UN Report Clearing UNRWA of Terror Ties a ‘Whitewash,’ Witnesses Tell Congress
Congress has minimize off assist to UNRWA till March 2025. Specialists instructed it UNRWA has for years failed to scrub up its act or examine staffers’ hyperlinks to Hamas.
Three knowledgeable witnesses testifying earlier than a Home Overseas Affairs subcommittee denounced as a whitewash a latest U.N. investigation into its troubled company helping Palestinians in Gaza.
On Could 17, they instructed the Subcommittee on World Well being, World Human Rights, and Worldwide Organizations, chaired by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), that the Colonna Report was launched by a committee stacked with company supporters handpicked by the company’s director.
The company, the United Nations Reduction and Works Company for Palestine Refugees within the Close to East (UNRWA), has overseen aid distribution and different providers to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Financial institution since 1949.
Former French international minister Catherine Colonna led the U.N.’s investigation. It included representatives of three establishments that witnesses stated had been thought to be pro-UNRWA: the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Regulation in Sweden, the Christian Michelsen Institute in Norway, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
The nine-week investigation started in response to Israeli allegations of the deep entanglement of UNRWA with Hamas, the fear group controlling Gaza, and banned in the US.
These allegations have already had an impression: $450 million in international assist was halted, and President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan international assist invoice halting all assist to UNRWA till a minimum of March 25, 2025. America had been offering a 3rd of UNRWA’s billion-dollar funds.
Ms. Colonna’s committee started work every week after the Home Overseas Affairs Committee voted 30 to 19 to halt UNRWA’s funding.
The Colonna report, Mr. Smith stated, “was arrange solely to whitewash UNRWA’s file.” The Home subcommittee needed to look at that, he stated, in addition to “U.S. funding to organizations apart from UNRWA, that are affiliated to terrorists or in any other case promote violence in opposition to Israelis.”
Israel has stated Hamas arms have been present in or underneath among the 2,000 buildings the company controls in Gaza, {that a} Hamas spy pc heart tapped the UNRWA constructing above it for electrical energy, and that a minimum of two hostages had been held within the properties of seemingly UNRWA staffers, together with a instructor and a physician.
Ms. Colonna, Rep. Smith stated, “has an extended historical past of help for UNRWA and hostility to Israel.” All three organizations tapped to work along with her have comparable histories, together with accusations of genocide and apartheid in opposition to Israel, he stated.
“Senior officers related to the report repeatedly acknowledged that their aim was to, quote, reassure donors and to offer donors with additional cowl,” he stated.
One of many witnesses, Hillel Neuer, spoke of UNRWA’s refusals to look with him or debate him. On Could 13, he stated, he was disinvited from a panel discussing UNRWA on the Stimson Heart in Washington after, he was instructed, UNRWA’s consultant at it refused to take part if he was there.
The Colonna Report “is, we’re instructed, an unbiased audit that has given UNRWA a clear invoice of well being exonerating the company of all expenses of its ties with terrorism,” Mr. Neuer stated. “This headline was repeated world wide and utilized by a number of international locations to reinstate funding.”
“There’s one downside, although, Mr. Chairman. These claims are utterly false.”
The investigators weren’t neutral, he stated. UNRWA Commissioner-Basic Philippe Lazzarini had denounced Israel’s expenses of terror ties as a disingenuous, politically motivated, and smear marketing campaign, Mr. Neuer stated.
“In doing so he irreparably tainted the credibility of the inquiry,” Mr. Neuer stated. He picked Ms. Colonna to go it just a few weeks after she’d posted her backing of UNRWA on social media. She had performed that, Mr. Neuer stated, after his personal group, U.N. Watch, had uncovered a social media group the place 3,000 UNRWA workers had celebrated the Oct. 7 bloodbath.
![Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, speaks at the 2015 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy. (Courtesy Hillel Neuer)](https://www.theepochtimes.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.theepochtimes.com%2Fassets%2Fuploads%2F2021%2F03%2F02%2F2015-geneva-summit-for-human-rights-and-democracy_16637897845_o-1200x799.jpg&w=1200&q=75)
“He selected somebody who he knew very effectively was sympathetic to UNRWA, to say the least,” Mr. Neuer stated. And France is UNRWA’s fourth largest donor. A former UNRWA spokesman subsequently instructed the Al Jazeera tv community that “the report by the previous French international minister, quote, will present the donors with additional cowl.”
“The report says the next: UNRWA quote stays pivotal in offering life saving humanitarian assist. UNRWA is irreplaceable and indispensable, (a) humanitarian lifeline. Mr. Chairman, we didn’t must have an unbiased assessment group of the French international minister and three Scandinavian institutes to provide these traces. These phrases are the official UNWRA speaking factors,” Mr. Neuer stated.
Mr. Neuer derided the report for its flowery language proclaiming “UNRWA has established a big variety of insurance policies and mechanisms and procedures to make sure compliance with a extra developed method to neutrality than another comparable U.N. or NGO entities. . . . The reality is the exact opposite.”
He in contrast the report back to the Soviet Union’s Stalin-era structure, a hovering assertion of human rights—guaranteeing direct elections, freedom of conscience, and different liberties. The Soviet dictator proclaimed it probably the most democratic structure on the earth.
“The fact was the exact opposite,” Mr. Neuer stated, noting that the structure got here into play in 1936, simply earlier than the Nice Purge started, a terror ensuing within the arrest after which execution or deportation to Siberia of tens of millions of residents.
![Displaced Palestinian people sit on benches as they wait outside a clinic of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Jan. 28, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images)](https://www.theepochtimes.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.theepochtimes.com%2Fassets%2Fuploads%2F2024%2F01%2F29%2Fid5575697-GettyImages-1960206191-600x400.jpg&w=1200&q=75)
Yona Schiffmiller, analysis director for NGO Monitor, a gaggle watchdog nonprofit group, stated Hamas’s coercion makes accountability and oversight of UNRWA unlikely. U.S. legislation bans funding teams that promote violence, terrorism, anti-Semitism, or the employment of people espousing these.
James G. Lindsay, former normal counsel for UNRWA, former Justice Division felony lawyer, and writer of a 2009 report on the group, instructed the committee he walked away from it when it grew to become obvious that whereas it stated it was vetting employees members for terror ties, it wasn’t doing it.
He noticed a quote from the UNRWA commissioner normal within the Canadian media saying, “Sure, I do know we’ve Hamas folks working for us, nevertheless it’s not one thing we fear about.”
He objected to UNRWA’s administration, “and I used to be rebuffed. And so I moved on.”
The Colonna Report itself paperwork not directly how incompetent the company is, he stated. Of its 50 suggestions, he stated, about 37 “replicate apparent administration deficiencies, issues like the necessity for coaching, higher coordination with different businesses, higher enforcement of guidelines, using extra girls as managers, that any competent administration workforce would have way back addressed with prodding from an unbiased assessment.”
He famous that of the 5.9 million Palestinians UNRWA designates as “refugees,” 1.8 million don’t meet the authorized definition as a result of they’re residents of and stay in Jordan. Somebody can’t be a citizen and a refugee on the identical time, he stated. Others must be stricken from the help rolls for his or her felony data or help of terrorism, he stated.
The listening to was barely disrupted by pro-Palestine demonstrators. A number of had “FREE GAZA” written on their arms. They held their arms up within the air and checked the screens of the listening to’s cameras to ensure the messages had been displaying. One wore a “Free Palestine” T-shirt.
At one level, Mr. Smith stopped the listening to to admonish them, noting that displaying indicators was unlawful. Some shouting broke out off digicam, and he then had police clear them from the listening to chamber.