Federal Probe Set To Expose 1,500 UNRWA Operatives With Hamas Ties

Federal Probe Set to Expose 1,500 UNRWA Operatives With Hamas Ties

Valerie Locke

The U.S. Agency for International Development Inspector General—an independent law enforcement office—is set to expand its probe of UNRWA to encompass at least 1,500 individuals with suspected terror ties, the Washington Free Beacon reported exclusively. The investigation has already produced named, documented cases and is generating serious momentum in Congress and the Trump administration for the harshest sanctions yet against the UN agency—up to and including a full foreign terrorist organization designation.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, a white UN jeep drove into Kibbutz Be’eri. The driver was Faisal Ali Mussalem al-Naami, a social worker employed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Al-Naami arrived at the scene with another armed operative, placed the body of 21-year-old Yonatan Samerano—who had been shot fleeing the Nova music festival—in the trunk of the UN-marked vehicle, and transported it into Gaza. It took 625 days and an IDF military operation to recover his body. Yonatan’s mother, Ayelet, spent those months confronting senior UN officials, including UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, demanding to know where her son was. She received no response.

Al-Naami’s case is now one data point in a federal investigation that is about to reach a scale impossible to ignore.

The lead documented case is Hafez Mousa Mohammed Mousa, an UNRWA school principal found to be an operative of Hamas’s East Jabaliya Battalion who coordinated communications with other suspected Hamas members during the October 7 attacks while serving in his UN post. 

On the morning of the massacre, Mousa used the same cellphone to perform his duties both as a Hamas operative and as an UNRWA school principal. He received a 10-year government-wide debarment from U.S. federal funds—the first known U.S. debarment of an individual affiliated with a terrorist organization connected to a UN humanitarian agency.

The cases fit a pattern that Israel has been documenting for years. Hamas’s own internal records, seized during the war, identify 24 UNRWA school employees as operatives, half of whom were issued rifles and grenades. One principal was known to wear Hamas military fatigues after school. Israeli intelligence estimated that 10% of UNRWA’s Gaza workforce—roughly 1,200 employees—are Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives, and that at least 500 hold military positions within those organizations, including senior command roles. Terror infrastructure was found in at least 30 UNRWA facilities.

The physical evidence is just as stark. Israeli forces uncovered a Hamas data center directly beneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters, containing computer servers and industrial batteries supporting Hamas’s intelligence and communications infrastructure, with electrical cables running directly into UNRWA’s own power grid. 

UNRWA chief Lazzarini claimed he had no knowledge of what was beneath his own headquarters. The commander of Israel’s 401st Armored Brigade, Col. Benny Aharon, responded: “There is no doubt that UNRWA staff knew that Hamas was digging a massive tunnel beneath them.”

The UN’s own internal investigation has done little to address the scale of the problem. The Office of Internal Oversight Services investigated 19 UNRWA staff members and fired nine, stating only that the evidence “indicated that the UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the armed attacks.” In nine other cases, the evidence was deemed insufficient. Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan called it “a disgrace,” noting that Israel had provided the UN with detailed information on over 100 Hamas-member UNRWA employees, and the UN investigated 19.

Now the obstruction itself has become part of the case. The USAID Inspector General sent letters in December 2025 to six UN agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross requesting personnel information and details of their interactions with Hamas. None of the UN agencies complied. 

“Given its history with Hamas, UNRWA does not have the luxury of not cooperating with an investigation and thinking there might not be consequences,” a senior U.S. official told the Free Beacon. “We will respond accordingly.”

Congressional pressure is mounting. Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and 24 colleagues wrote to the Trump administration in May demanding it “take decisive action to fully dismantle UNRWA and eliminate it from the UN budget.” Rep. Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.) and 90 other lawmakers issued the same call days later. “UNRWA’s terrorist ties are clear,” Cotton told the Free Beacon, “and the UN’s attempt to hide those ties from the U.S. government is deeply concerning.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) warned: “Either they come clean, or I expect growing momentum for designating them for the support they give to terrorists.” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R., Tenn.) called it “appalling that other U.N. agencies today are still stonewalling the Trump Administration’s ongoing investigations.

