UNRWA - Hamas ally or tool?

There is a long history of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) facilities and organisation being used by Hamas, including:

• On Jan. 6, 2009, as part of defensive operations in the Gaza Strip, IDF forces came under mortar attack from within the UNRWA-run al-Fakhora school in Jabalya. In response to the incoming enemy fire, the IDF returned mortar fire to the source. The IDF return fire landed outside of the school but reports indicate that dozens of Palestinians were killed. IDF spokesmen have said that among those killed were Imad Abu Iskar and Hassan Abu Iskar, two senior Hamas rocket operatives. The presence of Hamas fighters outside the school has been confirmed by first-hand accounts by residents of the area in reports in the Associated Press and The New York Times. Israeli defense officials told the Associated Press that booby-trapped bombs in the school had triggered secondary explosions that killed additional Palestinian civilians there.

• On Oct. 29, 2007, terrorists in Beit Hanoun, Gaza used an UNWRA school to launch mortars into Israel. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon deplored the attack and asked UNRWA to conduct a full investigation.

• In May 2008 Reuters reported that Awad al-Qiq, an Islamic Jihad rocket engineer, had been moonlighting as a science teacher and deputy headmaster at the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by UNRWA. Al-Qiq was killed while supervising a factory assembling rockets and other weapons for use against Israel, located just a short distance from the school.

• Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attallah, UNRWA's Director of Food Supplies for Gaza, admitted to using his UN vehicle on multiple occasions during the summer of 2002 to transport arms, explosives, and activists from the Popular Resistance Committee to carry out terrorist attacks. Attallah also confessed to contacting members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Syria "in order to obtain money for transferring arms to the Gaza Strip as assistance for the PRC."

• Armed Palestinians have been filmed using UNRWA ambulances to transport
terrorists and, possibly, remains of fallen Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

• Of the 17 UNRWA employees Israel has arrested and indicted since 2001 for aiding terrorists, seven have been convicted in military courts.

• UNWRA's former Commissioner-General Peter Hansen admitted that the agency has employed members of Hamas and other terrorist factions but that he was not aware of any who were active members. According to Hansen: "Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another."

• On April 25, 2007 the UNRWA representative in New York, Andrew Whitley, revealed to congressional staff that UNRWA provided cash assistance to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

• According to a November 2003 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report: "During the first 6 months of 2003, assailants occupied or attacked UNRWA facilities on nine occasions."

• Alaa Muhammad Ali Hassan, a Tanzim member affiliated with Fatah, confessed during interrogation that he had carried out a sniper shooting from a school run by UNRWA in the al-Ayn refugee camp near Nablus. He also told his interrogators that bombs intended for terrorist attacks were being manufactured inside the UNRWA school's facilities.

• In 1982, President Reagan accused UNRWA of allowing its Lebanese camps to become armed bastions of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Forced to investigate when Reagan threatened to withhold U.S. funding for the organization, UNRWA admitted that several camps indeed had been militarized. While the Security Council hasn't enforced 1208 in the Palestinian territories, it has applied pressure on militant Palestinian refugees elsewhere.

In fact, a search on Google for "UNRWA and Hamas" shows numerous articles about the intricate links between the two organisations. These are from the first 2 pages of the search alone:

Gaza Bedfellows UNRWA And Hamas
How UNRWA supports Hamas
Congress Should Withhold Funds from the UNRWA
UNRWA's Hamas employees
Head of UNRWA admits Hamas members on payroll
UNRWA has no Hamas employees, and other UN fantasies