Since October 7th, 2023, the world has come to see the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in a new light. The evidence of its direct collaboration with terror groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad raises the question: if UNRWA were to be dismantled entirely, who would do the work?

The site at a bomb shelter on the Gaza perimeter has been called a massacre within a massacre. That day, on October 7th, Hamas terrorists murdered 16 Israelis hiding in the bomb shelter after fleeing the Nova Music Festival. They also kidnaped several others, including Israeli American Hirsh Goldberg-Polin. In addition to being with Hamas, the man leading that part of the massacre had another job – working for UNRWA.

IDF Chief Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari explained, “Mohammed Abu Itiwi was a Nukhba commander in the El Bureij Battalion of Hamas’s central camp’s brigade. He has also been employed by UNRWA since July 2022.”

Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Immigration Amichai Chikili told CBN News, “You have employees of UNRWA who were leading the massacre.”

A report from Chikili documents those employees who took part in the October 7th massacre. He told us Hamas’ infiltration of the agency has been widespread.

“The entire system – because Hamas is in power – so, if you want to be an UNRWA employee with a very nice salary, you must be related to Hamas,” Chikili explained.

He added, “So UNRWA employees in Gaza were mainly all Hamas militants or Hamas civil organizations’ personnel, or the families of Hamas militants and members. If you’re not connected to Hamas directly or indirectly, you cannot work in UNRWA in Gaza.”

Evidence of this relationship is why the Knesset recently overwhelmingly passed a law that Israel divorce itself from UNRWA.

Boaz Bismuth, a Likud member of the Knesset, declared, “Just understand again the spirit of the bill. We have nothing against the international community, against foreigners, against the idea of humanitarian aid. This is what Israel is providing. It’s about the fact that UNRWA participated in the massacre on the 7th of October.”

After the vote, UNRWA claimed the law would be disastrous.

UNRWA director Philippe Lazzarini complained, “Today, millions of Palestinian refugees fear that the public services on which their lives depend will soon disappear. They fear that the children will be deprived of education, that illnesses will go untreated, and that social support will stop. 17,000 UNRWA personnel in the occupied Palestinian territory fear that they will lose their employment. The entire population of Gaza fears that their only remaining lifeline will be cut.”

Bismuth, who co-authored the Knesset legislation, disputes those claims.

“There will not be a vacuum because, just because they (UNRWA) were helping yesterday, doesn’t mean someone else cannot do the job tomorrow,” Bismuth countered. “The job will be done, because I will ask you the same thing in Gaza. You can tell me, you know, Hamas is reigning in Gaza. I mean, you kick them away so who will control? Someone else. It’s as easy as that, and it will be found. Other people can do it and will do it – and will do it beautifully – without being (a) terrorist.”

Chikili’s report cites how UNRWA has perpetuated the Palestinian refugee problem for generations.

“The fact that we have an entity solely for Palestinian refugees that can inherit (this) status to their kids, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, creating more and more refugees every year. And then you have the rest of the world, UNHCR (U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees) entity, that is for any other refugees in Africa or Asia, or Haiti – it doesn’t matter,” Chikili explained.

His report contrasts UNRWA and the UNHCR overseeing 5.9 million refugees. UNRWA employed 30,000 workers in 2023. That same year UNHCR employed 18,000 while overseeing 59 million refugees worldwide. Chikili says the difference goes even deeper.

“The UNHCR is not an ideological entity related with the war against the State of Israel, and UNRWA is part of a war. It’s a war machine; (It) was designated to train the Palestinian younger generation for jihad. That is the reality. And also, when you go physically, and you go and you see in schools of UNRWA, in so many cases beneath the schools you have tunnels, within the schools you have ammunitions and missiles and weapons,” Bismuth said.

It’s why many in Israel want UNRWA abolished and support UNHCR to take its place. But, in a statement, UNHCR told CBN news:

“As we, with other U.N. agencies have previously warned, UNRWA is the only entity with the capacity to deliver the scale and breadth of assistance that 2.2 million people in Gaza, and millions of other Palestinians in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan need. As the U.N. secretary-general has stated, there is no alternative to UMWRA.”

Yet, critics cite that UNRWA’s most lasting and infamous legacy is its education system. Many principals of UNRWA schools in Gaza were also Hamas members. ChIkilI says it takes a village to raise a terrorist, and that UNRWA helped teach a genocidal ideology.

“This is the Palestinian ideology. It is UNRWA’s ideology,” Chikili insisted. “And, by the way, is also very, very important to understand the jihadist ideology to train the kids to hate – anti-Semitism – to teach them that the war against the Jews and killing the Jews, that is the most important thing on earth. And this is also a part of what we saw on October 7th.”

