The UN Funds "Human Rights Education" — Taught by Hostage-Takers
UNRWA's own teachers held Israeli hostages and sat on Hamas's Politburo. It is time to end the fiction that this agency is a neutral humanitarian actor.
Last month, at the 63rd Session of the UN Human Rights Council — a panel dedicated, with characteristic UN irony, to human rights education — a woman named Neta Heiman Mina stood up and asked the assembled delegates a question none of them wanted to answer. Her mother, Ditza, was 84 years old when Hamas kidnapped her from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023. For 48 days, an UNRWA teacher named Abed kept Ditza trapped in his attic with very little food. The question Neta put to the Council: how can the United Nations place the education of Gaza's next generation in the hands of a man like that?
It is a question that answers itself — if you are willing to look at the record.
Israeli intelligence found that at least 12 UNRWA employees participated in the October 7th attack, including six who took part in the invasion, two who held hostages, and others who transported ammunition. Of those 12, seven were teachers. The audio recordings leave nothing to the imagination: one UNRWA teacher and PIJ operative was captured saying, "I'm inside with the Jews." Another, a Hamas operative, announced: "We have female hostages. I captured one."
And then there is Suhail al-Hindi. For years he served simultaneously as UNRWA school principal and chairman of the UNRWA Gaza staff union — the man in charge of 8,000 teachers. UNRWA suspended him briefly in 2011 for meeting with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, then watched him get re-elected union chairman. In 2017, UNRWA finally pushed him out — not for being a Hamas member, but because he had just been elected to the Hamas Politburo, alongside Yahya Sinwar. He had been on UNRWA's payroll for 27 years.
I have litigated terrorism cases in U.S. federal courts where judges ruled there is no such thing as a lone wolf. Behind every terrorist stands a whole system that incites, indoctrinates, equips and funds them, and takes care of their families afterward. UNRWA, as constituted in Gaza, is part of that system.
Neta also said something that deserves to be heard: the vacuum must be filled. Gaza's children need food, medicine and education — and Israel should support genuine alternatives to deliver them. The moral imperative is not to end humanitarian aid. It is to ensure that aid is never again routed through an agency whose teachers moonlight as jailers.
Donors who keep writing the cheques are not funding education. They are funding the system that put an 84-year-old woman in an attic.