Despite growing evidence that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been infiltrated by Hamas, South Africa continues to fund and defend the agency. Pretoria’s apparent unwillingness to acknowledge Hamas involvement in UNRWA now places it alongside donors who ignore warnings that a once-humanitarian institution has become politically compromised.

A 2025 investigation, Schools in the Grip of Terror by UN Watch, a Geneva-based organisation that monitors the United Nations, traces how Hamas gradually gained control of UNRWA’s education system in Gaza.

From Localisation to Dependence

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, UNRWA localised almost its entire workforce. “Over 99 percent of UNRWA’s 30 000 employees are Palestinian nationals,” the report notes. What began as community empowerment turned into dependency that Hamas exploited. By the mid-2000s, the Gaza Staff Union had become a political power base in its own right.

Education Turned Political

Between 2012 and 2016, the overlap between education and extremism became explicit. One man symbolised this drift: Suhail Al-Hindi, who served simultaneously as an UNRWA school principal, head of the Gaza Staff Union, and a Hamas leader.

(Suhail Al-Hindi speaking outside UNRWA Gaza headquarters,UN Watch, Schools in the Grip of Terror (2025). © UN Watch.)

When UNRWA’s finances faltered, Al-Hindi threatened strikes and unrest, warning of: “an inevitable explosion.” Management conceded to his demands. Only in 2017, after Israel exposed his membership of the Hamas Politburo, was he forced to resign.

Neutrality Collapses

By the late 2010s, politicisation had become systemic. UN Watch found that: “over 15 percent of UNRWA’s senior educators in Gaza are members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” Photographs show Hamas portraits displayed beside UN logos and maps that erased Israel entirely.

Even UNRWA’s own 2024 Colonna Review admitted that: “politicised staff unions are making threats against management and disrupting operations.” Yet, according to UN Watch: “as of August 2025 UNRWA had not completed a single recommendation related to staff neutrality.”

South Africa’s Position

Pretoria, however, has remained a loyal supporter. It continues to channel multilateral funds and to defend UNRWA in diplomatic forums. The Department of International Relations and Cooperation praises the agency for its: “humanitarian role” but has not commented on the evidence that its schools and unions are now under militant influence.

Even the Colonna Review described UNRWA as: “held hostage by its own employees and the political factions that control them.”

By defending UNRWA uncritically, Pretoria risks aligning itself with an organisation that no longer meets basic standards of neutrality or accountability. Donor governments now face a clear choice: either demand independent vetting of staff, external audits of Gaza schools, and public neutrality reports, or accept that aid money is sustaining a system captured by the very groups it was meant to resist.