UNRWA schools are grooming children for jihad

For example, Suhail Al-Hindi, a founding member of Hamas, simultaneously served as a Hamas leader, an UNRWA principal and head of the Gaza staff union, overseeing the education of 220,000 children. When UNRWA tried to fire him in 2011 for his open terror activities, he organised mass strikes and protests backed by Hamas. UNRWA soon caved, reinstating him and pledging not to discipline staff for “external activities.”

Today, Al-Hindi is a senior figure for the terror group, based in Turkey. Earlier this month, he was present alongside the top Hamas leadership in Qatar while meeting their Iranian backers. He calls on “every Muslim to rise up” and insists that “death fighting jihad” is the “highest aspiration.” Undoubtedly, this rhetoric shaped the education for hundreds of thousands of UNRWA students while under his watch.

The story is the same in Lebanon. Fateh Sharif, Hamas’s top leader there, was also an UNRWA principal and head of its teachers’ union in the country. When international management tried to remove him, he orchestrated strikes that paralysed UNRWA’s Beirut headquarters. But Sharif was never fired, and even while suspended, he continued to influence school operations until Israel eliminated him in September 2024.

It is Hamas  – not the UN – that runs UNWRA

Immediately after his death, Hamas eulogised him for raising “an educated generation committed to the resistance.” UNRWA’s staff union honoured him as a “martyr” who spent his life instilling children with the duty to “defend Palestine.”

Let there be no doubt, this is not about rogue employees – it is systemic. Moreover, successors to Al-Hindi and Sharif are also Hamas operatives. UNRWA’s schools are effectively controlled by a terror group, with international staff powerless to intervene. The 2024 Colonna report, meant to assess UNRWA’s neutrality but widely seen as sympathetic, still found its staff unions “politicised.” By August 2025, UNRWA admitted that not a single recommendation on union neutrality had been implemented.

In practice, it is Hamas – not the UN –who runs UNRWA. This is not surprising considering that fewer than 1 per cent of UNRWA’s 30,000 employees are international. The rest are local Palestinians—many openly tied to Hamas and PIJ—who control hiring, curricula, and discipline.

Furthermore, the few international officials who cross Hamas don’t last. In 2021, Gaza’s UNRWA staff forced the expulsion of Matthias Schmale, the agency’s top foreign official, after he made comments seen as too sympathetic to Israel. That Hamas could dictate the ouster of UNRWA’s top foreign official, while the agency is powerless to dismiss men like Al-Hindi and Sharif, makes clear who truly holds the reins.

For Hamas and its supporters, UNRWA is not a humanitarian agency but a political weapon. Its schools indoctrinate children with the so-called “right of return,” teaching them that their destiny is to “return to Palestine”—in practice, to destroy Israel.

October 7 was not an aberration. It was the direct product of this indoctrination.

UNRWA is not preventing extremism – it is producing it. Dominated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, its staff unions are controlled by terrorists, and its classrooms have become factories of hatred. Donor countries like the UK, which recently pledged an additional £20 million to UNRWA, are not supporting education but subsidising a system that grooms children for jihad.

UNRWA cannot be reformed. To sustain it is to sustain extremism. Dismantling it is the only hope of breaking the cycle of indoctrination and violence.

If the world truly wants peace, it must face a hard truth: so long as UNRWA exists in its current form, Palestinian children will be raised not on a curriculum of opportunity, but on a curriculum of war.

Dina Rovner is the legal adviser of UN Watch