With Biden-Harris DOJ’s Help, Hamas’s U.N. Collaborators Evade October 7 Reckoning

Instead of attempting to shield it from a civil suit, the DOJ should support holding the UNRWA accountable for its role in the 10/7 massacre.

A fter Hamas’s October 7 attack shocked the world, we learned that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) had been complicit in that day’s barbarities. That rendered it politically untenable for the Biden-Harris administration to continue pouring hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into UNRWA’s coffers.

It’s yet another policy that the media–Democrat complex has shielded Vice President Harris from having to answer for — not that the Trump campaign has noticeably pressed the point.

To underwrite the UNRWA is to underwrite Hamas. Realizing that, President Trump cut the agency off — the UNRWA gravy train having hit nearly $400 million per annum by the end of the Obama-Biden administration. Spurred by the pro-Hamas agitators in their base, Biden, Harris, and congressional Democrats revived the UNRWA’s raid on the public fisc.

Yet after the October 7 revelations, even Biden and Harris perceived that a “pause” in American largesse was in order, given the blood on agency’s hands: the murder of nearly 1,200 Israelis, the maiming and rape of hundreds more, and the abduction of 251 hostages. (The carnage included 43 Americans killed, nine of those hostages; it is hoped that four Americans are among the 64 hostages still believed to be alive, rather than the 33 presumed dead.) For the moment, with all that was already in the pipeline, Secretary of State Antony Blinken could quietly assure transnational progressives that the effect of the pause would be negligible and its duration temporary.

Naturally, the drying up of funding has not meant an end of Biden-Harris administration support for Hamas’s enablers. To the contrary, the Justice Department has just thrown the UNRWA a legal life-preserver.

In a submission to federal court in Manhattan, the DOJ has told Judge Analisa Torres (an Obama appointee) that the UNRWA enjoys immunity from the lawsuit filed by 101 victims of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities. This after the participation of UNRWA officials in the attack was so well-established that, desperate to save face, the agency fired a dozen staffers and paid lip service to the need for a full investigation — risibly but predictably portrayed as a serious commitment by the White House.

In a more fitting response, NR’s editors called for the termination of the UNRWA, describing its complicity in the October 7 attacks as “arguably the biggest scandal in the U.N.’s history” — we needed to hedge with “arguably” because there is so much competition for that ignominious crown. I contended in addition that the UNRWA should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). It is not enough to say that the agency aids and abets Hamas: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, which emerged in the first Intifada, has killed Americans, is dedicated to Israel’s annihilation, and has been a designated FTO since Congress created the FTO designation nearly 30 years ago. It is likely that there would be no Hamas without the UNRWA.

Steeped in sharia-supremacist ideology, the agency, since its 1949 creation, has been singularly responsible for perpetuating the jihad against Jews and Israel, which long predates the Jewish state’s victory in the 1948 War of Independence. (Israel’s independence is known as the Nakba, or catastrophe, in UNRWA and other sharia-supremacist circles; over time, the observance has been fine-tuned from a lament over the afront of Jewish presence in territory claimed by Muslims — regarded as an unwelcome sliver of Dar al-Harb in Dar al-Islam — to the more trendy, “genocide”-focused lament over the expulsion from their homes of “Palestinians,” even though the “Palestinian” designation did not exist at the time.)

Rather than carry out its mandate of helping true refugees find asylum after they’ve fled from war or persecution in their homelands, the UNRWA has metastasized the so-called refugee crisis into a weapon of the jihad. The UNRWA has done this by redefining, solely for Palestinians, what it means to be a refugee.

Daniel Pipes has diagnosed this process: The UNRWA has (a) absurdly allowed “refugee” status to be transferred from generation to generation without limitation; (b) permitted “refugees” to maintain that status even after they’ve acquired a nationality (note: from 1948 until 1967, Jordan controlled the West Bank and granted citizenship to its inhabitants; at the same time, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip lived under Egyptian rule, although Cairo did not grant them citizenship); and (c) persisted in labeling Palestinians as “refugees” even though they are settled in the territories slated to become the Palestinian national homeland — indeed, territories that would have achieved statehood decades ago were it not for the Palestinian refusal to concede Israel’s right to exist and to renounce terrorism.

