by Bassam Tawil
- The United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has once again requested international financial aid. This is the same organization whose workers have been promoting violence and antisemitism on social media.
- UNRWA has since done absolutely nothing to help the “refugees” move on with their lives and seek a better future for themselves or their families.
- “Almost all of [the incorrectly labeled Palestinians in Gaza] have been born in Gaza, their parents have been born in Gaza, their grandparents have been born in Gaza… they were never displaced an inch. Yet, every day they hear, they learn, and they get an official stamp from the UN agency that says: ‘That’s not your home. You might have lived here all your life, but your home is there, just across the fence. That’s your real home [Israel], and it was taken from you.” — Einat Wilf, former Israeli Member of Knesset, December 1, 2015.
- The Geneva-based independent human rights group UN Watch has uncovered evidence of UNRWA staff incitement which clearly violate the agency’s own rules as well as its proclaimed values of intolerance for racism, discrimination or antisemitism.
- Meanwhile, in 2021, the US government confirmed its “failure to ensure that taxpayer aid dollars sent to the Palestinian government did not ultimately make their way to terrorists.”
- Terrorist groups in Gaza, such as Hamas, have continued to build terror tunnels under UNRWA schools, to use the children as human shields if Israel retaliates after it is attacked — as Hamas member Abu Khaled, openly admitted in December 2021.
- “UNRWA’s procurement contracts suggest that funds are already flowing to PFLP affiliates,” wrote foreign policy expert Julia Shulman.
- “[T]he Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act (PATA)…. prohibits assistance to the PA unless the administration certifies that ‘no ministry, agency, or instrumentality of the Palestinian Authority is effectively controlled by Hamas'” — Matthew Zweig, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, June 2021.
- Commenting on the Biden administration decision to restore the financial aid, UN Watch said that now is the time for the US to demand that “neutrality, accountability and transparency” Secretary Antony Blinken paraded.
- It does not seem, however, that UNRWA has taken far-reaching and drastic measures to end the incitement to violence and antisemitism. In fact, it has not taken any at all.
- It is clear that UNRWA, like many other UN agencies, has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. Instead of seeking ways to solve the problem of the so-called refugees, UNRWA has perpetuated and inflated it…. Instead of promoting peace and non-violence, UNRWA employees have been doing the reverse…. UNRWA donors might consider these evasions before they sign the next check to one of the UN’s most incompetent and corrupt organizations.
- Read more…