”The punitive options now under active discussion include stripping UNRWA of its diplomatic immunity under U.S. law—which would expose it to a torrent of October 7-related lawsuits—and a full foreign terrorist organization designation. The family of Yonatan Samerano has already filed a landmark lawsuit in the Jerusalem District Court against UNRWA seeking NIS 25 million in damages under Israel’s Compensation for Victims of Terrorism Law. If diplomatic immunity falls, that case would be the first of many.

Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies framed the legal reality bluntly: “The Justice Department’s position right now is that UNRWA does not enjoy privilege or immunity. That means nothing stops the Treasury Department from imposing terrorism sanctions on UNRWA to force its closure.”

A senior State Department official put the investigative conclusion more plainly still: “If it walks like an FTO and talks like an FTO and employs FTO personnel, a case exists that it should be an FTO.”

Israel has been making that case for decades. The U.S. government is now making it too—with names, dates, and a federal docket that is still growing.

IDF: One-third of Hezbollah force eliminated, ‘we will not relent’

IDF: One-third of Hezbollah force eliminated, ‘we will not relent’

David Isaac

IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin expounded on Israel’s goals for the northern front on Thursday following a targeted strike carried out by the Israel Defense Forces in Beirut, the first such strike in more than three weeks. 

“As we speak, IDF soldiers—conscripts, career personnel and reservists—are targeting Hezbollah across all its operating systems. Our troops are acting courageously and achieving many successes. The Air Force is operating nonstop, striking Hezbollah in Lebanon. In the past 24 hours alone, we struck in Tyre, Beirut and Southern Lebanon in significant support of operating ground forces,” Defrin said.

“Our goal is clear—to defend the communities of the north, to push the terrorist threat away, and to severely weaken Hezbollah,” he said.

Israel is eliminating dozens of members of the Iranian-proxy each week. Since the beginning of the ceasefire on April 16, Israel has killed more than 800 terrorists in Lebanon. That is in addition to more than 2,500 terrorists killed there since the start of “Operation Roaring Lion” on Feb. 28. 

According to the terms of the ceasefire, “Israel retains the right to act in self-defense against imminent or ongoing threats, while refraining from offensive military operations in Lebanon.”

Israel has eliminated one-third of the roughly 30,000 terrorists in Hezbollah’s ranks, Defrin said. In recent days, Israel significantly damaged Hezbollah’s command and control capabilities, hitting top commanders, he added.

Strikes have intensified on the orders of IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir. As soldiers systematically dismantle the terrorist group, Hezbollah has become “desperate,” Defrin said. 

The IDF spokesman also referred to the death of IDF Staff Sgt. Rotem Yanai, 20, from Giv’at Ada. She served as a service conditions noncommissioned officer in the 435th Battalion of the Givati Infantry Brigade.

“A welfare NCO in the Givati Brigade, Rotem worked on behalf of the soldiers out of deep love for our country and belief in the justice of her service. I share in the family’s grief. We stand together with them in this difficult time,” Defrin said.

Yanai was killed when a Hezbollah drone launched from Lebanon hit soldiers in a military zone near the border. Families of soldiers serving in the base where she was killed had previously complained, having sent a letter two months ago questioning the placement of noncombat soldiers so close to the Lebanese front where they were at risk of drone attack, according to reports.

“We are constantly formulating responses to the drone threat. The best minds in the IDF and outside the IDF are engaged in this effort and working tirelessly. We are focusing on three main efforts—detection, intended to provide early warning to our soldiers; improving interception capabilities; and protecting soldiers on the ground,” Defrin said.

“We will not relent, in any arena, near or far. The IDF remains vigilant and is prepared to return to intense combat against the Iranian terror regime if required. We will continue operating everywhere in order to ensure the security of the civilians and soldiers of the State of Israel. This is our duty.”

