U.S. Identifies and Blacklists Three More UNRWA ‘Teachers’ Who Participated in Oct 7 Terror Spree

"The State Department formally added three more United Nations Relief and Works Agency school teachers to a first-of-its-kind blacklist after an ongoing U.S. investigation concluded that the teachers participated in Hamas's Oct. 7 terror spree and held Israelis captive, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal. It's the latest embarrassment for the United Nations, which has delegated most of its Gaza relief work to UNRWA even though the agency is fully infiltrated by Hamas.

The Trump administration's September 24 order bars the three UNRWA staffers from working on all U.S. taxpayer-funded aid projects for the next decade, blocking them from circulating into other U.N. humanitarian groups.

The three UNRWA teachers—revealed as Rami Mohammad Sabbah, Mamdouh Husain Al Qaq, and Yusuf Zedan El Hawajri—doubled as Hamas footsoldiers who entered Israel on Oct. 7 to kill and capture Israeli citizens, according to a nonpublic investigative summary prepared by the United States Agency for International Development's independent inspector general and obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon.

The State Department has now added a total of four UNRWA staffers to a still-growing federal blacklist that will prevent them from joining any U.N. agencies involved in the Gaza reconstruction project. The USAID inspector general's office, a law enforcement entity separate from the largely defunct USAID, has referred more than 100 current and former UNRWA staffers for similar action, and U.S. officials familiar with the matter told the Free Beacon that further additions to the blacklist are likely forthcoming.

While UNRWA has fired a total of 70 Gaza-based employees, largely in response to the USAID inspector general's probe, its administrative action does not prevent them from moving to other U.N.-backed humanitarian groups that are working on American aid projects in Gaza. The State Department's blacklist—built as a result of the USAID inspector general's landmark findings—ensures that Hamas-linked UNRWA staff will not be eligible to work inside Gaza, benefit from American funding, and infiltrate the massive reconstruction project the United States is now standing up.

‘The USAID inspector general's continued investigation, finding definitive links between UNRWA and Hamas, has opened the eyes of the international community as to why Secretary of State [Marco] Rubio deemed UNRWA a 'subsidiary of Hamas,'‘ a senior U.S. official briefed on the ongoing investigation told the Free Beacon. ‘This was quite evident last week at the U.N. General Assembly. The winds are finally shifting.’..."