‘An UNRWA social worker took my son hostage… it’s really sick’

Last month, Israel passed a bill banning the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) from activity within Israel and, more significantly, cutting all ties between the organisation and the Israeli government.

UNRWA are still operating within Gaza, but the IDF, who coordinates the entry of aid into the region, will no longer work with them. Among the organisations that distribute aid, UNRWA was, until now, responsible for 13 per cent of relief, with the UN World Food Programme contributing 50 per cent. The bill follows allegations by the Israeli government earlier this year that 19 UNRWA workers helped perpetrate the Oct 7 massacre and that a further 100 of their employees are members of terrorist groups. In August, an investigation by the UN's own watchdog dismissed nine of those workers. (Muhammad Abu Attawi, a commander in Hamas's special operations division and leader of the Nova massacre, has also since been found to have been an UNRWA driver.)

Another blot on the organisation came in June when former hostage Ditza Heiman stated in a court testimony that she was held in an UNRWA school teacher's home. The ban , however, caused outrage from many, including Keir Starmer who said he was "gravely concerned" . Other political voices were more supportive, including Robert Jenrick who reiterated that he "staunchly opposed" the UK's involvement with UNRWA, referring to the £35 million of UK funding the organisation received last year.

For Israeli mother Ayelet Samerano, 53, the veto was the first positive piece of news she had heard in 13 months. The last Samerano saw of her son was on Oct 7 last year, in a video showing 21-year-old Jonathan lying seemingly lifeless in the middle of a road outside Kibbutz Be'eri. A video clip posted by Hamas shows a truck pulling up, two men hauling him from the ground and throwing his limp body into their boot, his shoeless feet shoved against its sides. Despite looking unconscious at the time, and later being told he had been killed, Samerano says she is yet to receive conclusive proof, as no body has ever been found. "My fear is doubled," she says of not knowing whether she is fighting for his release or to be reunited with his remains. "It's an awful way to live."

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas's attack, Samerano was only told the name of the man who had taken her eldest child – Faisal Ali Musalam Naami. But in February, during an interview with a reporter, she learnt that he was in fact an UNRWA employee, and that he was driving an agency vehicle. Israeli officials found that Naami, along with 18 other staff , had participated in the Oct 7 attacks (The UN's investigative body said there was insufficient evidence in 10 of the cases). "UNRWA has lost legitimacy and can no longer function as a UN body," Israel's defence minister said at the time, stating that other agencies would need to step in instead.

At the end of October, following the passing of the bill, Oren Marmorstein, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel, explained: "The Hamas terrorist organisation has infiltrated UNRWA in Gaza widely and deeply. Israel remains committed to international law and to ensuring the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza, through international organisations that are free of terrorist activity."

Samerano had never heard of the agency prior to that reporter's call, but has since made it her business to understand it. "They are teaching children from the moment they are born to hate people," she says. Reports have previously found that in UNRWA-run schools, textbooks described jihad as "achieving martyrdom"; others did not acknowledge Israel on the world map. "It's really sick," she says of Naami. "He's a social worker; a social worker committing terror, and kidnapping a citizen." The employees accused of having Hamas links were dismissed, and funding from the likes of the US briefly paused while investigations were carried out. But Samerano is understandably furious about the global cash flow being resumed. The money is "not going to help the Gazan people" she says. "It's going to [fund] terror."

Speaking out publicly about UNRWA is the latest in what has been more than a year of unbearable tasks for Samerano, who travels the world campaigning for Hamas to release the hostages , hoping it might bring her closer to finding out what happened to Jonathan. "Every night I scream in silence. Every morning, I cry on my way to work. Every waking moment, I think about my son, and I live like that through each day, over and over again," she told an audience in Switzerland three months ago, where she had travelled to lobby the chief of UNRWA to put pressure on Hamas to release her son and other hostages. During one protest in Switzerland, she held a photo of Jonathan aloft while shouting "UNRWA kidnapped my son!" – only to have it snatched by an elderly protester, and dumped in the bin.

"It's like a bicycle," she tells me of the constant juggernaut of global events; this need to speak her boy into existence while the world seems intent on moving on. "When I'm doing that, I can keep myself up. When I stop, I will fall. So this is, for me, bringing me a lot of strength that in other ways, maybe I don't have."

