The audacity and hypocrisy of a renewed pro-UNRWA campaign is breathtaking
‘Hamas-infested’ UNRWA is ‘tainted with terrorism’: Hillel Neuer
UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer unpacks his perspective on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency amid allegations of terror ties against agency employees.
Against the backdrop of Israel’s four-front war for its very existence, the United Nations, with the support of anti-Israel elected officials in the U.S. and elsewhere, are circling the wagons to ensure that UNRWA will continue to brainwash generations of Palestinian children to deny the 3,500-year link of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and the Jewish state’s legitimacy.
A new bill launched by anti-Israel members in Congress demands that the U.S. resume its funding of UNRWA, which is currently blocked under U.S. law. This initiative comes as the United Nations insists that all UNRWA employees are legally immune from any prosecution.
This presumably includes UNRWA employees who were members of Hamas and who participated in the Oct 7 Hamas crimes against humanity in southern Israel, where 1,200 Israelis, among them entire Jewish families, were mass murdered and mutilated. Young Israeli women in peaceful communities and at the Nova Peace concert raped, with hundreds kidnapped – dead and alive – to be brutalized and bartered by Hamas for the release of thousands of Palestinian terrorists held by Israel.
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) holds a press conference in Jerusalem on Oct. 27, 2023. (Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The audacity and hypocrisy of a renewed pro-UNRWA campaign is breathtaking. The United Nations has done less than zero to gain the release of innocent hostages taken by Hamas on Oct 7. In fact, U.N. officials and special rapporteurs were eerily silent or, worse, excused Hamas’ brutal pogrom.
UN CHIEF DEFENDS UNRWA, SAYS ONLY 'A FEW ELEMENTS' PARTICIPATED IN OCT. 7
And when it comes to the United Nations, words – spoken and unspoken – do count.
Top U.N. officials we recently met with refused to label Hamas a terrorist organization. That policy allows UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini to insist that, for the U.N., "Hamas is not a terrorist group… it is a political movement".
Lazzarini has refused to say whether UNRWA even considers Hamas a "militant or armed group." He hasn’t said that membership in an armed group is a sufficient cause for not hiring a person by UNRWA or terminating his or her employment.
Lazzarini has not taken any action to enforce the prohibition on membership in armed groups, let alone take steps to ensure to its donor states that it will identify and dismiss employees who are members of armed groups.
ISRAEL'S UN AMBASSADOR SLAMS WORLD BODY, SAYS UNRWA TAKEN OVER BY HAMAS TERRORISTS IN GAZA
He has neither investigated, suspended nor fired 100 UNRWA staff whom Israel submits are Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad's military operatives.
The bottom line is that the day after the war in Gaza ends, unless there is strong opposition from the United States, Hamas is still well-positioned to take back the reins of power over the lives of the people of Gaza and over the minds and hearts of Palestinian children.
Some months ago, I had the opportunity to speak directly to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the State Department. I told him that UNRWA cannot be part of the solution for "the day after" in Gaza when it has been a core problem for decades.
As of now, the plans of the U.S. for the day after in Gaza remain unclear.
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Events on the ground, and the blood-curdling indifference to Jewish lives and Jewish life by the United Nations only reinforces our fears about the future for Palestinian children and the children of Israel – from Sderot to the Golan Heights.
Americans deserve to hear from both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump on whether they will support a return to business as usual for UNRWA and Gaza or will they choose to blaze a new path toward peace for generations of Jewish and Arab children yet unborn – sans this failed U.N. agency.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean and director of Global Social Action for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the past chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
