Hamas victims sue UNRWA

Some 200 victims of Hamas and Hezbollah filed a lawsuit in the U.S. federal court last week alleging that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the global body’s Palestinian aid organisation, supports terrorism.

Richard Heideman, an attorney for the victims and their families, told JNS that UNRWA portrays itself as a humanitarian actor, but its cooperation with Hamas was illegal.

“The fiction that’s been allowed to be created and that many countries turn a blind eye toward is that they allow the view that Hamas also provides ‘humanitarian’ services, ‘charitable’ services, and therefore people blink and think that Hamas is good,” he said, “even though they are the worst evil organization for terrorism, as bad as the Islamic State, as bad as Abu Nidal was decades ago.”

“Money is fungible, and whether the money is maybe spent for providing some aid or food or grenades or Kalashnikovs or RPGs, or whether the money is used to provide safe haven, that money is fungible, and this fiction must be rejected,” he told JNS.

Some 13% of Hamas’s annual $2.5 billion budget came from UNRWA, and the aid organisation’s staff heavily overlapped with that of the terrorist group, per the suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“UNRWA has not denied that a material number of its staff personally participated in the Oct. 7 attack, although it has quibbled with the numbers estimated by credible outside sources,” the complaint states.

Since Oct. 7, UNRWA has carried out “a spin campaign trying to minimize the nature and degree of its institutional culpability in providing material support to Hamas, trying to portray it as the work of a few rogue low-level employees rather than reflecting conscious institutional policy decisions made at the highest levels by the individual defendants,” according to the complaint.

The plaintiffs include victims of Hamas and Hezbollah attacks dating back to 2015, including the targets of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel. All are U.S. citizens.

“Shachar Deborah Troen Mathias was heinously murdered together with her husband, Shlomi David Mathias, in their home by Hamas during the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas in Kibbutz Holit, a small kibbutz in Israel,” the complaint states. “Her son, Rotem Eliyahu Mathias, was also physically injured during the same attack.”

The lawsuit contains 38 pages of similar descriptions of Hamas and Hezbollah attacks and their victims.

The complaint seeks damages under the Anti-Terrorism Act and Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act from both UNRWA and its U.S.-based non-profit charity UNRWA USA. (JNS sought comment from both organisations.)

The United Nations and its subsidiaries are typically protected from lawsuits under the U.N. Headquarters Agreement and other treaties, which grant U.N. officials and organisations a form of diplomatic immunity.

Heideman argued that those protections do not apply in UNRWA’s case.

“Yes, there is a Headquarters Agreement. Yes, there are treaties. Yes, they cover the United Nations itself,” he told JNS. “So the U.N. General Assembly, for example, is covered. The U.N. Security Council is covered.”

“But Congress didn’t say in any of its documents that UNRWA, which was established after the United Nations itself was established, that UNRWA should have immunity,” Heideman said. “There is no such agreement.”

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice argued that UNRWA had legal immunity under the U.N. umbrella in a similar lawsuit against UNRWA officials, which Israeli citizens in New York brought. The Trump administration wrote in April that the government has “reevaluated that position.”

“UNRWA is thus not properly characterized as a subsidiary organ and therefore is not entitled to immunity,” wrote Yaakov Roth, acting assistant attorney general for the civil division, and Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

“The government appreciates that it previously took a different view on this issue, but it now believes the arguments in favor of that view are lacking,” they wrote.

The Trump administration’s argument hinges on whether the U.N. General Assembly had the power to establish UNRWA in the first place under the U.N. Charter as a permanent aid organisation for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

“Because the charter does not grant that authority to the General Assembly, it would make little sense to say that an institution created and entirely devoted to such activities is a ‘subsidiary organ’ of the General Assembly that is ‘necessary’ to executing the General Assembly’s functions,” Roth and Clayton wrote.

UNRWA “provides humanitarian assistance and contributes to protection of refugees through essential service delivery, primarily in the areas of basic education, primary health care and mental health care, relief and social services, microcredit and emergency assistance” for millions of Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza, per the U.N. agency’s website.

Heideman told JNS that, alongside UNRWA’s alleged material support for terrorist groups in the form of funding, staffing and infrastructure, UNRWA’s mandate to never resettle Palestinians and to confer refugee status on all of their descendants in perpetuity only lengthens the conflict.

“They tell the world wrongly the lie that there are 6.2 million Palestinian refugees, because it is a lie and there is no justifiable humanitarian or other reason that those camps continue to exist—none whatsoever,” Heideman said. “Those people are entitled to freedom. They’re entitled to resettlement. They’re entitled to live free lives wherever they may choose to go.”

The Palestinian Authority doesn’t let them out and doesn’t want to do so, “because it’s all too easy to paint the picture that Israel is the perpetrator, Israel is the occupier, Israel is the apartheid, genocidal country that must be punished,” he said. “They use as the poster children for that not just the grandparents, but all of their descendants.”

“It’s a humanitarian wrong and a legal wrong that must be fixed,” Heideman said. “UNRWA must be held accountable for failing and refusing to do what its mandate was, and that is to provide services and indeed to resettle these refugees.”

“Certainly UNRWA must be held accountable for teaching hate, encouraging hate, fostering hate and praising those who commit maiming and murder,” he added.

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