Samerano says of Jonathan, or Jonty, as he was known to family and friends: "He was smiling all the time. He had a special charm. And with this charm, everybody wanted to be with him... wherever we arrived, the doors were open and everybody wanted to help him."

Samerano becomes emotional recalling what might have been Jonathan's final hours. He and his two friends fled the Nova festival immediately when rockets appeared in the skies early that Saturday. They went in search of a bomb shelter, pulling up at Kibbutz Be'eri, where they planned to wait out the attacks. But they arrived at the same time as Hamas terrorists, who shot at their car before entering the kibbutz. The terrorists would go on to kill 96 civilians including children, and take a further 26 hostage from the kibbutz.

Samerano and the families of the two other young men saw the news unfolding from Tel Aviv, and called them relentlessly, unable to get through. After four days of anguish, her brother sent her a video posted by Hamas, showing the young men on the ground, and Jonathan's abduction. They assumed the UNRWA vehicle used to drive him away had been commandeered by Hamas militants, learning around 100 days later that Naami had been an active participant.

Israeli authorities say that of the 251 people taken captive by Hamas last year, more than 60 may still be alive, while the bodies of a further 35 remain in Gaza. Not knowing which grim camp her son falls into has left Samerano in an unimaginable limbo. "I don't know for sure if he is alive or dead," she says, the picture of him on the wall beside her the closest she has been to him since she drove him to meet his friends on Oct 6 last year. "Every day I'm afraid," she admits, voice wavering. "If he is alive, will I succeed in bringing him back alive? And if he is not alive, what will happen?"

Her mind pinballs between each devastating possibility. That there were no reports of bullet wounds or his blood found has led her to imagine that he might still be captive. Or, he is dead and beneath the ground somewhere.

The picture of Jonathan was created by Samerano by a friend of his, the T-shirt bearing a lyric from his favourite song: "It was the smile in your eyes." Jonathan was the same, she says. "With his smile, he could do everything," his mother says. They spoke up to ten times a day. "He told me everything," she says, calling her at midnight wanting to trade thoughts on the latest idea that gripped him. Their relationship was "very, very tight. Very. I say that they never cut the cord," she laughs. An event producer, just prior to his capture he had told his mother that he hoped to try and make it in New York. "He wanted to do so many things," says Samerano, including launching a brand featuring the limited edition T-shirts he had made for each event. In his absence, she plans to create that line for him.

He was born creative, she adds; his various schemes lodged in the minds of his many friends. One messaged Samerano on Oct 7 this year, remembering an exploit proposed by her son – then 10 – to convince his school friends to travel en masse to Eilat, 350km from their home. The gaggle of kids at the Sameranos' after school each day asked him if he was crazy, but Jonathan was unbowed, reasoning: "It's just one bus line." Those words espoused his philosophy exactly, says Samerano. "Everything for him was just one bus line. He made everything he wanted; he wasn't afraid... that's why he was so successful." The friend who messaged last month, while travelling in Nepal, felt those words all the more acutely with Jonathan gone, he said. "I'm taking this philosophy from now on. And I'm not afraid of anything; I will do everything."

Moments like this provide a rare bit of comfort for Samerano, who has spent the past year rallying for Jonathan, his devastated girlfriend, her husband and younger son. Her friends urge her to take care of herself; to get a massage, or go to the beach, but "I can't. I really can't. I can't imagine it," she says. "My son is in Gaza, how can I rest? People cannot understand it, but it's in your mind twenty four hours [a day]. It's going with you everywhere." These things that are "good for the soul," as well-wishers suggest, are ultimately meaningless, she feels. "The best thing for my soul now is to bring him back."

In June, on Jonathan's 22nd birthday, the Sameranos threw him a party – the first time that any such celebration had occurred since the attack eight months earlier, she says; before then the grief had proven too overwhelming. Three thousand people showed up. "At the beginning it was hard for me, but it was amazing," Samerano reflects. "It was the first time after Oct 7 that those people came and danced. For us, it was, wow, [this is] the best thing we could do for Jonathan while he's there."

Life before and since has yielded less optimism, with Samerano left only to persist, unaware whether her efforts are in vain: "I'm hoping for a miracle."