By this sleight of hand, UNRWA has expanded the Palestinian refugee population to nearly 6 million when, in point of fact, fewer than 700,000 Arabs were displaced from Israel in the 1948 war. (By contrast, over 850,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab and Muslim countries after 1948.) Of these 700,000, as former Trump secretary of state Mike Pompeo has observed, fewer than 200,000 remain, and most of those “are not refugees by any rational criteria.” Ergo, today’s 6 million Palestinians (including nearly 2 million of Palestinian ancestry who freely live with full civil rights in Israel) have attained a remarkable distinction: In the history of humanity, they are the first “genocide” victims to see their population swell by a factor of 30 since the “genocide” began.

Couple this with the fact that the UNRWA has distorted U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 into a mandate that all 6 million “refugees” have a right to return to their “homes” in Israel. Of course, in the semi-autonomous Palestinian territories — in Gaza, where Palestinians elected Hamas to lead them, and in the West Bank, where they would do so if given the chance — there are no refugees. And of Palestinians living in these territories today, well over 90 percent have never lived in Israel. (It is estimated that in the territories, where the median age is about 22 and life expectancy is about 74, there may be fewer than 70,000 Palestinians living today who were alive in 1948 — i.e., 76 years ago.) In any event, Resolution 194 principally calls for a negotiated settlement of all claims, including territorial claims, between the disputing parties; and to the extent that the resolution’s Article 11 contemplates that “refugees” may return to their homes, the condition for that return is that such “refugees . . . live in peace with their neighbours.” To put it mildly, that is not the Palestinian game plan.

So . . . what is behind the UNRWA’s “right of return” tenet — shared, not coincidentally, by Hamas? Well, the answer to this question should have been well-known in the United States for at least 30 years. That’s when the Justice Department prosecution team I led tried the so-called Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, and several of his subordinate jihadists on terrorism charges, a task that required us to expose for an American jury the sharia-supremacist ideology that catalyzed the sundry plots to carry out bombings and political assassinations.

The salient ideology is undeniably derived from a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic scripture that remains authoritative in the Middle East — including in the Palestinian territories. Yet the transnational progressives who dominate Western governments and media persist in denying that this ideology exists, or at least denying that its powerful influence grips more than a relative handful of “extremists.” Hence, even though we were not precluded from proving reality in the courtroom, a fantasy is assiduously peddled to the public — lest you begin to question such dogma as the “two-state solution,” in which we’re to believe that Israelis and the “From the River to the Sea” crowd will live side-by-side in irenic bliss.

Behind the UNRWA’s “right of return” mantra are two animating principles of sharia supremacism.

The first is that any territory that Islam claims, either in scripture or by subsequent conquest (which is scripturally endorsed) is deemed Islamic in perpetuity. If such a territory is annexed by non-Muslims, Muslims are obliged to conduct jihad (seen as “defensive”) until the territory is returned to Islamic rule. Now, Israel was the Jewish homeland for millennia before Islam was “revealed” to Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, in the early seventh century a.d. (I know I’m supposed to say “c.e.,” but under the circumstances that doesn’t seem right). Nevertheless, a dubious but long-standing interpretation of Islamic scripture holds that Israel, particularly Jerusalem, is central to Islam. (It is claimed to be the launch point for Muhammad’s “night journey” to heaven in around 621.) And in the nearly 14 centuries between the Rashidun Caliphate’s conquest of Jerusalem in 637 and the Ottoman Empire’s post-World War I collapse (giving way to Mandatory Palestine under British control), Israel was regularly under Islamic rule, although Jews continued to live there. In sharia supremacism, once it has been under Islamic rule, a lost jurisdiction must be brought back under Islamic rule as soon as Muslims have the wherewithal for reconquest.

The second principle, deep-seated in sharia supremacism, is enmity toward Jews. Muhammad’s army fought Jewish tribes after those tribes spurned his efforts to entice them to accept Islam. Moreover, Islamic eschatology — reflected in the al-Bukhari and Muslim hadiths — holds that there will be a final confrontation in which Muslims slaughter Jews. This is expressly reaffirmed in Hamas’s charter. As the self-proclaimed “Islamic Resistance Movement,” Hamas there “aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take.” What promise? As Muhammad put it:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

This is not a fringe belief. Not only is it founded in scripture; it was a favorite theme of the Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential Sunni Islamic jurisprudent in modern history, who died in 2022. Qaradawi’s television program, Sharia and Life, broadcast by Qatar-based Al Jazeera, had a weekly audience of millions. Hamas took Qaradawi as its authoritative sharia scholar, marinating in his instruction that “the martyr operations” against Israel were “the greatest of all sorts of jihad in the cause of Allah.”

