The United Nations has said nine staff members of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNWRA) may have been involved in the October 7 attacks on Israel by the terror group Hamas.

Speaking on Monday, UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq told Reuters: "For nine people, the evidence was sufficient to conclude that they may have been involved in the seventh of October attacks.”

He said they would be fired for taking part in the attacks which saw more than a thousand Israelis killed and hundreds taken hostage.

Haq said the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, had found at least nine individuals had been involved in the attack, after concluding an investigation into the alleged involvement of 19 Unrwa staff members.

He said: “OIOS made findings in relation to each of the 19 Unrwa staff members alleged to have been involved in the attacks.

"In one case, no evidence was obtained by OIOS to support the allegations of the staff member's involvement, while in nine other cases, the evidence obtained by OIOS was insufficient to support the staff member's involvement.”

Haq said all the nine members of Unrwa staff that were involved in attacks were men.

He said: "For us, any participation in the attacks is a tremendous betrayal of the sort of work that we are supposed to be doing on behalf of the Palestinian people."

The investigation was launched by The United Nations after Israel said it found evidence that 12 Unrwa staff took part in the Hamas massacre. Following the revelations, several countries including the US, the UK, and Germany suspended funding to Unrwa, before restoring it last month. 

Israel has since claimed that some 450 Unrwa staff were involved in Gaza terrorist groups, nearly 10 per cent of the body’s staff in Gaza.

Unrwa employs 32,000 people across its area of operations, 13,000 of them in Gaza.

In March Unrwa claimed that that some of its employees had been pressured into saying the agency had links with Hamas while they were held for questioning by Israeli police.