A leading independent watchdog organization published a report this work, on how the Hamas terrorist movement took control over the education system in Gaza and Lebanon from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

The watchdog group — UN Watch — titled its 220-page report “Schools in the Grip of Terror: How UNRWA Allowed Hamas Chiefs to Control Its Education System.”

According to the report, “These case studies show in detail how Hamas has hijacked UNRWA’s education through its domination of the local UNRWA staff unions, particularly the teachers’ sectors of the unions, enabling Hamas to control UNRWA schools — the physical facilities, teachers, and curriculum — including by preventing the agency from implementing changes to de-radicalize the curriculum, blocking efforts by UNRWA to discipline staff for inciting antisemitism and jihadi terrorism, and placing Hamas operatives in senior educator positions in schools.”

Oct. 7, 2023, in southern Israel.

Palestinian students study in a classroom on their first day back at Haifa school administered by UNRWA in Beirut’s southern suburb on Sept. 3, 2018. 

In August, Fox News Digital obtained a U.S. State Department public assessment to Congress, stating, “The administration has determined UNRWA is irredeemably compromised and now seeks its full dismantlement.”

Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, told Fox News Digital that, “This report is part of a disinformation campaign that this organization, the so-called UN watchdog, has been launching against UNRWA for years now. Their reporting is full of unsubstantiated claims and clearly aims at destroying the agency which, at its heart, has provi[ded] education and health care in place where no one else actually wants to work with a group of people that is one of the most vulnerable in the region.” 

Touma dismissed the report, claiming, “By the way to say most cases referred to in the report as new are not new. 90%, if not more, are already known to us.he vast majority have been found as unsubstantiated.”

The US government stopped funding UNRWA because of its support for Hamas terrorists.