Under the Biden administration in 2023, the U.S. became UNRWA’s largest donor. In Donald Trump’s first administration, he ended the agency’s funding. Most here hope, that when he takes office in January, he will act quickly to do so again.

Nearly one hundred aid trucks were looted in southern Gaza on Saturday in what UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, has described as “one of the worst” incidents of its kind.

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, UNRWA told CNN in a statement Monday.

Drivers were forced to unload trucks at gun point, aid workers were injured, and vehicles were damaged extensively, it said.

The UN agency did not identify the perpetrators of the looting, but blamed the “collapse of law and order” and the “approach of the Israeli authorities” for creating a “perilous environment.”

It said the challenges involved in delivering aid to Gaza had become “increasingly insurmountable,” with “trucks frequently delayed at various holding points, often looted, and subjected to escalating attacks.”

“Well, we have been warning for a long time about the total breakdown of civil order; (until) four or five months ago, we still had local capacity, people who were escorting the convoys. This has completely gone,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini told a press conference in Geneva on Monday.

A spokesperson for the US State Department called the looting “abhorrent” and blamed it on the “overall breakdown” of security in Gaza, for which he said the the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was partly to blame.

“They’re working to establish an improved security situation on the ground, but clearly, when you have looting going on, there’s a breakdown,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at told a press briefing on Tuesday. “And the IDF certainly bears part of the blame for that.”

In a report Monday that cited Gaza’s interior ministry, the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV channel claimed Gaza security forces had killed more than 20 people involved in looting aid trucks, though it did not specifically mention Saturday’s incident.

The National and Islamic Forces, a coalition of Palestinian groups, commended the ministry’s actions against the looters, who it referred to as “criminal thieves who disrupt the security of our internal front and steal the livelihoods, bread, and medicine of our citizens.”

Worsening shortages

The attack on the convoy – the worst of its kind “in terms of volume,” according to UN Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric – comes amid warnings by the UN that already severe shortages of food and aid in Gaza will worsen without immediate intervention.

Civilians fleeing northern Gaza after weeks of intense Israeli military operations have told of a chronic lack of food and people dying of hunger, while aid agencies have warned that the area is on the brink of famine.

On Thursday, a UN Special Committee report alleged Israel was using starvation as a method of war – an allegation denied by COGAT, the Israeli agency that approves aid shipments into Gaza.

At his press conference Tuesday, US State Department Miller said the US was working with the IDF, COGAT and UN agencies to get more assistance to those who need it. He noted the opening of new aid routes to Gaza, which happened after the Israeli government allowed only limited access to the besieged strip for weeks. He said the US hoped some of the new routes would help divert convoys away from looters.

The attack on the convoy also comes amid a backdrop of deteriorating relations between Israel and UNRWA. The agency’s ability to deliver aid to Gaza took a hit last month when Israel’s parliament voted to ban it, in a move that is expected to severely restrict its operations in territories Israel occupies, including the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The new law requires all contact between Israeli officials and the UN agency to cease by the end of January.

At the press conference in Geneva, Lazzarini spoke of the UN’s concerns over the new law, warning there was no other agency that could replace UNRWA’s role in helping the Palestinians.

“Our staff in the region is deeply, deeply concerned, anxious, worried about what might happen,” he said.

Lazzarini also told the conference of an incident last week in which he said a female UNRWA worker had been searched at her home by IDF soldiers.

Heavy toll on civilians

Meanwhile, Israeli strikes in Gaza continue to take a heavy toll on civilians.

On Monday, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 50 people, including 17 members of a single family, according to the local health ministry.

Most of the dead were killed in on northern Gaza, including the 17 family members who died in the city of Beit Lahiya, the ministry’s general director Dr. Munir Al-Bursh told CNN.

A local journalist who spoke to the cardiologist told CNN that Badran’s children had been killed alongside his sister, her husband and their children. Among the killed children was his sister’s weeks-old newborn, who Badran had delivered and whose birth he had intended to register on Monday, he said.

The director of the hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, said that everyone in Badran’s home at the time had been killed.

Safiya said the hospital itself had also been attacked.

He said patients were filled with “fear and horror,” adding “we are now pleading to the world. This killing machine must be stopped, the bombing must be stopped.”

CNN has reached out to the Israeli military for comment on the hospital attack. It has previously said it was operating “against terrorist infrastructure and operatives” in Beit Lahiya.

CNN’s Ruba Alhenawi, Kareem Khadder, Abeer Salman, Michael Conte and Jennifer Hansler contributed reporting.