Why is Keir Starmer laundering British money for Hamas?

The British Establishment's support for UNWRA is telling.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer last night released a statement slamming the Israeli Knesset’s decision to ban UNWRA from operating within Israel. Members of the Knesset yesterday voted in favour of two bills, one which prevents UNWRA from operating within Israel, and another preventing contact between Israeli authorities and UNWRA.  

Here is Starmer’s statement in full: 

The UK is gravely concerned at the UNRWA bills that Israel’s Knesset has passed. This legislation risks making UNRWA‘s essential work for Palestinians impossible, jeopardising the entire international humanitarian response in Gaza and delivery of essential health and education services in the West Bank. 

The humanitarian situation in Gaza is simply unacceptable. We need to see an immediate ceasefire, the release of the hostages and a significant increase in aid to Gaza.

Under its international obligations, Israel must ensure sufficient aid reaches civilians in Gaza. 

Only UNRWA can deliver humanitarian aid at the scale and pace needed. We pay tribute to the 222 UNRWA staff who have lost their lives in the conflict. UNRWA has a UN mandate to support Palestinian refugees. We urge Israeli lawmakers to ensure that UNRWA can continue to deliver its essential work.

Let’s take a look at these claims. 

UNWRA is the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. It was set up in 1949 alongside the UNHCR, the UN’s Refugee Agency, which serves all other refugees worldwide. 

UNWRA claims that it provides “assistance and protection for registered Palestine refugees”, and that they do this by “running education, health, relief and social services, microfinance and emergency assistance programmes”. Geographically, they operate in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. 

According to UNWRA: “When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.”

One of the criticisms often leveled at UNWRA is that Palestine Refugee status is unique in being passed on down the generations, hence, 750,000 refugees has, over the years, blossomed into nearly 6 million. UNWRA’s response is that Palestinians aren’t given special status: “Under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found. As stated by the United Nations, this principle applies to all refugees.” 

It adds: “Protracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises.”

A game is being played here. Firstly, the refugees living in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria could of course be granted citizenship by those countries, which would immediately normalise their situations. In fact, the population of Jordan is confluent with the Palestinian population. Arabs have lived throughout the region for centuries. Borders have shifted, and as they have, the people living there have found themselves being labelled differently. Families living in the West Bank have, over the last century, lived under British rule, Jordanian rule, Israeli rule and Palestinian Authority rule. There are plenty of families with members living on both sides of the River Jordan; those to the west of the river have become Palestinian refugees, while those to the east are now Jordanian citizens, but they remain related. 

Palestinian flag, Jordanian flag - spot the difference.

Secondly, the Oslo Accords led to the creation, in 1994, of the Palestinian Authority, which places responsibility for the civic management of Palestinian areas under the control of the Palestinian Legislative Council, led by Mahmoud Abbas. In 2006, Israel also ceded control of Gaza, handing it to the Palestinian Authority, which then lost control to Hamas in the enclave’s only election to date. Abbas himself was supposed to run for election to renew his mandate in 2009, but hasn’t. The Palestinian State has a seat in the UN and is recognised as a sovereign nation by 146 of the 193 member states of the United Nations, including Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Russia, China, and India. 

More than half a million children attend UNWRA run schools. 1.9 million Palestinians access UNWRA’s health provisions. UNWRA’s budget for the 2024 fiscal year is US$1,147,262,000. That’s one billion, one hundred forty-seven million, two hundred sixty-two thousand US dollars. For 2025, it’s US$1,071,999,000. 

Every dollar that UNWRA spends on feeding, educating, nursing and financially assisting the Palestinian population, is a dollar freed up for the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to spend on paying rewards to terrorists and their families, stockpiling weapons, and building large underground bunker cities. 

By providing basic state functions for the Palestinian population, UNWRA relieves the PA and Hamas of the duty to do so. That’s a problem, not least for the Palestinian people who are being used as pawns in a never-ending war game. 

