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UNRWA’s Role Is to Perpetuate the War Against Israel
Palestinians pass by the gate of an UNRWA-run school in Nablus in the West Bank. Photo: Reuters/Abed Omar Qusini.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was created in December 1949, after six Arab armies were defeated in their failed attempt to destroy the newly founded State of Israel.
Almost from its inception, UNRWA was hijacked to serve the ongoing battle against Israel’s existence, with a set of refugee conditions and policies that were exclusively and uniquely applicable to Palestinian Arabs.
These conditions and policies were created because, unlike Israel, which absorbed the vast majority of Jews forced out by the Arab and Muslim world, the Arab countries refused to accept Palestinian refugees. Despite their abundant resources, these countries chose to keep people in refugee camps, rather than helping them build new lives. The Palestinians in Jordan’s illegally occupied West Bank were eventually granted Jordanian citizenship, but somehow still kept their refugee status — in contrast to what happens to all other refugees who gain citizenship.
UNRWA was tasked to look after the needs of Arabs displaced by the conflict, by providing aid, education, and accommodation, but, instead, it became twisted into a mechanism for continuing the Arab war on Israel.
UNRWA created a farcical definition of a refugee, designating it as anyone “whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.” Worse, this was later expanded to include all descendants, meaning anyone who lived in Mandate Palestine for less than two years and left for any reason would be declared a refugee — a status that would be passed on to their descendants and descendants’ descendants until the end of time, even if they attained citizenship in another country.
This is in stark contrast to every other refugee group on earth, and it explains the ever-increasing Palestinian refugee numbers from roughly 700,000 in 1948 to at least 5.9 million today.
Every facet of UNRWA is geared towards perpetuating these people’s existence as homeless “refugees” until the day they can “return” to non-existent ancestral homes in Israel — a dangerous fantasy that will never happen, as it would eliminate the world’s only Jewish state.
UNRWA’s mandate forbids the resettlement of any refugee, instead actively requiring they be kept in this permanent state of statelessness and rootlessness. Its education system teaches Palestinians to hate Jews, and that Israel is an illegitimate state. In textbooks, the entire area of the Jewish state is labelled as “Palestine”.
Needless to say, UNRWA’s unprecedented policies and behavior align perfectly with Hamas’ ideology and charter that call for the destruction of Israel through armed violence and the death or expulsion of its Jewish citizens.
When Hamas seized power in a violent coup in Gaza in June 2007, it began to embed its fighters and military infrastructure and equipment in all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure including UNRWA facilities. It must also be remembered that Hamas already had popular support in Gaza, winning a plurality of votes in the 2006 Palestinian elections, and as that support grew, more UNRWA staff members were affiliated with Hamas.
In May 2023, just a few months before the October 7 terrorist attacks, the EU Parliament passed a resolution, for the fourth year in a row, that condemned the “hateful” content in Palestinian Authority textbooks used by UNRWA, and demanded that “all anti-Semitic references are deleted, and examples that incite hatred and violence are removed.”
That request was ignored, yet the money from donor states to UNRWA kept on flowing.
Unsurprisingly, when Hamas terrorists, including civilians and other Gaza-based terrorist organizations, invaded Israel from Gaza on October 7, UNRWA employees participated in the slaughter, rape, torture, and kidnappings. Even most of the terrorists who were not UNRWA employees, would have been educated in the culture of hate taught in UNRWA schools.
So it’s difficult to take UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres seriously when he says that he was “horrified” by the revelations that at least 12 UNRWA officials and members were directly involved in the massacre that day, along with allegations that 10% of the 13,000 UNRWA staff in Gaza are members of terror groups, and perhaps half have a close family connection to Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
Israeli officials have warned about UNRWA for decades. The UN — where anti-Israel bias has been entrenched into the bureaucratic structures — deliberately chose to ignore the warnings.
As a result of these revelations, many countries, including the US and Australia, have suspended funding to UNRWA, pending an investigation into its terror links. And while it’s true that UNRWA distributes most of the humanitarian aid in Gaza, it’s also true that over the past four months, Hamas has been stealing up to 66% of that aid, according to Israeli intelligence sources. So, in effect, UNRWA acts as a supply line for Hamas, rather than for needy Gazans.
