Schools in the Grip of Terror: How UNRWA Allowed Hamas Chiefs to Control Its Education System
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Executive Summary
“Most people who are engaged in underground organizations try not to have their involvement known publicly,” said Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, when asked why the UN employed for decades a Hamas terror chief who oversaw 2,000 teachers at UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
Yet this report reveals that the opposite is true: Hamas terror chiefs held top positions within UNRWA’s educational system despite publicly and repeatedly flaunting their support for and ties to Hamas and terrorism. UNRWA knew - and did nothing. The UN agency that raises more than $1 billion annually from Western states with the promise to educate Palestinian children with values such as peace, tolerance, and universal human rights, instead has handed
them over to the very operatives who recruit child soldiers, glorify suicide bombers, and preach the annihilation of a UN member state.
By knowingly employing Hamas terrorist leaders as school principals and teachers, and by allowing terror chiefs to head the unions that oversee thousands of their teachers, UNRWA didn’t just tolerate extremism - the Western-funded UN agency institutionalized it, turning classrooms into incubators of hate.
Over its 75 years of existence, UNRWA has churned out thousands of jihadi terrorists. Some of the most infamous include the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Massacre, or Mohammed Deif, the now-deceased commander of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, one of the masterminds of the October 7th atrocities in Israel.
This in itself should raise alarm bells for any donor that supports UNRWA out of genuine humanitarian concerns.
How is it that a so-called UN humanitarian agency has a track record for producing so many terrorists? This report tells the story of how Hamas took over the UNRWA staff unions that oversee thousands of teachers and school principals, and hijacked the agency’s entire education system.
As we established in our previous report, The Unholy Alliance: UNRWA, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, UNRWA’s operations on the ground are actually controlled by its local leaders, and not by the tiny handful of international staff such as Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, who serves only as the public face, fundraiser, and advocate for UNRWA. Many of these local leaders, especially in Gaza and Lebanon, are Hamas members or leaders, while thousands of UNRWA’s local employees are also active Hamas members. To put this in perspective, more than 99% of UNRWA’s 30,000 employees are area staff - local Palestinian Arabs -while only 120 employees at the agency are international staff, funded by the United Nations in New York. The Palestinian Arab local staff are the people who run all of UNRWA’s services, including its education system.
This is exemplified by the contrast in how UNRWA in Gaza dealt with the cases of Matthias Schmale, a senior member of UNRWA’s international staff who headed the agency’s Gaza operation, and Suhail Al-Hindi, a senior Hamas official and former UNRWA union leader.
In May 2021, it took less than ten days for UNRWA’s local leaders - Amir Al-Mishal, then head of the UNRWA Gaza Staff Union, working together with his predecessor Suhail Al-Hindi - to get Matthias Schmale expelled from Gaza after he had appeared to make one remark supporting Israel in a media interview.
Yet, when Suhail Al-Hindi was publicly appearing with Hamas terrorist leaders for many years - while he was serving as an UNRWA school principal and as head of the UNRWA Gaza Staff Union - UNRWA failed to fire him. Moreover, after UNRWA temporarily suspended Al-Hindi in 2011 and Hamas orchestrated mass protests paralyzing UNRWA’s services in Gaza, Al-Hindi successfully pressured UNRWA’s top international management to agree not to discipline staff for “external activities” -i.e., involvement with Hamas terror chiefs, the activities of which he had been accused.
Similarly, in Lebanon, UNRWA management failed to fire Fateh Sharif who had served for years simultaneously as the head of the UNRWA Lebanon Teachers’ Union and as a senior leader of Hamas in Lebanon. Furthermore, recognizing that she has no control over the local staff, UNRWA Lebanon Director Dorothee Klaus departed Lebanon for her own safety on the day that UNRWA announced that it had suspended five of Sharif’s UNRWA Lebanon Teachers’ Union associates for neutrality violations related to their Hamas activity.