“jeopardising … delivery of essential … education services in the West Bank”

As mentioned above, UNWRA administers the schools attended by Palestinian children in five areas: Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Over half a million children attend those schools. According to UNWRA, 58% of its budget, more than half a billion dollars, is spent on education. 

UNWRA schools teach the curriculum of the host country. Consequently, the 320,000 students attending the 370 UNWRA-run schools in the West Bank and Gaza are taught a curriculum created by the Palestinian Authority.  

Researchers have repeatedly found that the PA fully embraces this opportunity to indoctrinate every Palestinian child to hate Jews (usually referred to as ‘Zionists’ in teaching materials), and to participate in violent actions to destroy Israel, like those seen on October 7th.

To take just one example, a November 2023 report by NGO Impact-se found evidence of reading comprehension being taught through violent stories promoting jihad and Palestinian nationalism: 

The text in one Palestinian school textbook read: 

The fedayeen [militants], despite their few primitive weapons, entered the Battle of Karameh with the fire of hand grenades and with bladed weapons. The daggers of the fedayeen fell on the necks of enemy soldiers. Some of the fedayeen wore explosive belts, thus turning their bodies into fire burning the Zionist tanks […]. Under heavy fire from the fedayeen and the Jordanian forces, and in the cover of darkness, the invading forces started to collect the bodies of their dead and injured in preparation for their retreat, leaving behind some of the bodies and body parts, to become food for wild animals on land and birds of prey in the sky. They were defeated, dragging their tails of defeat and failure.

[…] We will not forget the image of a burnt Zionist soldier, shackled by his commander in thick chains inside his tank, because he was too afraid to flee. The heroes hauled some of the tanks to Amman, to make them toys for the kids happy from the victory.

Discussion and Analysis

1-We will prove on the basis of the text that the Zionists underestimated the Arab forces.

2- We will explain why:

a- The Heroes of Karameh defeated the invading forces, despite the lack of weapons and manpower in their hands.

b- The Palestinians and the sons of the Arab nation race to join the ranks of the uprising.

c- The invading forces asked for a ceasefire.

Accompanying image from the school text book.

In another example, cited in a March 2023 report by the same organisation, a reading comprehension exercise for 13-year-olds contains a story about a Palestinian firebombing attack on a Jewish bus near the West Bank city of Ramallah, celebrating the attack as a ‘barbecue party’.

These are just two of countless examples uncovered over the last decade or so, many of which have been brought to the attention of western politicians whose governments fund Palestinian education, by Impact-se and other organisations. By 2018, the outcry had reached such a level that the European Union was forced to commission a report into incitement to violence in Palestinian textbooks. 

That report, published in 2021, was a whitewash. It found that “The textbooks affirm the importance of human rights” and that “References to human rights serve as a framework through which the textbooks address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of human rights violations in the context of international law.”

Again, this is semantic game-playing. What it means is that Palestinian children are taught the concept of human rights by telling them that their rights have been stolen by Israel, as a colonialist oppressor, and that armed resistance is justified.

Nonetheless, despite the pussy-footing, the findings were an embarrassment for the British government, which indirectly funds Palestinian education through UNWRA. The government was forced to issue a statement, promising to raise concerns about this with the Palestinian Authority.” Yet in the same statement it called on “all parties to condemn incitement wherever and whenever it occurs,” thereby suggesting that Israeli children are taught to hate in the same way that Palestinian children are (they aren’t).  

Just to hammer home the insult, a year after the report was released, in June 2022, the British Council, a quango sponsored by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, signed a landmark cooperation agreement with UNWRA, acknowledging a “decade long partnership” between the two. Dozens of schools across the Gaza strip and West Bank have been honoured in the International School Awards by the British Council over that time. According to UNWRA, “the honor celebrates schools that are successfully preparing students to be responsible global citizens by embedding international education into their curriculums (sic).”

It should also be noted that the British government has attempted to side-step the issue in the past by insisting that it doesn’t pay for textbooks, but for teachers. In 2018, the Department for International Development said in a statement that: “no UK taxpayers’ money to the Palestinian Authority goes to schools or to fund education materials that incite violence. DFID support to the Palestinian Authority contributes to the salaries of vetted teachers and education public servants in the West Bank.”