Three fronts, no clear victory: The drafts that could reshape the region

Three fronts, no clear victory: The drafts that could reshape the region

Dr. Michael Milshtein

Three draft cease-fire and political-arrangement agreements for three Middle Eastern conflicts are now being advanced. The most important draft concerns the confrontation with Iran. Alongside it are a faltering cease-fire text for Lebanon and a long-term arrangement proposal for Gaza. At this stage, none of the moves is certain, and in each arena there remains a possibility that fighting will resume or continue.

The talks on an agreement with Iran appear to be the most serious, and the emerging text is deeply troubling for Israel. At its center, according to reports, is a U.S. commitment to a complete halt of military action against Tehran and to lifting the maritime blockade, opening the Strait of Hormuz, a card the Iranians created during the war, and only afterward discussing Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump promised this week that Iran’s 60% enriched uranium would be taken out of the country and destroyed, but at least for now, Tehran has made no such commitment.

The other components that were supposed to be part of forcing Tehran to submit are absent from the reports, chief among them Iran’s long-range missiles and the Islamic regime’s regional proxies. 

Also pushed to the sidelines is the Iranian people, whose protest movement was one of the “triggers” of the war and who were promised that “help is on the way,” alongside the collapse of the early-war fantasy that a fanatical regime could be brought down through “decapitation” and the use of minorities.

By contrast, the Islamic regime feels strengthened after surviving the greatest threat it has ever faced and is working vigorously to secure strategic gains. Beyond guarantees meant to prevent another attack, Tehran is also demanding the lifting of sanctions, which would reduce domestic public and economic pressure, as well as the release of $24 billion frozen in banks around the world.

That was the purpose of this week’s visit to Qatar by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament and currently the most powerful man in Tehran, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Iran’s central bank governor Abdolnaser Hemmati, a move that also illustrated Doha’s return to the forefront of mediation.

The growing confidence at the top of the Iranian leadership was reflected this week in the decision to restore internet access after it was cut during the wave of protests, and in the declaration by Mojtaba Khamenei, the supreme leader, that “the Middle East will no longer provide protection for American bases,” and that after the war the slogans “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” would spread throughout the Islamic nation, especially among young people.

In the background stands the Arab world, which contrary to reports, and to Israeli hopes, does not want Trump and Netanyahu to “go all the way.” It is instead seeking a rapid end to a confrontation it sees as doing more harm than good: the Islamic regime has survived and become more extreme, while the energy sector continues to suffer a severe crisis because of disrupted movement through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Arab hope now is that an agreement will create a rift between Israel and the United States and block what is seen as the consolidation of Israeli hegemony under Trump’s sponsorship.

“Any agreement between Tehran and Washington will be a personal defeat for Netanyahu, and will mark Israel’s return to the passenger seat after serving as the driver during the war,” the editorial in the daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi said this week.

To sweeten what appears to be a bitter pill for Israel, Trump promised this week that Saudi Arabia and Qatar would join the Abraham Accords, alongside a puzzling mention of Jordan and Egypt, which already have peace agreements with Israel, as well as Turkey and Pakistan.

The response was swift and predictable: Riyadh repeated its familiar mantra, one Israel either does not understand or does not want to understand, that advancing ties between the countries depends first and foremost on dialogue over the Palestinian issue, something the government naturally avoids for political and ideological reasons.

Tehran stresses that ending the war must also include Lebanon, a position meant to show that despite the blows suffered by Iran and Hezbollah, it still has influence in the northern arena.

Israel, for its part, is deeply frustrated, as most of the assessments and hopes regarding the front against Hezbollah have proved wrong. Despite the assassinations of senior figures, the capture of territory and the start of unprecedented negotiations with the Lebanese government, the organization led by Naim Qassem, initially described as a pale shadow of Nasrallah, is continuing a determined war of attrition centered on explosive drones. There are no signs that internal pressure in Lebanon, especially from the government, is affecting it.

In the background, a demand that is troubling for Israel is being raised: a return to the pre-October 7 equation, meaning total Israeli avoidance of strikes on the organization, with Hezbollah making clear it will respond to any action, in contrast to the line it followed until Operation Lion’s Roar.