The UNRWA’s “right of return” proselytizing, a fundamental element of the virulent Jew hatred taught in UNRWA schools, is every bit as much a part of Hamas’s jihad as the atrocities of October 7. It should not need saying that the “return” of millions of Palestinian “refugees” to Israel would eviscerate the Jewish state. That is Hamas’s goal and it is the UNRWA’s goal, too.

It was more surprising that the sun came up this morning than that the UNRWA collaborated in the October 7 atrocities — enabling Hamas to build tunnels under its facilities, conduct business and conceal weapons in areas it controls, launch attacks from such areas, and so on. It’s been alleged that at least one of the hostages taken by Hamas was held in the attic of a UNRWA “educator.”

Because the UNRWA is a scam to enrich Hamas under the guise of facilitating humanitarian aid (which everyone knows is controlled and diverted by Hamas), the agency has an oversized workforce recruited from the Palestinian territories, and Hamas membership and influence are apt to be pervasive. Intelligence estimates published after October 7 indicated that close to 20 percent of the UNRWA’s 12,000-person staff — including perhaps 400 trained operatives — had Hamas ties of some kind. Worse, Commentary’s Seth Mandel has noted that about one in four male UNRWA employees has ties to Hamas, compared to about 15 percent of males in the Gaza population at large — i.e., one is considerably more likely than the average Palestinian to be involved with Hamas if one works at the U.N. agency.

Bad as all this sounds, it gets the equation backwards. Biden-Harris officials and other progressives who urge the kid-glove approach to Hamas are fond of saying that you can’t defeat “an idea” militarily. Put aside the abject stupidity of this fortune-cookie wisdom. The “idea” in question is not Hamas. Hamas is just a jihadist fighting force — like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and dozens of others. Fighting forces are quelled all the time; Israel has already substantially defeated Hamas in Gaza. But it will reemerge, maybe with a new name on the door, because the animating idea, sharia supremacism, remains predominant in the Muslim Middle East, and forcible “jihad in the cause of Allah,” as the Muslim Brotherhood proclaims, is the scripturally endorsed method of spreading the idea.

On that score, the UNRWA is at least as much a menace as Hamas. It is the UNRWA that runs schools in the Palestinian territories, preaching sharia supremacism in its most virulently antisemitic, anti-Western form. It is the commitment to sharia supremacism that informs the UNRWA’s “right to return” advocacy.

It is the UNRWA that ripens young Palestinians for Hamas activities, not the other way around. At the Middle East Forum, Asaf Romirowski and Arsen Ostrovsky provide a couple of notable examples. Ismael Haniyeh, the emir of Hamas until he was assassinated by the IDF in Tehran two months ago, was a graduate of the UNRWA school system. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who along with Ahmed Yassin founded Hamas in 1987, graduated at the top of his class in the UNRWA secondary school in Gaza’s Khan Younis hotbed.

When the Biden-Harris administration, like the Obama-Biden administration, transfers hundreds of millions of dollars from American taxpayers to the UNRWA, that’s what it’s funding. And when the Biden-Harris DOJ helps the U.N. evade a civil lawsuit seeking to hold the UNRWA to account, that’s what it’s defending. And don’t forget: When the participation of UNRWA staffers in the October 7 attacks came to light, the agency’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, publicly vowed a thorough investigation, further committing that “any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution.”

Well, what about accountability in the October 7 litigation? It is true that it’s a civil case, a proceeding less grave than the criminal prosecutions that were promised. But at least it could bring some accountability. Nevertheless, U.N. officials, as is their wont, are trying to keep a lid on another U.N. scandal — this time by invoking immunity to protect the UNRWA. And the Biden-Harris administration is helping them.

The Justice Department’s letter is oh-so-high-minded about the U.S. government’s obligation to honor treaty commitments and its special responsibility as the U.N.’s host country to respect the organization’s privileges and immunities. Here is the blunt fact, though: The U.N. can waive its immunity.

No nation is in a better position than the United States to pressure the U.N. and its Hamas-enabling UNRWA to do exactly that. And don’t tell us about all the essential functions that the UNRWA, however unsavory it may be, performs. The U.N. has components and NGOs that carry out legitimate refugee services and distribute humanitarian aid, including food and medical assistance. Providing help doesn’t have to mean materially supporting a terrorist organization.

Rather than telling a judge about the imperative of insulating the U.N. from the consequences of its monstrousness, why isn’t the Biden-Harris administration telling the U.N. that it won’t see a dime of American funding — not for the UNRWA, not for anything — until it waives its immunity and allows the victims of October 7 to have their day in court and hold the savages to account?