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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.
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Kanye West Releases Track List for New Album ‘WW3’ Featuring Songs About Hitler After Dressing In Full KKK Outfit
Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, dressed in a full black leather KKK outfit during his interview with DJ Akademiks that was shared on YouTube on March 31, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, shared on Thursday the track list for a new album titled “WW3” and it includes songs with titles that reference Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
The seventh track on the album is titled “Heil Hitler,” which is the greeting praising Hitler that given as part of the Nazi salute, while the eighth song is titled “Hitler Ye and Jesus.” The “Runaway” rapper, 47, has previously made comparisons between himself and Jesus, and said in an interview this week with DJ Akademiks:”I’m the closest thing to God on Earth and I act just like how God acts.” The musician and Yeezy creator has also repeatedly praised Hitler in interviews and on social media. In February, he wrote on X, “Hitler was sooooo fresh. Me loving Hitler is old news,” as well as ““Im a Nazi” and “I am God Jesus Hitler Ye Like I told you.”
Early Thursday morning, Ye posted on his X account a photo of a paper that features the names of the 11 songs on “WW3.” Also on the paper is a drawing of two black swastikas, which was the symbol of Hitler’s Nazi Party and is still used by white supremacists and extremists. There is also a song on the album titled “Bianca,” after his estranged wife Bianca Censori. In the song, which he revealed on a livestream with DJ Akademiks, the rapper give details about the Australian architect leaving him because of his recently unhinged and antisemitic social media posts. It’s been reported since mid-February that Censori left Ye and wants to divorce him because of his disturbing antics, which included selling a shirt with a swastika on it.
“She’s having a panic attack and she is not liking the way that I tweeted,” Ye raps in the song about Censori. “Until Bianca’s back I stay up all night I’m not going to sleep / I really don’t know where she’s at.”
The track list for Ye’s album “WW3.” Photo: X/Screenshot
Ye also shared on X the cover art for “WW3.” It features a man and a woman in red and white Ku Klux Klan robes. According to the music website Genuis, the photo was originally taken during a KKK wedding in a barn in Tennessee in July 2015, but was edited by Ye so that the man’s skin color is Black. The real like couple’s dog is also edited out of the image.
Ye – who has four children with his ex-wife Kim Kardashian – did an interview with DJ Akademiks earlier this week and when greeting the disc jockey at the start of their conversation, he wrote a necklace that featured an oversized, diamond encrusted swastika. Ye later changed into a black leather Ku Klux Klan outfit for the reminder of the interview. He said he wanted to wear the KKK ensemble the day before out in public but was worried “they would put me in the hospital for my outfit.”
Ye released last week on YouTube a song titled “WW3” in which he addresses his antisemitic comments on X and calls for him to be removed from the social media platform because of his hateful remarks. He also denies similarities to Hitler. “They tellin’ me that I’m a bully/I’m antisemitic, fully/They sayin’ I’m actin’ like Hitler/But how am I actin’ like Hitler?/When I am a f–king ni–a,” Ye raps in the song. “They tellin’ me, ‘Get up off of Twitter’ … Rockin’ swastikas ’cause all my ni–as Nazis/Readin’ ‘Mein Kampf,’ two chapters ‘fore I go to sleep.”
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Berlin and Tel Aviv Partner as Twin Cities to Help Combat Antisemitism, ‘Protect Jewish Life’ in German Capital
Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner, left, and Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai shake hands for a photo taken during Wegner’s visit to Israel in February 2024. Photo: Senate Chancellery Berlin.
The capital of Germany will form a city partnership with Tel Aviv in an agreement that will be officially signed during Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai’s visit to Berlin next month.
Berlin made an announcement about the agreement on Friday ahead of Huldai’s trip to the city on May 5. Berlin already has 18 twin city partnerships, including with Brussels, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Jakarta, Kyiv, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mexico City, Moscow, Paris, Beijing, Prague, Tashkent, Tokyo, Warsaw and Windhuk.
“In recent years, there have been many efforts, including from my predecessors, to conclude a partnership between Berlin and an Israeli city,” said Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner in a released statement. “I am very pleased that after extremely trusting and intensive discussions with my counterpart from Tel Aviv, Mayor Ron Huldai, and representatives of the Israeli city, it has now been possible to agree on a twinning between Berlin and Tel Aviv. We can now deepen the long-standing and cordial connection between the two metropolises and fill it with even more life.”
