For two decades, Israel warned the world that UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, was not a humanitarian organization with a Hamas problem. It was a Hamas organization with a humanitarian cover. The world wasn’t listening. Now, a landmark U.S. federal investigation is dismantling every denial, name by name, rank by rank, battalion by battalion.
The U.S. Agency for International Development’s inspector general’s office, a law enforcement body separate from the largely defunct USAID, has transmitted a new investigatory report to the State Department, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, revealing that an additional 101 UNRWA staffers participated in the October 7 massacre and hold active affiliations with Hamas’s military wing. These are URWA workers with benign covers provided by their UNRWA job. They are schoolteachers. Deputy principals. Math instructors. Psychosocial counselors. Medical professionals. They’re all drawing United Nations salaries funded in significant part by American taxpayers while simultaneously serving as soldiers, squad leaders, snipers, keepers of hostages, and platoon commanders in the Al-Qassam Brigades.
The Free Beacon reported that scores of “UNRWA school principals, teachers, security personnel, attendants, psychosocial counselors, and medical professionals” were also members of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades or other terror factions. Among those newly identified: a “deputy school principal serving as an al-Qassam deputy company commander in the Ain Gallout/5th infantry battalion,” a “deputy school principal serving as squad leader for the Khan Younis Brigade/2nd,” a teacher who served as a “platoon commander of the Central Brigade/Al Quds 2nd Battalion,” a “math and computer teacher” found to have “ties to an Al-Qassam intelligence squad,” a third UNRWA instructor with “expertise as a sniper for Hamas,” and a fourth who served as a “Hamas soldier with orders to bring two anti-tank missiles to a prescribed location during the October 7 terror attacks.”
Operation Stop the Carousel
The investigation, dubbed Operation Stop the Carousel, is still unfolding, and the inspector general’s probe is expected to encompass at least 1,500 UNRWA-linked individuals suspected of terror ties. To date, the probe has resulted in the blacklisting of 108 individuals for “participating in the October 7 and/or having Hamas affiliation,” with additional referrals expected in the future, “as well as potential criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.”
The blacklist is designed specifically to close any escape routes. The federal blacklist ensures that all individuals identified by the USAID inspector general will be prevented from migrating out of UNRWA and into other aid agencies involved in Gaza reconstruction projects.
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott did not mince words. “Unfortunately, it is no surprise that another 100 UNRWA employees were determined to be involved in the barbaric October 7 attack,” Pigott said. “President Trump and Secretary Rubio have affirmed time and time again that no State Department funding will be provided to UNRWA, which has been totally infiltrated by Hamas and terrorist sympathizers.”
Senior State Department officials speaking to the Free Beacon were equally direct. “The sheer amount of officials tied to terrorist activity is shocking and unacceptable,” one senior official said. “This investigation validates Secretary Rubio’s policy that UNRWA is a subsidiary of Hamas and should not be part of Gaza’s future.” Another official told the Free Beacon last week: “The USAID inspector general’s cases, coming in droves, are corroborating the obvious parent-subsidiary relationship between UNRWA and Hamas in Gaza. If UNRWA was not a U.N. organization, it’d be undeniably facing terrorist sanctions based on what USAID IG has uncovered.”
The Money Trail: How UNRWA Salaries Funded Hamas
The personnel overlap between UNRWA and Hamas’s military wing is not the only channel through which the agency has bankrolled terrorism. A lawsuit filed in federal court in New York revealed a financial mechanism that ran money directly into Hamas’s coffers with every paycheck UNRWA issued. The suit alleged that UNRWA helped funnel millions of dollars each month to Hamas by insisting on a policy that applies only in Gaza: the payment of employee salaries and other expenses in U.S. dollars, rather than in the local currency of Israeli shekels.
The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity. UNRWA employees use local money-changers to convert their dollars to Israeli shekels, the complaint says. The suit claims that Hamas “runs the majority” of the currency exchangers and extracts a 10% to 25% fee from the rest, “ensuring that a predictable” stream of revenue flows from UNRWA salaries into Hamas’s accounts, month after month, year after year. This was not a bug in the system. For an organization whose workforce is 10% Hamas operatives, it was a feature.
The Aid Pipeline: A Hamas Revenue Stream
The financial exploitation of UNRWA did not stop at salaries. Internal Hamas documents show the group “systematically exploiting” aid entry; IDF-captured papers reveal that Hamas has an official policy of confiscating 15–25 percent of aid, through methods ranging from confiscating aid at checkpoints to extorting protection fees of $8,500–$14,000 per truck from all vehicles entering or moving within Gaza.
During the initial stage of the war in October 2023, Hamas diverted 25% of all incoming UN aid. By early 2024, this quota was redistributed as follows: 7% to Hamas’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, 4% to Hamas’s civil administration, and 4% to the group’s political leadership. Intercepted documents also reveal threats against aid workers and deliberate efforts to sow chaos in Gaza’s streets, such as closing markets, stirring unrest, and preventing civilians from reaching distribution points through intimidation or gunfire.