However, Impact-se has documented dozens of examples of UNWRA teachers and workers directly inciting and supporting jihadi violence, including the October 7th massacre. Bilal Ahmed is one such teacher, who lives and works in Gaza city. On the morning of October 7th, he posted two Koranic verses praising the attacks: “We sent against you servants of Ours - those of great military might, and they probed [even] into the homes, and it was a promise fulfilled” [Al-Isra’: 5] and “Indeed, their meeting of their fates is [for] the morning. Is not the morning near?" [Hud: 81]. Both of these verses speak of punishment of the Jews for the sin of having turned away from God. Maha ‘Abd al-Karim, another teacher working in an UNWRA school in Gaza, also posted Hud:81 to Facebook. 

Asmaa Rafiq Kuheil is an UNWRA English teacher. On October 7th she posted twice, saying “7 October 2023, Sculpture [commemorate] the Date” and “I want to go to Yebna [Yavne], Jaffa and Beersheba to eat manakish for breakfast and take pictures on the beach, who’s coming with me?”. 

In total, Impact-se have identified by name 133 UNWRA staff members who have posted antisemitic remarks and incitement to terror on social media, and a further 82 UNWRA staff members involved in drafting, supervising, approving, printing and distributing hateful educational content, and listed the schools they work at. UN Watch has also produced a report naming 153 UNWRA employees who glorified terror.  

We need to see … a significant increase in aid to Gaza. … Only UNRWA can deliver humanitarian aid at the scale and pace needed.

UNWRA has shown no real ability to protect aid intended for Gazans from the clutches of Hamas. Just last week, UNWRA tweeted that its compound in Gaza City had been looted by Hamas after its staff were forced out. 24,000 litres of fuel and a cache of medical supplies were among the looted assets. The tweets were swiftly deleted, with the agency later claiming that nothing had been taken. CCTV footage of the raid in action was papered over with a tweet claiming “The images circulating on social media were of a movement of basic medical supplies from the UNRWA warehouse to health partners.”

That claim was mocked by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which tweeted: “Did Hamas also break into your Twitter account? Or are you just scared of disappointing your terrorist friends?”

Hamas also steals food aid, beats Gazans attempting to access it, takes it to its own compounds and sells it back to the local population at hugely inflated prices, turning aid into a money-spinner for the terror group. UN workers, meanwhile, stand idly by, making a mockery of the claim that UNWRA is the “only” agency capable of delivering the aid — clearly it is not at all up to the task. 

But the assistance to Hamas goes much further than merely some stolen food and fuel. In June, a lawsuit was filed against senior UNWRA figures which claimed that the agency had helped Hamas skim over $1 billion in funding from its budget. 

The mechanism was somewhat protracted, but in essence, it involved paying UNWRA’s 13,000 employees in Gaza in dollars, cash. The employees then had to use Hamas money-changers to convert the currency to shekels, with Hamas taking a cut of between 10% and 25% for the ‘service’. Ludicrously, UNWRA has claimed it did nothing wrong, insisting that the employees chose to be paid in dollars as Gaza has no currency of its own. 

Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the agency, responded to the lawsuit saying: “The United Nations, including UNRWA, enjoys immunity from legal process, as do United Nations officials, including those serving with UNRWA.” (In effect: ‘So what? You can’t catch us’).

However, Touma and her colleagues may not have the last laugh. Gavi Mairone, a human rights lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement: “We do not believe UNRWA has immunity for aiding and abetting” the attacks on Israel. 

The full lawsuit, issued on behalf of over 100 Israeli plaintiffs who were affected by the October 7th attack, including one person who was held hostage, details dozens of ways in which UNWRA helped Hamas. These include offering safe harbour for Hamas to place its weapons and infrastructure in and under UNWRA facilities, including schools and hospitals, and looking the other way regarding UNWRA staff who were members of Hamas. 

