harming Israelis and Jews abroad. This is in light of, among other things, the anti-Israel narrative and the negative media campaign by pro-Palestinian elements — a trend that may encourage and motivate extremist elements to carry out terrorist activities against Israelis or Jews abroad,” the statement read.
“Therefore, the National Security Bureau is reinforcing its recommendation to the Israeli public to act with responsibility during this time when traveling abroad, to check the status of the National Security Bureau’s travel warnings (before purchasing tickets to the destination,) and to act in accordance with the travel warning recommendations and the level of risk in the country they are visiting,” it listed, adding that, as illustrated in the past year, these warnings are well-founded and reflect a tangible and valid threat potential.
The statement also emphasized the risk of sharing content on social media networks indicating current or past service in the Israeli security forces, as these posts increase the risk of being marked by various parties as a target. “Therefore, the National Security Council recommends that you do not upload to social networks, in any way, content that indicates service in the security forces, operational activity, or similar content, as well as real-time locations.”
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Israel Intensifies Gaza City Bombing as Rubio Arrives

Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south, in the central Gaza Strip September 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Israeli forces destroyed at least 30 residential buildings in Gaza City and forced thousands of people from their homes, Palestinian officials said, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived on Sunday to discuss the future of the conflict.
Israel has said it plans to seize the city, where about a million Palestinians have been sheltering, as part of its declared aim of eliminating the terrorist group Hamas, and has intensified attacks on what it has called Hamas’ last bastion.
The group’s political leadership, which has engaged in on-and-off negotiations on a possible ceasefire and hostage release deal, was targeted by Israel in an airstrike in Doha on Tuesday in an attack that drew widespread condemnation.
Qatar will host an emergency Arab-Islamic summit on Monday to discuss the next moves. Rubio said Washington wanted to talk about how to free the 48 hostages – of whom 20 are believed to be still alive – still held by Hamas in Gaza and rebuild the coastal strip.
“What’s happened, has happened,” he said. “We’re gonna meet with them (the Israeli leadership). We’re gonna talk about what the future holds,” Rubio said before heading to Israel where he will stay until Tuesday.
ABRAHAM ACCORDS AT RISK
He was expected to visit the Western Wall Jewish prayer site in Jerusalem on Sunday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold talks with him during the visit.
US officials described Tuesday’s strike on the territory of a close US ally as a unilateral escalation that did not serve American or Israeli interests. Rubio and US President Donald Trump both met Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani on Friday.
Netanyahu signed an agreement on Thursday to push ahead with a settlement expansion plan that would cut across West Bank land that the Palestinians seek for a state – a move the United Arab Emirates warned would undermine the US-brokered Abraham accords that normalized UAE relations with Israel.
Israel, which blocked all food from entering Gaza for 11 weeks earlier this year, has been allowing more aid into the enclave since late July to prevent further food shortages, though the United Nations says far more is needed.
It says it wants civilians to leave Gaza City before it sends more ground forces in. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have left but hundreds of thousands remain in the area. Hamas has called on people not to leave.
Israeli army forces have been operating inside at least four eastern suburbs for weeks, turning most of at least three of them into wastelands. It is closing in on the center and the western areas of the territory, where most of the displaced people are taking shelter.
Many are reluctant to leave, saying there is not enough space or safety in the south, where Israel has told them to go to what it has designated as a humanitarian zone.
Some say they cannot afford to leave while others say they were hoping the Arab leaders meeting on Monday in Qatar would pressure Israel to scrap its planned offensive.
“The bombardment intensified everywhere and we took down the tents, more than twenty families, we do not know where to go,” said Musbah Al-Kafarna, displaced in Gaza City.
Israel said it had completed five waves of air strikes on Gaza City over the past week, targeting more than 500 sites, including Hamas reconnaissance and sniper sites, buildings containing tunnel openings and weapons depots.
Local officials, who do not distinguish between militant and civilian casualties, say at least 40 people were killed by Israeli fire across the enclave, a least 28 in Gaza City alone.
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Turkey Warns of Escalation as Israel Expands Strikes Beyond Gaza

Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (not seen) at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, May 13, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
i24 News – An Israeli strike targeting Hamas officials in Qatar has sparked unease among several Middle Eastern countries that host leaders of the group, with Turkey among the most alarmed.
Officials in Ankara are increasingly worried about how far Israel might go in pursuing those it holds responsible for the October 7 attacks.
Israel’s prime minister effectively acknowledged that the Qatar operation failed to eliminate the Hamas leadership, while stressing the broader point the strike was meant to make: “They enjoy no immunity,” the government said.
On X, Prime Minister Netanyahu went further, writing that “the elimination of Hamas leaders would put an end to the war.”
A senior Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, summed up Ankara’s reaction: “The attack in Qatar showed that the Israeli government is ready to do anything.”
Legally and diplomatically, Turkey occupies a delicate position. As a NATO member, any military operation or targeted killing on its soil could inflame tensions within the alliance and challenge mutual security commitments.
Analysts caution, however, that Israel could opt for covert measures, operations carried out without public acknowledgement, a prospect that has increased anxiety in governments across the region.
Israeli officials remain defiant. In an interview with Ynet, Minister Ze’ev Elkin said: “As long as we have not stopped them, we will pursue them everywhere in the world and settle our accounts with them.” The episode underscores growing fears that efforts to hunt Hamas figures beyond Gaza could widen regional friction and complicate diplomatic relationships.