The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has come under fire after the New York Times broke the story that twelve UNRWA staff members took part in the 7 October massacre in which Hamas terrorists murdered around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli and some foreign civilians.

The revelations are based on detailed intelligence reports that tracked the employees’ cell phones to sites where Israeli civilians were killed as well as documents recovered from Hamas terrorists, both living and dead.

The NYT’s scoop was followed up by the Wall Street Journal which reported that 10 per cent of UNRWA staff (1,200 employees) are members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or have ties to those organisations, and about half the employees have a close relative who is a member of one of the two groups, both of which are designated terrorist organisations.

According to intelligence reports on which the newspaper reports are based, almost a quarter of UNRWA’s male employees have ties to Hamas. This is a higher percentage than in the general population where about 15 per cent of adult males are linked to Hamas. This might explain why UNRWA says at least 152 of its employees have been killed in the conflict – were they Hamas fighters rather than civilians fleeing the battle?

The most surprising fact about these revelations is that the story was broken by the New York Times because the grey lady’s journalistic credibility has taken a battering over the last decade. Former NYT editor James Bennet wrote in December that, ‘The (NY) Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist’. Since the NYT presumably got the story from someone senior in the Biden administration it probably had to set aside its Trump Derangement Syndrome for long enough to scrutinise the material and report it.

What is not surprising is that UNRWA is once again exposed as a front organisation for terrorists. The pernicious role of UNRWA in the plight of Palestinians is a very old story that goes right back to its creation after the invasion of the fledging state of Israel in 1948 by the armies of its five Arab neighbours.

UNRWA was established in 1949 to assist all refugees created by the conflict – both Jewish and Arab – whether they were located in Israel or in Arab states. From 1952 however, the Israeli government took responsibility for those within Israel and also absorbed another 800,000 Jews that were summarily exiled from Arab states.

Arab countries however have refused to do likewise, insisting that Palestinians, unlike any other refugees, don’t have to be absorbed by the state in which they reside but must be given the right to return to Israel even if they want to destroy it. The Arab refusal to absorb Palestinians into their states even when they have lived there for generations or to give them the same rights as all other citizens permanently perpetuates the Palestinian crisis.

Thus, UNRWA has a mandate which has to be renewed every three years but is now entering its 75th year. It employs more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon and provides billons of dollars in funding for Palestinians. Meanwhile, Palestinians outside these areas, and every other refugee in the world, is looked after by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees getting far less aid money.

This is a crazy state of affairs but it gets worse. In January 2021, outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed UNRWA’s dirty little (or rather dirty big) secret. Of the 5.9 million people that UNRWA claims are Palestinian refugees, fewer than 200,000 meet the official criteria for refugee status because they were displaced by the 1948 war. The rest are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren which UNRWA automatically registers as refugees.

It’s bad enough that UNRWA is falsely claiming funding for fake refugees but it gets worse. It uses that money to print text books to teach Palestinian children to incite hatred of Israel and Jews. It teaches tiny tots how to do maths by counting the number of terrorist martyrs and teaches grammar with phrases such as, ‘Jihad is one of the doors to Paradise’.

It should be no surprise then that seven of the twelve employees that have been sacked for taking part in the Hamas bloodbath on 7 October were teachers including two who were maths teachers, two who were Arab language teachers, and one who was a primary school teacher.

The Trump administration suspended its funding to UNRWA in 2018 because of terrorist text books amongst other things but when the Biden administration came to power it renewed the funding, just as it removed the Houthis from its list of designated terrorists, restarted its attempts to renew its Iran nuclear deal, and has renewed its ten-year lease of land in Qatar for its largest US airforce base in the Middle East.

The US is by far the largest funder of UNRWA and has provided over $US7 billion between 1950 and the present – $1 billion just under the Biden administration.

But make no mistake. Every dollar that UNRWA spends, whether on terror text books or something more innocuous, frees up a dollar that Hamas can spend on terror tunnels, rockets, planning massacres, and recruiting jihadists.

And just to be clear, UNRWA doesn’t even recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation so why should it avoid working with it?

It was to this organisation that Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong agreed to give over $AU20 million simply asking for a reassurance from the Palestinian Authority that the money wouldn’t be diverted to terrorists. The money was intended to be spent on children’s education. One can just imagine the textbooks that it could fund – My Little Book of Jihad or J is for Jew-Hatred? .

The Albanese government’s policy in the Middle East has been a disaster from its appalling delay in declaring 7 October a terrorist attack to funding the UNRWA and failing to help defend the Red Sea from Houthi terrorists.

Labor under Bob Hawke was truly a great friend of Israel and a staunch defender of the West. Sadly, it’s impossible to say either of those things of Labor today. Australia, Israel and the West are weaker as a result.