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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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Former Columbia University President Appointed as UK Economic Adviser

Columbia University administrators and faculty, led by President Minouche Shafik, testified before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, 2024. Photo: Jack Gruber/Reuters Connect
i24 News – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has named Minouche Shafik, former president of Columbia University, as his chief economic adviser at Downing Street, a move aimed at stabilizing the country’s fragile economy and averting a potential budget crisis.
Shafik, an economist of Egyptian origin with dual British and American nationality, has held senior roles at the Bank of England, the IMF, and the World Bank.
She later led the London School of Economics and was elevated to the House of Lords in 2020.
Her tenure in the United States was more turbulent. Shafik stepped down as president of Columbia University in 2024 after just a year in office, amid fierce criticism over her handling of pro-Palestinian protests following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza.
US officials accused her of failing to confront antisemitism on campus, while students and faculty condemned her decision to call in police to dismantle protest encampments.
Since returning to Britain, Shafik has played an active role in policy and cultural institutions. She advised Foreign Secretary David Lammy on international aid reform, has chaired the Victoria & Albert Museum since January, and led the “Economy 2030” inquiry for the Resolution Foundation, where she argued for reforms to the UK’s system of wealth taxation.
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Israel Mulls West Bank Annexation in Response to Moves to Recognize Palestine

The Jordan Valley. Photo: Юкатан via Wikimedia Commons.
Israel is considering annexation in the West Bank as a possible response to France and other countries recognizing a Palestinian state, according to three Israeli officials and the idea will be discussed further on Sunday, another official said.
Extension of Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank – de facto annexation of land captured in the 1967 Middle East war – was on the agenda for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet meeting late on Sunday that is expected to focus on the Gaza war, a member of the small circle of ministers said.
It is unclear where precisely any such measure would be applied and when, whether only in Israeli settlements or some of them, or in specific areas of the West Bank like the Jordan Valley and whether any concrete steps, which would likely entail a lengthy legislative process, would follow discussions.
Any step toward annexation in the West Bank would likely draw widespread condemnation from the Palestinians, who seek the territory for a future state, as well as Arab and Western countries. It is unclear where US President Donald Trump stands on the matter. The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar did not respond to a request for comment on whether Saar had discussed the move with his US counterpart Marco Rubio during his visit to Washington last week.
Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the prime minister supports annexation and if so, where.
A past pledge by Netanyahu to annex Jewish settlements and the Jordan Valley was scrapped in 2020 in favor of normalizing ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the Abraham Accords brokered by Trump in his first term in office.
The office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The United States said on Friday it would not allow Abbas to travel to New York for the United Nations gathering of world leaders, where several US allies are set to recognize Palestine as a state.
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Israel Pounds Gaza City Suburbs, Netanyahu to Convene Security Cabinet

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli forces pounded the suburbs of Gaza City overnight from the air and ground, destroying homes and driving more families out of the area as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet was set on Sunday to discuss a plan to seize the city.
Residents of Sheikh Radwan, one of the largest neighborhoods of Gaza City, said the territory had been under Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes throughout Saturday and on Sunday, forcing families to seek shelter in the western parts of the city.
The Israeli military has gradually escalated its operations around Gaza City over the past three weeks, and on Friday it ended temporary pauses in the area that had allowed for aid deliveries, designating it a “dangerous combat zone.”
“They are crawling into the heart of the city where hundreds of thousands are sheltering, from the east, north, and south, while bombing those areas from the air and ground to scare people to leave,” said Rezik Salah, a father of two, from Sheikh Radwan.
An Israeli official said Netanyahu’s security cabinet will convene on Sunday evening to discuss the next stages of the planned offensive to seize Gaza City, which he has described as Hamas’ last bastion.
A full-scale offensive is not expected to start for weeks. Israel says it wants to evacuate the civilian population before moving more ground forces in.
HAMAS SPOKESPERSON TARGETED
Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israeli forces had targeted Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson of Hamas’ armed wing. Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Abu Ubaida was killed. Two Hamas officials contacted by Reuters did not respond to requests for comment.
Gaza health authorities said 15 people, including five children, were killed in the attack on a residential building in the heart of Gaza City.
Abu Ubaida, also known as Hozayfa Al-Khalout, is a well-known figure to Palestinians and Israelis alike, close to Hamas’ top military leaders and in charge of delivering the group’s messages, often via video, for around two decades, delivering statements while wearing a red keffiyeh that concealed his face.
The US targeted him with sanctions in April 2024, accusing him of leading the “cyber influence department” of al-Qassam Brigades.
In his last statement on Friday, he warned that the planned Israeli offensive on Gaza City would endanger the hostages.
On Saturday, Red Cross head Mirjana Spoljaric said an evacuation from the city would provoke a massive population displacement that no other area in the enclave is equipped to absorb, with shortages of food, shelter and medical supplies.
“People who have relatives in the south left to stay with them. Others, including myself, didn’t find a space as Deir Al-Balah and Mawasi are overcrowded,” said Ghada, a mother of five from the city’s Sabra neighborhood.
Around half of the enclave’s more than 2 million people are presently in Gaza City. Several thousand were estimated to have left the city for central and southern areas of the enclave.
Israel’s military has warned its political leaders that the offensive is endangering hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza. Protests in Israel calling for an end to the war and the release of the hostages have intensified in the past few weeks.