UNRA’s double game: The findings of the report exposing the connection to the terrorist organizations
A report published by UN WATCH, an official watchdog organization commissioned by the United Nations, describes cases revealing collaboration between terrorist organizations in Gaza and Lebanon and the Palestinian refugee aid agency UNRA.
The report reveals a long series of meetings between senior UNRWA officials and the leaders of the terrorist organizations. In June 2022, UNRWA Secretary-General Philip Lazzarini emphasized the importance of “partnership” with the terrorist organizations in Gaza and met regularly with them as part of the “Joint Committee for Refugees”. The committee is chaired by Mahmoud Khalaf, a member of the Central Committee of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an organization designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.
Previously, UNRA managers regularly attended annual Hamas conferences, where internal matters of the organization, such as job vacancies and teachers’ union elections, were discussed. At the 2021 conference, for example, senior Hamas official Ahmed Abdel-Hadi announced the creation of a joint committee tasked with “monitoring relations with UNRA and ensuring that it fulfills its obligations.”
The report’s findings show that terrorist organizations are able to use threats and pressure to prevent decisions they don’t like. For example, when UNRWA attempted to issue biometric ID cards to aid recipients or publish a code of ethics proclaiming LGBT rights, the terrorist organizations managed to torpedo the initiatives through direct threats against the organization’s management.
In February 2022, UNRA Lebanon Director Claudio Cordona, who previously served as head of Amnesty International, visited the Ain al-Khilwa camp to meet with representatives of several terrorist organizations, including representatives of Hamas. At the meeting, the terrorists said: “The Palestinian issue in Lebanon is a political issue and cannot be reduced to a humanitarian issue.” Previously, in January 2018, Cordona met with senior Hamas official Ahmed Abdel-Hadi , which confirmed that the terrorist organizations support the UNRA because it “represents a living testimony to the Nakba of 1948.”
In Israel, it was reported this year that about 10% of UNRA educational system employees in the Gaza Strip are active in terrorist organizations, and dozens of cases have been documented in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad used UNRA facilities in Gaza for their purposes War in Israel, hiding weapons, holding hostages and even a concentration of humanitarian aid that the organizations are looting. However, Israel has never disclosed the personal connections between the UNRA leaders and the leaders of the terrorist organizations, as was the case in the report.
UNRWA’s double game as an international aid organization on the one hand and as a Palestinian organization supporting terrorist organizations on the other is not new. Israel published documentation about the use of UNRWA ambulances more than 20 years ago, but even before the October 7 attack, and has not taken official and open action against the organization. On the other hand, UN WATCH and the organization’s founder, Hillel Neuer, have often spoken out against UNRWA for many years. The review of UNRWA’s relations with the leadership of terrorist organizations only occurred in the last decade.
The UN WATCH organization operates at the Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Its founder is the Jewish-Canadian lawyer Hillel Neuer.
UNRA is apparently part of the United Nations and even has the letters UN at the beginning of its name, but it is very different from the rest of the institutions. Unlike every other department of the United Nations, UNRWA is not defined by its field of activity, but by the identity of its patients. The UNRA does not have specific objectives, which allows it to operate in various areas, and its activity focuses exclusively on “Palestinian refugees”.
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