Hamas attack victims, families sue UNRWA, claim aid agency is liable for Oct. 7 attack
More than 100 victims of Hamas' Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Israel and their families are seeking monetary damages from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, the U.N. aid agency whose members are accused of having ties to terrorism and reportedly assisted Hamas on the day of the assault.
The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, with Chicago-based law firm MM-Law LLC and New York firm Amini LLC filing the suit on behalf of the victims and their families. The defendants named in the suit are current or former UNRWA top officials, including Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini.
The lawsuit also alleges that UNWRA funding meant for aid for the Palestinian people has ended up in the hands of Hamas terrorists, who used those resources to attack Israel.
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"Hamas did not carry out these atrocities without assistance," the lawsuit reads. "It was aided and abetted by, among others, the above-named defendants, who are current or former senior officials ... of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, as well as UNRWA itself, who collectively spent over a decade prior to the October 7 Attack helping Hamas build up the terror infrastructure and personnel that were necessary to carry out the October 7 Attack, including by knowingly providing Hamas with the U.S. dollars in cash that it needed to pay smugglers for weapons, explosives, and other terror materiel."
"As discussed throughout, Defendants were warned repeatedly that their policies were directly providing assistance to Hamas," the suit added. "In the face of those warnings, Defendants continued those very policies."
The lawsuit also alleges that the aid agency allowed Hamas to use its facilities to store weapons and build tunnels underneath UNRWA buildings. The suit also cited various stories of former hostages, including one released in November who told the public he was held captive in the home of a teacher from UNRWA.
"UNRWA elementary school teacher Yusef Zidan Salimam Al-Khuajri (combatant in the Qassam Brigades' Central Camps Brigades) took part in the October 7 Attack and was revealed speaking on the phone roughly 7 hours after Hamas began invading Israel, bragging about the female captive that he captured," the document states about another one of the hostages.
"The Arabic term 'sabaya' that he used to refer to the Israeli woman, is a term in Islam that describes women and children as the property of a Muslim man," the suit added. "The interpretation also has the context of a slave and is exactly the same word as ISIS used to refer to Yazidi women captured by them and used as sex slaves."
A report released by The Wall Street Journal earlier this year estimated that about 1,200 UNRWA employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or other terrorist groups. The report suggested that about half of the agency's employees have family members who belong to Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The plaintiffs accused UNRWA of funneling money to terrorists by paying employees in U.S. dollars, forcing those workers to visit money changers and exchange the dollars for local currency. Hamas operates moneychanger locations and reaps a profit on every currency exchange, the lawsuit claims.
The plaintiffs assert that UNRWA was warned "repeatedly" that its actions were providing aid to Hamas, but the agency did not alter its policies. According to the suit, UNRWA "knowingly provid[ed] Hamas with the U.S. dollars in cash that it needed to pay smugglers for weapons, explosives, and other terror materiel."
UNRWA did not immediately respond to The Christian Post's request for comment.
On the day of the attack, Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted over 240 others. Terrorists massacred kibbutzim residents and attendees of an all-night music festival.
The attack prompted Israel to launch a military offensive in Gaza. The Hamas-run health ministry claims over 37,000 people have died since the war began last October but has not differentiated between combatants and civilians.
One of the ways the suit said UNRWA helped Hamas was by allowing the terror group to use its schools and other buildings for weapons storage based on the assumption that these would be places that Israel could not attack.
"Whether Defendants knew of the precise plans for the attack or its magnitude is irrelevant to their liability; they knew that Hamas openly proclaimed its goal to target and murder innocent civilians in violation of the law of nations and treaties of the United States and knew that the material support they were providing would enhance Hamas' capability to do so," the suit states.
"The resulting atrocities were foreseeable, and the Defendants are liable for aiding and abetting Hamas' genocide, crimes against humanity, and torture."
The suit also raised concerns about the materials UNRWA uses in its schools, with the plaintiffs contending that the textbooks "indoctrinate children from a young age into a death-cult ideology of hatred and genocide" and turn them into potential terrorist recruits willing to commit terrorist acts."
Samantha Kamman is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: samantha.kamman@christianpost.com. Follow her on Twitter: @Samantha_Kamman