For UNRWA, the 1948 war continues forever, and UNRWA’s very existence is designed to ensure an open, festering wound of the eternal, ever-expanding Palestinian refugees, which is never allowed to heal.
For any progress toward genuine peace, UNRWA needs to be dismantled sooner rather than later, and its duties taken over by other, less tainted UN bodies, such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN’s main agency for looking after all the world’s millions of refugees who are not Palestinian. UNHCR, unlike UNRWA, has successfully resettled more than 50 million refugees and helped them to rebuild their lives, rather than remain immersed in violence and hatred.
Justin Amler is a Policy Analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).
The post UNRWA’s Role Is to Perpetuate the War Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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New Zealand Prime Minister Says Israel’s Netanyahu Has ‘Lost the Plot’
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon attends a press conference with Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (not pictured) at the Australian Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Aug. 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Tracey Nearmy
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said on Wednesday that Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu had “lost the plot” as the country weighs whether to recognize a Palestinian state.
Luxon told reporters that the lack of humanitarian assistance, the forceful displacement of people, and the annexation of Gaza were utterly appalling and that Netanyahu had gone way too far.
“I think he has lost the plot,” added Luxon, who heads the center-right coalition government. “What we are seeing overnight, the attack on Gaza City, is utterly, utterly unacceptable.”
Luxon said earlier this week New Zealand was considering whether to recognize a Palestinian state. Close ally Australia on Monday joined Canada, the UK, and France in announcing it would do so at a UN conference in September.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has reached “unimaginable levels,” Britain, Canada, Australia and several of their European allies said on Tuesday, calling on Israel to allow unrestricted aid into the war-torn Palestinian enclave.
Israel recently increased the flow of humanitarian supplies into Gaza, after imposing a temporary embargo in an effort to keep them out of the hands of Hamas, which often steals the aid for its own use and sells the rest to civilians at inflated prices. While facilitating the entry of thousands of aid trucks into Gaza, Israeli officials have condemned the UN and other international aid agencies for their alleged failure to distribute supplies, noting much of the humanitarian assistance has been stalled at border crossings or stolen. According to UN data, the vast majority of humanitarian aid entering Gaza is intercepted before reaching its intended civilian recipients.
Ahead of Wednesday’s parliamentary session, a small number of protesters gathered outside New Zealand’s parliament buildings, beating pots and pans. Local media organixation Stuff reported protesters chanted “MPs grow a spine, recognize Palestine.”
On Tuesday, Greens parliamentarian Chloe Swarbrick was removed from parliament’s debating chamber after she refused to apologize for a comment insinuating government politicians were spineless for not supporting a bill to “sanction Israel for its war crimes.”
Swarbrick was ordered to leave the debating chamber for a second day on Wednesday after she again refused to apologize. When she refused to leave, the government voted to suspend her.
“Sixty-eight members of this House were accused of being spineless,” House speaker Gerry Brownlee said. “There has never been a time where personal insults like that delivered inside a speech were accepted by this House and I’m not going to start accepting it.”
As Swarbrick left, she called out “free Palestine.”
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Gaza ‘Journalist’ Was a Hamas Terrorist — But the Media Ignores the Evidence
The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon
Outrageous reporting this week enabled terrorism to hide behind the mask of journalism, portraying an Al Jazeera reporter targeted by Israel in Gaza as a heroic figure.
In reality, it was a sea of lies that ignored clear evidence that Anas al-Sharif was, in fact, a member of Hamas.
Almost all foreign media outlets mourned the death of al-Sharif in an IDF strike on Monday, August 12, while doubting or altogether omitting hard evidence presented by the IDF proving that he was a commander of a terrorist cell in a Hamas guided rockets platoon.
Western press have eaten up Al Jazeera *cough* Hamas propaganda over Anas al-Sharif’s elimination by the IDF.
Here’s a
of some of the most egregious coverage. https://t.co/zrgp91N4EP
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 12, 2025
The IDF presented an internal Hamas document where al-Sharif was registered as a soldier and team commander, as well as a photo showing him embraced by former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7, 2023, attack against Israel.