“This campaign is a golden opportunity for Hezbollah to break the rules of the game Israel imposed since the end of 2024. In retrospect, it turns out that the organization’s decision not to respond to the attacks, whose effect on it was apparently limited, stemmed from its need for relative calm to rebuild its strength,” Prof. Eyal Zisser of Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center said.

“Israel is bogged down in a war of attrition that past experience shows usually works in Hezbollah’s favor, is constrained in its responses by the United States and is frustrated by the severe damage to communities in the north,” he added. “It seems that maneuvering another kilometer or two, or even striking the Shiite rear in Lebanon, is unlikely to change Hezbollah’s behavior.”

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Romania drone incident, response to NATO threats: Key takeaways from Putin’s chat with journalists

Romania drone incident, response to NATO threats: Key takeaways from Putin’s chat with journalists

RT

Russian President Vladimir Putin took questions from reporters during his trip to Kazakhstan on Friday, providing an update on the Ukraine conflict and tensions with NATO in Europe.

The president also commented on the drone intrusion in Romania, which NATO blamed on Russia, and touched on foreign policy debates in Armenia, a former Soviet state and Russia’s longtime ally.

Russia has the upper hand on the battlefield

The Ukraine conflict is nearing its end as the Russian military continues its offensive on all fronts, Putin said. He said it would be “unwise” to name a specific timeline, however.

“The situation on the battlefield gives reason to believe that (the conflict) is drawing to a close,” Putin said.

Putin said that although Moscow maintains “certain contacts,” no peace talks are being held at the moment.

While the US has been preoccupied with the war in Iran, some EU officials have begun floating the idea of resuming talks with Russia, which were suspended in 2022.

The president reiterated that Russia has no intention of attacking NATO or EU members, dismissing claims to the contrary as “brazen lies.” He reiterated Russia’s position that it was forced to intervene in Ukraine after Kiev failed to implement the 2014-2015 Minsk accords with the breakaway Donbass republics, which later voted to become part of Russia.

Western leaders are using the conflict to justify “unreasonable” military spending hikes, Putin argued. “They should not mislead their own people,” he added.

At the same time, Putin said Russia has the capability to “raze to the ground”any country that attempts to attack it.

He was responding to Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys, who said this month that, in the event of a conflict, NATO must demonstrate that it “can break into” Russia’s Kaliningrad Region, an exclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.

Putin warned that Russia would treat all Ukrainian drone launch sites as legitimate targets, even if they operated from the Baltic states.

Putin called for an “objective investigation” into a drone strike on a residential building in the Romanian city of Galati near the Ukrainian border on Friday, which injured two people. Romania, together with its NATO allies, blamed Russia for the intrusion.

The president said Romania should provide “objective data” about the incident, just as Russia handed over decoded flight data from a Ukrainian drone shot down last year en route to one of Putin’s residences. Putin also recalled how suspected Ukrainian drones had veered into the Baltic states and Finland in recent months.

Putin denounced the Western media for what he called making fools of their audience in order to channel more money to Ukraine. He also blasted foreign outlets for what he said was their failure to cover Ukrainian drone strikes on a college in Starobelsk last week, which killed 21 students and injured more than 40 others.

“Not a single word was said about the tragedy in Starobelsk, where our children were deliberately killed. Not a single word, as though it never happened,” Putin said.

Moscow previously criticized outlets including CNN and the BBC for declining an invitation to travel to Starobelsk.

Karen Hao: “I Saw Up Close The Dark Reality Of OpenAI’s Race To Create God”

Karen Hao: “I Saw Up Close The Dark Reality Of OpenAI’s Race To Create God”

Madeleine Spence via The Sunday Times

For the last three weeks the world has watched as two of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, engaged in a public mudslinging battle through a California court about an organisation they co-founded: OpenAI. The evidence provided, including memos, emails and text messages, all gave a tantalisingly rare window into the origins of the company.

Karen Hao, however, already knew the story well. In fact, watching the trial she felt vindicated. “It was good to see lots of what I had discovered being laid out,” she tells me when we meet in London a few days after the trial ends.