The looting was not always covert. In November 2024, of the 109 trucks carrying food supplies for UNRWA and the World Food Programme from the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza, 97 trucks were “lost” in the looting; drivers were forced to unload trucks at gunpoint, aid workers were injured, and vehicles were damaged extensively. The UN itself, by its own admission, eventually acknowledged that close to 90% of its own aid was being “intercepted,” some of it “forcefully by armed actors.”
IDF video shows explosives, a Kalashnikov rifle, and an RPG found stored in UNRWA aid bags. UN vests were found together with ammunition and explosives. A Hamas tunnel network was discovered under UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters, housing a sophisticated data center with electricity cables running directly into the UNRWA headquarters, connecting it to UNRWA’s electricity network.
A Gaza resident recorded in a phone call with the IDF put it plainly: “Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers, and it manages UNRWA. From the day they rose to power, they took control of everything.”
The GHF Contrast: What Accountability Actually Looks Like
When the Trump administration launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in May 2025, critics from the UN and affiliated NGOs declared it would fail. They were wrong. The GHF delivered more than 187 million free meals to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip without Hamas stealing their aid. During its entire four-and-a-half months of operations, not a single GHF aid truck was looted.
The difference was structural. Rather than bulk truckloads of commodities that could be intercepted and sold on the black market, GHF food packages exceeded the caloric minimums set by the international humanitarian community. GHF delivered aid “directly to the people of Gaza without interference from Hamas,” bypassing the entire UNRWA distribution infrastructure that Hamas had long treated as its personal supply chain. On a single Wednesday, GHF delivered 41 truckloads of aid, amounting to 2,273,040 meals.
The pre-packaged individual meal model was not just more efficient; it was theft-resistant by design. Bulk flour, sugar, and cooking oil can be confiscated, repackaged, and sold. A sealed family food parcel marked for a specific beneficiary is far harder to monetize. Hamas, predictably, tried to make GHF fail from the start by intimidating civilians, threatening anyone who approached aid centers, and even throwing grenades at American aid workers.
Classrooms as Recruitment Centers
The Hamas operatives now being exposed in UNRWA’s payroll did not radicalize in a vacuum. They were, in many cases, products of the very school system they later came to staff. UNRWA-issued school textbooks in the Palestinian Authority are among the most antisemitic and inciting in the world. No discipline is untouched: from math and theology to literature and science, their content promotes blistering hatred for Jews and Israel, indoctrinating students as young as six years old to commit their lives to martyrdom and intergenerational war. Compromise with Israelis is described as betraying Palestinian identity, and suicide bombings are a prerequisite for entry into heaven.
UNRWA operates 183 schools in the Gaza Strip, catering to more than 286,000 students, and those schools use the Palestinian Authority’s curriculum. The Israeli research institute IMPACT-se, which analyzes educational curricula for compliance with UNESCO benchmarks, submitted an extensive 245-page dossier in 2023 detailing the glorification of terrorism and antisemitism still rife within UNRWA educational facilities.
A joint report presented to the U.S. Congress in March 2023 found that teachers and schools at UNRWA regularly call for the murder of Jews and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis, and incite antisemitism. One Grade 5 Arabic language book, produced by the Palestinian Authority Education Ministry and adopted by UNRWA, glorifies Palestinian terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, a PLO member who participated in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre that resulted in the deaths of 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children.
The school curricula were supplemented during summer breaks with terrorist training camps for children. Hamas enlisted 50,000 Gaza children in its summer camps, offering terrorist training to boys as young as 9, including drills that teach them how to take hostages.
The European Parliament, hardly a body known for alignment with Israeli positions, formally recognized the direct causal link. The Parliament recognized that those teaching materials had a role in radicalizing Gazans prior to the October 7 onslaught, in which 1,200 people were killed by Hamas and other terror groups in southern Israel, and 253 were taken hostage. “I insisted on keeping the reference to the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 in this text because people must understand that they were a direct consequence of this education to hatred that is also taught in UNRWA schools,” one member said.
The Reckoning
The findings are certain to increase Congressional calls for UNRWA to be dissolved or formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration. Israel has for the last 20 years claimed that UNRWA, a 76-year-old U.N. arm established solely to provide aid to Palestinians, has been fully infiltrated by Hamas, which maintains an iron grip on aid distribution across the Gaza Strip. Those calls are now backed by a federal law enforcement body with subpoena power, and the evidence is no longer circumstantial.
The United States alone provides 22% of the UN general budget, 25% of its peacekeeping budget, and 40% of its humanitarian budget, including hundreds of millions in funds to UNRWA. Every dollar of that funding, as the USAID inspector general’s evidence makes clear, entered an organization where one in ten employees in Gaza held terrorist affiliations, where a math teacher trained with Hamas’s intelligence unit, and where a school principal commanded an infantry battalion on October 7.
Israel knew. For twenty years, Israel said so. The world called it propaganda. Operation Stop the Carousel is proving it was prophecy.