كما قلنا منذ البداية ورفض البعض تصديقه: لا يجلس مجالس الارهابيين إلا الإرهابي. #أنس_الشريف لم يكن صحفيًا بل إرهابيًا حمساويًا pic.twitter.com/KG6DPrlyoW
— افيخاي ادرعي (@AvichayAdraee) August 11, 2025
The media did not even bother displaying these. Instead, al-Sharif’s photo in a press vest circulated everywhere, and Israel’s claims were either ignored or undermined.
Sky News, for example, lauded al-Sharif as a “crucial reporting voice,” but IDF evidence of his Hamas affiliation was disregarded.
On social media network X, Sky News also posted a story quoting Al Jazeera’s condemnation of Al Sharif’s “assassination.” The network did not respond when Israeli former hostage Shlomi Ziv commented: “I was held by a journalist in captivity and his father was a Doctor!!!!!!!”
Meanwhile, the AP and Reuters — the world’s two leading news agencies — failed to properly report what the IDF was stating.
The AP simply lied, saying that Israel said “without producing evidence that al-Sharif had led a Hamas cell. It was a claim the news organization and al-Sharif had denied” — as if a denial is a clear-cut refutation of hard evidence.
Reuters did the same, saying Israel did not disclose any evidence.
And instead of headlines such as “IDF kills Hamas terror cell leader posing as ‘Al Jazeera’ journalist,” both agencies’ headlines were one-sided.
They took the Palestinian narrative that Israel targets journalists as gospel, even though this narrative is based on the Qatari-funded network that supports Hamas and the denial that its worker has been exposed as a terrorist:
The New York Times went as far as eulogizing al-Sharif and the four other journalists who were killed in the strike, displaying Israel’s proven claims as mere accusations.
Nowhere did the Times display al-Sharif’s photo with Sinwar or the documents showing his Hamas affiliation.
This evidence was also omitted from a Washington Post headline and sub-header that made Israel look like it deliberately targets journalists:
Meanwhile, CNN produced hard-hitting videos showing al-Sharif’s Al Jazeera’s dispatches from war-torn Gaza, but without showing any of Israel’s evidence.
Ultimately, this is symptomatic of a wider problem throughout this war — whereby the media treat IDF statements with disdain while treating the claims of a terrorist organization as fact.
All these outlets, of course, failed to mention that al-Sharif conveniently ignored Gazans’ protests against Hamas throughout the war. Courage, apparently, applies only to reporting what Hamas wants the world to hear.
And almost none of them mentioned that al-Sharif was not the first terrorist who posed as a journalist in Gaza, perhaps in an attempt to hide the fact that it is a common phenomenon — from CNN’s Hassan Eslaiah to Al Jazeera’s Ismail Al Ghoul, among others.
Will the media ever doubt the Qatari network’s statements as it doubts the IDF?
Will they ever question what any journalist in Gaza says?
They can’t. Because they project their own conceptions on what it is like to cover a warzone, especially Gaza. They think that any journalist there deserves automatic solidarity and protection, instead of professional scrutiny.
With a pre-existing pro-Palestinian bias – it means the entire global media sings to Hamas’ tune.
Indeed, it proves Hamas’ evil brilliance of using the term “journalist” as a cover for terrorism. If anyone doubts it, it is an assault on the freedom of the press. Thus, the global media outcry over al-Sharif and his colleagues is a betrayal of real journalism, manipulated to demonize Israel and enable attacks against it. The outcry should have been directed against the exploitation of respected titles to promote terrorist agendas or fire rockets at innocent civilians.
Al Jazeera has already succeeded in promoting its own Hamas-friendly narrative in the aftermath of al-Sharif and his colleagues’ deaths — one where Israel is attempting to “silence voices” from revealing the truth of what is going on inside Gaza. As the IDF gears up for a potential invasion of Gaza City, we can expect to hear more of this narrative, as Al Jazeera and its fellow travelers in Western media falsely claim that Israel is attempting to cover up alleged crimes by deliberately targeting media workers.
The truth is quite the opposite. But it is unlikely to be reported.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Israeli Military Says Chief of Staff Approved ‘Main Concept’ for Attack Plan in Gaza
The new Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, visits the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City, March 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military said on Wednesday that chief of staff Eyal Zamir has approved the “main concept” for an attack plan in the Gaza Strip.
Israel has said it will launch a new offensive and seize control of Gaza City, which it captured shortly after the war’s outbreak in October 2023 before pulling out.