United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has reportedly told other UN agencies to reject funding and tasks that ordinarily would fall to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which has been linked to Palestinian terror.
As Breitbart News has reported, many donor countries suspended donations to UNRWA after more than a dozen of its employees were found to have participated in the Hamas terror attack of October 7. In addition, UNRWA has been faulted over the years for indoctrinating Palestinian children to hate Israel and Jews, and the very existence of the agency perpetuates the idea that Palestinian “refugees” — several generations later — will return to a destroyed Israel.
Israel has said that it sees no future for UNRWA in a post-Hamas Gaza. It is encouraging other UN agencies, which are not infested with terrorists or suffused with terrorist ideology, to perform the functions that UNRWA performs in Gaza.
The UN is trying to resist that idea, according to an investigative report by Colum Lynch at DevEx.com:
Secretary-General António Guterres has urged the heads of the United Nations’ principal relief agencies, including the World Food Programme and UNICEF, to rebuff appeals by Israel and the United States to undertake work currently carried out by the world body’s beleaguered Palestinian refugee agency.
The outreach pits Guterres against the Biden administration, which is mounting a campaign to persuade the U.N.’s main relief organizations to take over some of the functions of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, the decades-old Palestinian aid agency that Israel has accused of complicity in Hamas’ crimes, reflecting concerns that its financial future is endangered.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a watchdog organization that monitors the UN and its institutions. raised the issue Thursday:
Israel has said that it is capable of delivering “unlimited” amounts of aid to Gaza, but that UNRWA is failing to distribute it properly to civilians in Gaza, and that much of it is being hijacked by Hamas terrorists or by armed gangs.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