According to the document, the UNWRA headquarters in Gaza City provided cover to a Hamas War Room, with Hamas computer servers located directly under UNWRA’s own servers, syphoning off the electricity required to keep them running. “In offices within UNRWA headquarters itself, the personal effects of senior Hamas military commanders and many weapons were found, including guns, ammunition, grenades and explosives. In the offices of UNRWA officials, intelligence tools and documents were found that testified that the same offices were also used by Hamas terrorists,” the suit notes.

“Hamas did not carry out these atrocities [on Oct 7] without assistance,” the suit further asserts. “It was aided and abetted by, [...] current or former senior officials [of UNWRA], as well as UNRWA itself, who collectively spent over a decade prior to the October 7 Attack helping Hamas build up the terror infrastructure and personnel that were necessary to carry out the October 7 Attack.”

It’s not clear where the figure of 222 UNWRA staff has come from, and therefore it’s difficult to ascertain whether Starmer is including the known Hamas terrorists who were also UNWRA staffers in this figure. 

However, what is known is that a number of UNWRA employees were also members of Hamas, and have therefore been killed by Israel as enemy combatants. Some took part personally in the October 7 massacre. 

They include 

• Muhammad Abu Attawi, a Hamas Nukbha force commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion who led the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7. Some 30 Israelis fleeing the Nova festival were hiding in the shelter when it was attacked by Attawi and his men. 16 were murdered, four were kidnapped, and seven survived. He was killed in an airstrike in mid-October. 

• Fathi al-Sharif, director of an UNRWA secondary school and head of the UNRWA Teachers Union in Lebanon, who also served as the leader of Hamas in Lebanon. in May, UNWRA teachers in Lebanon went on strike, demanding the reinstallment of al-Sharif after he was suspended for engaging in political activities on UNWRA premises. UNRWA Chief, Phillippe Lazzarini, was forced to travel to Beirut to end the strike, following which he insisted to the international community that the allegations were false.
  Three months later, the truth was revealed when Hamas responded to the killing of al-Sharif by Israel by releasing a statement confirming his position as head of Hamas in Lebanon. The statement noted: “he worked as a successful teacher and administrator, and contributed to building an educated and resistant generation, committed to the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, a career that was full of sacrifices, sweat and blood.”

• Ahed Al-Muqayyad, head of UNWRA’s operations in Gaza, was also killed in October during a targeted strike of Hamas fighters in northern Gaza. Al-Muqayyad appears to also have been a Hamas leader. According to one Palestinian source, al-Muqayyad was involved in overseeing the theft and resale of humanitarian aid by Hamas to the Palestinian population. Hamas’ official news channel, Al-Aqsa TV, also mourned his death, something that is normally reserved for Hamas leaders. 

Far from helping Palestinians, UNWRA has used its privileged position — and billions of dollars in international funding — to incite the Palestinian population to engage in terror, to fund the building of infrastructure designed for terrorist purposes, to shield terrorist organisations from physical attack by Israel, and to give terror groups political cover on the world stage. Indeed, one could say that UNWRA’s “essential work” is nothing less than ensuring the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has cost both populations so dearly in blood and gold.  

This has been understood for well over a decade now, but the current war, provoked by October 7, has laid this truth bare for all to see. Video after video has emerged from Gaza and Lebanon showing terror tunnels located right under the noses of UN workers. Image after image shows how UN institutions were used to stockpile and give cover to weapons and crucial infrastructure. 

Keir Starmer’s statement not only ignores all of this evidence, it refers repeatedly to aid, to the need to provide aid to Gaza, and the need to have UNWRA supply aid to Gaza. Given the above, one can only surmise that the British government is intent on continuing to launder money for Hamas through UNWRA under the guise of ‘aid’. 

That British taxpayer’s money is being used in this way is appalling in its own right. Add in the fact that the Mayor of London and the Metropolitan Police have allowed support for Hamas and Hezbollah to go unchecked on London’s streets week after week for over a year now, and we are forced to conclude that the British establishment itself support the aims and methods of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has stated as its goal the Islamisation of the whole world. Make of that what you will.