Hao was given unprecedented access to OpenAI’s offices in 2019, and has since spoken to hundreds of former employees and people within Altman’s inner circle to piece together the story of how OpenAI went from an ideological non-profit, with the purpose of “saving humanity”, to an engine of record financial investment and controversy (last week The Wall Street Journal reported it was preparing to file for a public listing, expecting a valuation in excess of $1 trillion). It is the central theme of her book, Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination, published last month, in which she argues that the maker of ChatGPT sparked a race for technological progress which is rapacious, extractive and bad for humanity.

When Hao first arrived at OpenAI’s offices in San Francisco in 2019, the company’s chief technology officer greeted her with a tentative smile. “We’ve never given someone so much access before,” Greg Brockman told Hao, inviting her to embed herself in their company for a profile piece she was writing.

Two weeks earlier, on July 22, 2019, OpenAI had received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. For Hao, a young technology reporter who had studied engineering and worked for a Silicon Valley start-up before joining the magazine MIT Technology Review, it was a career-defining opportunity. It was also the moment that the scales fell from her eyes. “Right off the bat, I started realising that something was not right,” says Hao, 32.

Hao had become a bit of a cynic after spending too much time around Silicon Valley start-ups masquerading as noble endeavours. But OpenAI, which had been founded in 2015, was supposed to be different. It was a non-profit that had dedicated itself to developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), the most powerful form of AI yet conceived. The idea was that this superintelligence could replicate, and then surpass, human intelligence. In OpenAI’s telling, it could become powerful enough to destroy the world, or to create global utopia, solving problems humanity wasn’t smart enough to.

They wanted it to become the latter, and OpenAI would be a transparent and collaborative tool to enable the world to get there.

Hao was surprised to find, then, what she considered a distinct lack of transparency. She was chaperoned everywhere. She wasn’t allowed to visit certain floors or attend certain meetings. “As I was talking to researchers, I noticed that they kept being very nervous about saying things they weren’t supposed to, which was bizarre, because the entire premise of OpenAI was they were going to share everything,” says Hao.

A security guard was given a picture of her face and told to be on the lookout if she appeared unapproved on the premises. Employees were warned on Slack not to speak to Hao beyond “sanctioned conversations”. The atmosphere was “competitive, secretive and insular”.

Speaking to insiders later on, she would hear how what had begun as an organisation throwing ideas at the wall “to see what stuck” had been transformed under Altman’s singular obsession: to achieve AGI before everyone else. This included competitors, such as Google, but also states, such as China.

Its scientists and researchers were some of the brightest minds in the industry. But, Hao says, their belief in AGI was something more akin to a religious fervour. She calls it “the ideological pursuit of the machine god”.

What most disillusioned Hao, however, was how this relentless pursuit of superintelligence was moulding the company and the industry.

OpenAI decided that the best way to achieve AGI was to take its large language models (LLMs) and dramatically scale them up. This meant “pouring ever more data into them and training them on supercomputers larger than anyone has ever built in human history”, says Hao. All this new processing power cost money, and OpenAI began a for-profit arm in order to find it.

“It’s hard to overstate how much this idea of scale was considered a scientific extreme at the time,” says Hao, who describes it as a “brute force” approach.

Until this point, AI research had been much more targeted. Scientists used small and limited data sets to test hypotheses about what artificially intelligent machine learning could do, such as detecting signs of Alzheimer’s by feeding it datasets of brain scans.

Now, it was about feeding as much data to the AI as possible in the hope of it developing “intelligence” in any field. The results were increasingly fluent models which seemed impressive, although some were sceptical whether this represented novel problem-solving and true intelligence. Nonetheless, OpenAI’s competitors raced to upgrade or create their own LLMs.

The vast, water-consumptive data centres popping up all over the world, driving up local energy prices, are a result of AI companies feeding LLMs more and more data in an effort to expand their knowledge base. Meanwhile, companies trawling the internet for morsels of information on which to train them has eroded our privacy and intellectual property, Hao argues.

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