Our community favours the provision of aid to civilians in Gaza who are in desperate need, but we are totally opposed to the use of UNRWA as an agency for delivering that aid.  To say that UNRWA as a whole is not a terrorist organisation sets a very low bar indeed for the kind of agencies with which Australia will partner.  It has been demonstrated that UNRWA employees, including schoolteachers, participated in the Hamas massacre of October 7 and many others have collaborated with Hamas in other ways.  They are indeed terrorists even if the organisation for which they work is not designated as such.

In fact UNRWA is so intimately connected to Hamas that no level of external control, even with UNRWA’s stated agreement, has been able to prevent large quantities of aid from being commandeered by Hamas at the expense of Gazan civilians.  The vast resources that have been squandered in constructing Hamas’s extensive labyrinth of tunnels, much of which has now been destroyed, are testament to that.

It remains our view that delivering aid through UNRWA poses an insurmountable risk of Australian taxpayers’ money being wasted or, worse still, being used in part to support Hamas’s terrorist activities.  Other agencies such as the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, the Red Cross and UNICEF administer aid and humanitarian services in Gaza and these bodies would be far more trustworthy conduits of Australian aid funding.

Daniel Aghion KC
President, Executive Council of Australian Jewry