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