UNRWA’s local leaders, like Al-Hindi and Al-Mishal in Gaza and Sharif and his colleagues in Lebanon view UNRWA as a political tool which “serves as an international witness to [Palestinian refugees’] displacement,” and a “right for the Palestinians until they return to Palestine,” i.e., until they undo the imagined injustice of Israel’s 1948 creation and replace it with a Palestinian state. At a December 2018 lecture about UNRWA, Al-Hindi himself said that UNRWA’s activities and services have “a very significant and positive impact” on the Palestinian people and on ensuring that “the Palestinian right of return remains intact.” Thus,
UNRWA’s local employees, represented by their staff unions, completely reject the very notion of neutrality as an attack on “Palestinian identity” and a form of “political blackmail” by the international staff, to silence their incitement against Israel in order to appease donor states.
When UNRWA’s international representatives like Philippe Lazzarini and Pierre Krähenbühl state that UNRWA’s role is to “act as a witness” to the “plight” or “injustice” of Palestinian refugees and insist that they will “defend” this aspect of UNRWA’s mandate, they do so to placate these local leaders - the ones who truly
control UNRWA’s operations on the ground. Adam Bouloukos, UNRWA’s Director of Affairs in the West Bank, acknowledged in an April 2024 interview with the Washington Post that UNRWA is “never able to de-link service provision from the right of return.”
Thus, it is UNRWA’s local Palestinian leadership who are calling the shots - people like Al-Hindi and Al-Mishal in Gaza, and Sharif and his colleagues in Lebanon - and not the other way around. If they reject the notion of UN neutrality, then UNRWA’s international leaders can have “the most robust neutrality mechanisms of any similar organization” - as Lazzarini likes to say - but they will never be able to implement these mechanisms on the ground.
Following the scandal over a 3,000-member UNRWA staff Telegram chat group that cheered the October 7th atrocities, exposed by UN Watch in January 2024, the UN created an “independent review” headed by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna “to assess whether UNRWA is doing everything within
its power to ensure neutrality and respond to allegations of serious neutrality breaches when they are made. The Colonna report, published on April 20, 2024, was extremely biased in favor of UNRWA and its staff, and was openly described by UNRWA officials as being designed to “reassure” the donor states - not to actually
expose wrongdoing.
Yet even the biased Colonna report expressly recognized that UNRWA staff unions are “politicized.” The report found that “over the years, political factions have used UNRWA’s staff unions to pressure the agency’s leadership and influence decisions on service delivery or project implementation” and that “the politicization
of staff unions is considered one of the most sensitive neutrality issues and needs to be addressed.” Nevertheless, as of August 2025, UNRWA had not completed implementation of a single Colonna recommendation related to the neutrality of staff unions.
The case studies in this report confirm the Colonna findings, highlighting UNRWA’s inability to enforce neutrality in both Gaza and Lebanon where senior UNRWA educators - Suhail Al-Hindi in Gaza and Fateh Sharif in Lebanon - simultaneously served as UNRWA school principals, heads of the local UNRWA staff
unions, and Hamas terror chiefs. Likewise, this report reveals that their associates and successors at the respective UNRWA staff unions in Gaza and Lebanon are also Hamas terrorists. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh himself had praised the Palestinian unions for their “role in the path of jihad.”
These case studies show in detail how Hamas has hijacked UNRWA’s education through its domination of the local UNRWA staff unions, particularly the teachers’ sectors of the unions, enabling Hamas to control UNRWA schools - the physical facilities, teachers, and curriculum - including by preventing the agency from implementing changes to de-radicalize the curriculum, blocking efforts by UNRWA to discipline staff for inciting antisemitism and jihadi terrorism, and placing Hamas operatives in senior educator positions in schools.
This fact that Hamas infiltrated UNRWA’s senior educator positions is corroborated by Israeli intelligence findings, based on Hamas membership lists and other documents found in Gaza, showing that over 15% of UNRWA’s senior educators in Gaza, in 60 UNRWA institutions, are members of the Hamas and Palestinian
Islamic Jihad terrorist groups.
