Hundreds of people, including survivors and families of victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, have filed a lawsuit against the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), accusing the agency of funding and supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.
The lawsuit, filed last week in Washington, D.C., federal court, says that UNRWA has provided funding and other support to Hamas and Hezbollah and employed staff who were directly involved in terror attacks.
The plaintiffs recounted the suffering and horror faced by victims and families in the attacks. Twelve members of the Mathias and Troen families, for example, sued on behalf of Shlomi David Mathias and his wife, Shachar Deborah Troen Mathias, who were “heinously murdered” by Hamas and whose son was also injured in the attack. The families are seeking compensation for the “severe mental anguish and extreme emotional pain and suffering” they endured.
President Donald Trump’s administration has ramped up scrutiny of UNRWA, which oversees nearly all humanitarian aid into Gaza, with Trump saying the U.N. agency has been “infiltrated” by foreign terrorist organizations. In April, the Justice Department stripped UNRWA of its immunity in U.S. courts, allowing a similar lawsuit to move forward.
UNRWA has long come under fire over its ties to terrorism. A Wall Street Journal report last year, citing Israeli intelligence, found that roughly 1,200 UNRWA staffers—about 10 percent of the agency’s workforce—were linked to terrorist groups and that 49 percent of the employees had close relatives with ties to terrorism.
Following the report, UNRWA spent months denying that its staffers work with Hamas before firing nine employees for participating in the October 7 attacks.
“The Administration has determined UNRWA is irredeemably compromised and now seeks its full dismantlement,” the State Department told Congress last month and repeated Friday in a statement to ABC News.
In addition to the October 7 attack, the lawsuit is seeking reparations for earlier terrorist attacks, ABC reported.
“This is a case seeking justice and accountability against an entity that holds itself out as ‘humanitarian’ but which has utterly failed in its mission and purpose while unconscionably providing material support for terror,” the plaintiffs’ attorney, Richard Heideman, said in a statement to ABC.
UNRWA in a Monday press release slammed the lawsuit as “meritless, absurd, dangerous, and morally reprehensible.”
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