Wegner noted the similarities between the two cities and added that through their partnership, Berlin and Tel Aviv will together tackle the rise of antisemitism. He highlighted how Berlin played a monumental role in the Holocaust, saying it was the city “where the Shoah was planned and enforced,” and said it has “a special responsibility and obligation towards Israel and to protect Jewish life in Berlin.”
“Especially in these challenging times, we set an example for diversity, cohesion and humanity,” Wegner stated.
Berlin’s state parliament unanimously approved a motion to establish a twin city partnership with Tel Aviv on March 28. The motion was jointly introduced by the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
Wegner, who is a member of CDU, was elected as the mayor of Berlin on April 27, 2023. He visited Israel in February 2024 for a solidarity visit, and was praised by Huldai for his “strong support of Israel” and “moving” commitment to helping to bring home the hostages abducted by Hamas terrorists from Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
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Now is The Time to Destroy the Iranian Threat
The new Chief of the General Staff, Major General Eyal Zamir, visits the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City, March 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
JNS.org – The Islamic Republic is actively working toward obtaining nuclear capability, Israel is planning an attack strategy, and the United States, finally, under President Donald Trump, is demonstrating it may be willing to use military force to stop the Iranian regime.
This week, the head of US Central Command, Gen. Michael Kurilla, visited Israel for talks with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir on regional security issues, the US military said in a statement on Thursday.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS Iran “must not be allowed to possess the weapons with which to carry out its homicidal agenda: its terrorist proxies must be degraded; its influence around the region rolled back; its nuclear facilities and ballistic missile and drone factories either shuttered or destroyed.”
To this end, the US has now taken the crucial step of placing the military option front and center to pressure Iran into folding.
The Pentagon has reportedly ordered the relocation of at least two Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries and a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile defense system from Asia to the Middle East.
There are also reports of a massive number of US military cargo flights traveling to the Middle East, with dozens of C-17s and several C-5s arriving at Isa Airbase in Bahrain as well as other bases near the Persian Gulf. Planes are also being delivered to Al Udeid Airbase in Qatar and Djibouti International Airport near Yemen.
The relocation of critical air-defenses such as THAAD and the repositioning of the USS Carl Vinson and its Carrier Strike Group to the Middle East, as well as the deployment of at least six B-2 “Spirit” Long-Range Strategic Stealth Bombers recently to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, suggest that the United States may be preparing for a major conflict soon with Iran.
However, Yossi Mansharof, an expert on Iran and Shi’ite political Islam at the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, has a different view. He told JNS that ending Iran’s nuclear program through military action is “not something the Trump administration is currently aiming for.”
Trump appears to want to exhaust all diplomatic avenues before turning to the military option—or authorizing Israel to do so.
Trump wants Tehran to negotiate and, according to Mansharof, “seeks to bring Iran to a point where the regime understands that the nuclear program not only fails to advance its goals but actually endangers it and Iran’s national security.”
It would be “appropriate” for Trump to set a time limit for the negotiations “in order to give them credibility and compel the Iranian side to take him seriously,” Mansharof said.
That being said, according to Mansharof, “Trump has made it clear that if Iran does not respond to his offer to negotiate, the US itself will attack Iran.”
He added that Trump “would support an Israeli strike against Iran and might even order the US military to join the Israeli attack and carry it out jointly—if he concludes that Tehran is unwilling to make sufficient concessions or is not showing seriousness in the negotiations.”
Mansharof also told JNS he believes Trump wants to make Iran understand that “continuing the current course—progress in the nuclear program, regional entrenchment, sponsoring Iran’s proxy network and developing the missile program—will harm the regime,” and therefore, it would be “in Iran’s own interest to reach an agreement with the US in these three areas.”
According to Misztal, however, the Trump administration “has not explicitly expressed its willingness to back an Israeli strike.”
“However,” he added, “the president’s general support for Israel and recent, increasingly bellicose warnings to Iran suggest that he is far more likely than any of his predecessors to not stop the Jewish state from doing whatever it feels is necessary to defend itself against the threat of a nuclear Iran.”
The threat is clear: Iran is aggressively advancing its belligerent agenda, disrupting the region as it pursues nuclear capabilities.