As detailed in this report, following are some of the examples of how Hamas-controlled UNRWA staff unions, together with their former members who went on to overtly serve as senior Hamas leaders, repeatedly challenged or overturned decisions by UNRWA’s international leadership.
April 2011: UNRWA Gaza Staff Union headed by Suhail Al-Hindi vehemently opposed UNRWA management plan to introduce Holocaust education in schools. At his retirement party in April 2017, Al-Hindi was praised for successfully objecting to Holocaust education.
September to December 2011: After UNRWA suspended Al-Hindi for participating in events alongside Hamas leaders, Al-Hindi led three months of paralyzing protests at the end of which he was reinstated, and UNRWA agreed not to discipline employees for “external activities,” i.e., the type of Hamas activities Al-Hindi engaged in.
January to February 2017: UNRWA Spokesman Chris Gunness said that UNRWA is “tackling neutrality head on,” touted a new employee training, and promised to discipline employees. Al-Hindi and his UNRWA Gaza Staff Union vehemently objected, stating that “UNRWA’s laws and neutrality will not come at the expense of employees’ patriotism and Palestinian identity,” and UNRWA employees refuse to participate in trainings.
July to October 2018: Al-Hindi and Amir Al-Mishal, as heads of their respective unions, coordinated massive strikes against UNRWA over its firing of 1,000 contract workers due to funding cuts. The strikes, fully backed by Hamas, directly threatened UNRWA and shut down the UNRWA Gaza headquarters. In August, Matthias Schmale complained to the press, stating “I am the captain of the ship and I have 13,000 sailors, and they removed me from my command and confined me to the captain’s room.” By early October, most of UNRWA’s international staff were evacuated for their safety. The dispute was ultimately resolved in November 2018 and Arab states increased their funding to UNRWA shortly thereafter.
May 2021: Al-Mishal, as head of the UNRWA Gaza Staff Union, successfully pressured UNRWA to reinstate 27 employees that had been dismissed.
May 2021: In a TV interview, UNRWA Gaza Director Matthias Schmale acknowledged that Israeli missile strikes against Hamas in Gaza were “very precise.” Immediately, Al-Hindi accused Schmale of committing “a great sin” that he “must atone for.” Al-Mishal, as head of the UNRWA Gaza Staff Union, led mass protests against Schmale, demanding his resignation. A few days later, Hamas successfully expelled Schmale from Gaza.
February 2023: The Professional Unions Association, headed by Al-Hindi, instigated UNRWA teachers to join a strike “in solidarity with the righteous martyrs of Nablus.” Although UNRWA management refused to authorize the strike, it appears that UNRWA teachers defied this decision and joined anyway.
March 2023: Senior Hamas member and former UNRWA Gaza Staff Union leader Issam Al-Daalis facilitated UNRWA’s hiring of Hamas government teachers who had resigned in order to work for UNRWA.
March to June 2023: Hamas official Al-Daalis intervened with UNRWA’s Gaza Director Thomas White to resolve an UNRWA dispute with the Contractors Union.
April 2023: Under Al-Mishal, the UNRWA Gaza Staff Union rejected UNRWA management demands to implement a women’s membership quota in the union.
March to September 2024: In wake of paralyzing UNRWA protests in Lebanon in support of Fateh Sharif, the Hamas terror chief and head of the UNRWA Lebanon Teachers’ Union, UNRWA decided only to suspend but not to fire him. In late May 2024, after UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini flew into Lebanon and met with a coalition of terrorist groups in order to resolve the dispute, local Palestinian media reported that the matter was resolved positively for Sharif. UNRWA later insisted that Sharif was suspended and placed under investigation for months. Yet in spite of having all of the evidence of his terror ties, UNRWA never fired him.
October 2024 to March 2025: UNRWA suspended five of Sharif’s associates in the UNRWA Lebanon Teachers’ Union. This prompted the usual fierce opposition and protests from UNRWA staff. Despite clear and compelling evidence of their ties to and support for terrorism, it took nearly a year for UNRWA to fire them.
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