A U.S. watchdog that tracks American foreign aid has found evidence that 101 more workers at the United Nations relief agency UNRWA took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and are linked to Hamas’s armed wing. The finding comes from a report sent to the State Department and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The watchdog is the inspector general’s office for USAID, the U.S. aid agency. It works on its own, apart from USAID itself. The 101 figure marks a huge jump in a probe that has slowly tied UNRWA staff to the part of Hamas that carried out the Oct. 7 massacre.

The new number is far larger than what the office had reported before. By an April update, it had flagged seven UNRWA workers for taking part in the attack and 14 more for ties to Hamas. Four of them were three teachers and a social worker who were accused of helping hold hostages or carrying out attacks in Israel. That work led to the first U.S. ban of a terrorist tied to a U.N. aid agency. A former UNRWA school principal, said to be a Hamas member, was barred from U.S.-funded work for 10 years. The Free Beacon reported two weeks ago that the full probe may end up covering at least 1,500 people linked to UNRWA and suspected of ties to terror groups.

The names are meant to feed a State Department list. The goal is to keep UNRWA workers tied to terror from moving into other U.N. groups or other aid groups paid for by the U.S., including any picked to help rebuild Gaza. Investigators have pointed out that the U.N. has never labeled Hamas a terror group, so being a Hamas member does not, on its own, stop someone from working on a U.S.-funded U.N. program.

The report comes as the Trump administration pushes to shut UNRWA down. It cut off almost all U.S. money to the agency in February 2026. A State Department review sent to Congress called the agency “irredeemably compromised” and said the administration now wants it taken apart for good. That view follows a 2025 order from President Donald Trump that said Hamas and other terror groups had gotten inside UNRWA. Officials are now looking at whether to strip the agency of its legal protections. That step could lead to a terror-group label and to lawsuits from Oct. 7 victims and their families.

Congress has pushed in the same direction. House Oversight Chairman James Comer has asked U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres for UNRWA records, saying the agency keeps ignoring U.S. requests. In May, Sen. Tom Cotton and two dozen others urged the administration to take the agency apart and drop it from the U.N. budget. More than 90 House members made a similar call.

UNRWA and the U.N. reject the claims. The agency, run by Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, says it checks staff through its own system and the wider U.N. system. The inspector general says those checks are not strong enough. A U.N. review in 2024 led to nine UNRWA workers being fired over possible ties to the attack. But U.N. investigators said they could not confirm the Israeli intelligence on their own. The Free Beacon has reported that the U.N. set aside audio and phone data that Israeli investigators said tied staff to Hamas.

UNRWA is the biggest aid group in Gaza. It has about 13,000 workers there and about 32,000 in the wider region. U.N. officials say it is the only group that can reach so many people with food, health care, and schools. Israel and its allies say the agency is full of Hamas members. They point to Hamas records found by Israel that, the New York Times reported, showed some school leaders were also Hamas fighters.

The watchdog says its work is not done and that more names are likely. With UNRWA’s U.N. mandate up for renewal and Gaza’s future aid setup still unclear, the new count adds to the calls in Washington to plan that aid without UNRWA.

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