The IAEA report confirms what we already know
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) recently analyzed the International Atomic Energy Agency’s quarterly report, dated Feb. 26 and titled “Verification and monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015),” including Iran’s compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
In what should be highly concerning, the findings show that Iran “can convert its current stock of 60 percent enriched uranium into 174 kg [384 pounds] of weapon-grade uranium (WGU) in three weeks at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), enough for 7 nuclear weapons, taken as 25 kg [55 pounds] of WGU per weapon.”
Perhaps more worrying is that Iran “could produce its first quantity of 25 kg of WGU in Fordow in less than one week,” according to the findings.
Shockingly, the ISIS analysis notes that Iran’s “total stocks of enriched uranium and its centrifuge capacity at Fordow and the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) combined are sufficient to make enough WGU for over ten nuclear weapons in one month and 12-13 in two months.”
In addition, as in several past Iran Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards reports, the IAEA has been unable to obtain clear answers from Iran regarding the presence of “undeclared nuclear material and/or activities at four sites—Lavisan-Shian, Varamin, Marivan, and Turquzabad.”
The ISIS analysis highlights the IAEA’s “significantly reduced ability to monitor Iran’s complex and growing nuclear program.”
In short, the IAEA report confirms what we already know: Iran is on the march toward nuclearization and the IAEA lacks a clear picture of Iran’s activities.
Iran is developing its ballistic missile program
One could argue that Iran might be enriching uranium but has yet to further develop its nuclear payload delivery system.
But a March 16, 2025, report in The Maritime Executive magazine noted that MV Jairan, owned by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) and the second of two Iranian cargo vessels that are believed to have loaded sodium perchlorate in China, was recently documented passing through the Straits of Malacca en route to Bandar Abbas.
“Sodium perchlorate is the primary feedstock for making ammonium perchlorate, used by Iranian solid-fueled ballistic missiles,” according to the report.
The ship is believed to have been carrying enough sodium perchlorate to refine sufficient ammonium perchlorate to fuel approximately 250 medium-range missiles of the types used by Iran to attack Israel in Operations True Promise-1 and 2—on April 13 and Oct. 1, 2024, respectively.
Current Iranian ballistic projectiles that use ammonium perchlorate include medium-range Kheibar Shekan and Fattah-1 missiles, and the shorter-range Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar missiles.
Regional concerns over striking Iran
If the US and/or Israel do ultimately strike Iran, Mansharof believes the Sunni states in the region “will respond with concern, fearing they might become targets of an Iranian retaliatory strike.”
Iran’s proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen—now severely weakened—“will limit Iran’s ability to respond to an attack, but it still has the potential to be dangerous,” Mansharof said.
In his view, “guarantees from the Trump administration are necessary” to ensure that the US will safeguard the security of regional Sunni states.
According to Misztal, “the regional response will almost certainly be determined by the effectiveness of any strike on Iran and the forcefulness of the United States in deterring an Iranian retaliation.”
He suggested that “it is possible to imagine another situation like we saw on April 13, 2024: the United States together with international and regional forces acting in concert to warn and defend Israel from Iranian retaliation.”
Now is the time to destroy the Iranian nuclear threat
According to Mansharof, “now is the time to address the Iranian issue at its root. Israel and the U.S. should jointly develop a comprehensive strategy against the Iranian threat in its various components.”
If Tehran is weakened, according to Mansharof, “in both Iraq and Lebanon, voices calling for reconciliation with Israel—currently suppressed by Iran’s proxy network—would gain strength. Without Iran, Saudi Arabia would have no barrier preventing it from joining the Abraham Accords, and the circle of peace in the region would expand significantly.”
Neutralizing the Iranian threat “would also benefit European national security, according to Mansharof. “The same applies to Africa, where Iran promotes ‘Shi’itization,’ particularly in Nigeria, where it supports the local Islamic movement.”
Mansharof told JNS that weakening Iran “would significantly advance global stability, as there is no continent today where Iran does not operate in some form.”
Misztal told JNS that “after decades of both the United States and Israel vowing to prevent a nuclear Iran, actually doing so would have dramatically beneficial repercussions around the world.”
He seemed to agree with Mansharof, saying that “in the Middle East, it would usher in the potential for a new, peaceful and cooperative region by lifting the Iranian threat that has held the region hostage for at least the last decade, reestablishing Israel as a regional superpower not to be trifled with, and re-opening the path to normalization with Saudi Arabia and others.”
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