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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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Israel Says Missile Launched by Yemen’s Houthis ‘Most Likely’ Intercepted

Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi addresses followers via a video link at the al-Shaab Mosque, formerly al-Saleh Mosque, in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
The Israeli army said on Saturday that a missile fired from Yemen towards Israeli territory had been “most likely successfully intercepted,” while Yemen’s Houthi forces claimed responsibility for the launch.
Israel has threatened Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement – which has been attacking Israel in what it says is solidarity with Gaza – with a naval and air blockade if its attacks on Israel persist.
The Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said the group was responsible for Saturday’s attack, adding that it fired a missile towards the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
Since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023, the Houthis, who control most of Yemen, have been firing at Israel and at shipping in the Red Sea, disrupting global trade.
Most of the dozens of missiles and drones they have launched have been intercepted or fallen short. Israel has carried out a series of retaliatory strikes.
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Iran Holds Funeral for Commanders and Scientists Killed in War with Israel

People attend the funeral procession of Iranian military commanders, nuclear scientists and others killed in Israeli strikes, in Tehran, Iran, June 28, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Large crowds of mourners dressed in black lined streets in Iran’s capital Tehran as the country held a funeral on Saturday for top military commanders, nuclear scientists and some of the civilians killed during this month’s aerial war with Israel.
At least 16 scientists and 10 senior commanders were among those mourned at the funeral, according to state media, including armed forces chief Major General Mohammad Bagheri, Revolutionary Guards commander General Hossein Salami, and Guards Aerospace Force chief General Amir Ali Hajizadeh.
Their coffins were driven into Tehran’s Azadi Square adorned with their photos and national flags, as crowds waved flags and some reached out to touch the caskets and throw rose petals onto them. State-run Press TV showed an image of ballistic missiles on display.
Mass prayers were later held in the square.
State TV said the funeral, dubbed the “procession of the Martyrs of Power,” was held for a total of 60 people killed in the war, including four women and four children.
In attendance were President Masoud Pezeshkian and other senior figures including Ali Shamkhani, who was seriously wounded during the conflict and is an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as Khamenei’s son Mojtaba.
“Today, Iranians, through heroic resistance against two regimes armed with nuclear weapons, protected their honor and dignity, and look to the future prouder, more dignified, and more resolute than ever,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, who also attended the funeral, said in a Telegram post.
There was no immediate statement from Khamenei, who has not appeared publicly since the conflict began. In past funerals, he led prayers over the coffins of senior commanders ahead of public ceremonies broadcast on state television.
Israel launched the air war on June 13, attacking Iranian nuclear facilities and killing top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
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Israel, the only Middle Eastern country widely believed to have nuclear weapons, said it aimed to prevent Tehran from developing its own nuclear weapons.
Iran denies having a nuclear weapons program. The U.N. nuclear watchdog has said it has “no credible indication” of an active, coordinated weapons program in Iran.
Bagheri, Salami and Hajizadeh were killed on June 13, the first day of the war. Bagheri was being buried at the Behesht Zahra cemetery outside Tehran mid-afternoon on Saturday. Salami and Hajizadeh were due to be buried on Sunday.
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would consider bombing Iran again, while Khamenei, who has appeared in two pre-recorded video messages since the start of the war, has said Iran would respond to any future US attack by striking US military bases in the Middle East.
A senior Israeli military official said on Friday that Israel had delivered a “major blow” to Iran’s nuclear project. On Saturday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement that Israel and the US “failed to achieve their stated objectives” in the war.
According to Iranian health ministry figures, 610 people were killed on the Iranian side in the war before a ceasefire went into effect on Tuesday. More than 4,700 were injured.
Activist news agency HRANA put the number of killed at 974, including 387 civilians.
Israel’s health ministry said 28 were killed in Israel and 3,238 injured.
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Pro-Palestinian Rapper Leads ‘Death to the IDF’ Chant at English Music festival

Revellers dance as Avril Lavigne performs on the Other Stage during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm, in Pilton, Somerset, Britain, June 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Dylan Martinez
i24 News – Chants of “death to the IDF” were heard during the English Glastonbury music festival on Saturday ahead of the appearance of the pro-Palestinian Irish rappers Kneecap.
One half of punk duo based Bob Vylan (who both use aliases to protect their privacy) shouted out during a section of their show “Death to the IDF” – the Israeli military. Videos posted on X (formerly Twitter) show the crowd responding to and repeating the cheer.
This comes after officials had petitioned the music festival to drop the band. The rap duo also expressed support for the following act, Kneecap, who the BCC refused to show live after one of its members, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh – better known by stage name Mo Chara – was charged with a terror offense.
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