Over the weekend, specifically on January 26th, 2024, nine countries paused their funding for UNRWA after reports came out showing 12 of its employees actually participated in the October 7th attacks where Hamas violently raped and heinously murdered 1,200 Israelis in their homes and at a music festival in sovereign Israeli land. And then opened the gates so that local non-affiliated Gazans could enter and loot homes and take home appliances and clothes and eat food from Israeli homes.
After Israeli authorities reported that 12 UN workers actually participated in the attack and then celebrated it with others, UNRWA actually terminated their contracts.
UN Watch released a groundbreaking report detailing how, despite the (UNRWA) insists it has zero tolerance for hatred and antisemitism, UNRWA staff in a 3,000-member Telegram group cheered and celebrated Hamas’s October 7th massacre while simultaneously asking when their salaries would be paid. UNRWA staff in the group shared photos and video footage of the October 7th events and prayed for the terrorists’ success and for Israel’s destruction.
The biggest donors to this organization, including the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, Canada, Finland, and the Netherlands, withdrew its support, at least put the financial support on pause. After these first eight withdrew funding, Japan announced Sunday that it quote “decided to suspend additional funding to UNRWA for the time being.” France, which makes a tenth country, has not pledged to suspend funding but has actually planned not to make a new payment moving into the first half of 2024. The countries that I have listed are all on UNRWA’s list of top donors from 2022.
The United States of America gave UNRWA $344 million US DOLLARS IN 2022 and was the largest single donor to UNRWA. In 2022, The organization received more than $1.17 billion dollars from various nations and organizations. Most are Western nations.
Out of 22 Arab nations in the world, the ones that pledged money to UNRWA in 2022 include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, which made it onto the top list of donors in 2022 … plus Oman, Kuwait, Malaysia, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Kazakhstan which pledged 10,000 dollars in 2022, and Pakistan pledged 8,756 dollars.
With those Western countries dropping out, that’s a big deal. And a huge loss for UNRWA.
Since 2015, UN WATCH has been exposing Facebook groups, some 150 of them, in which UNRWA staff members get onto the social media platform and write antisemitic items and call for incitement and jihadi terrorism. It is widely known and reported that UNRWA textbooks teach young kids to hate Jews and that Jews and Israelis are the enemy who should be destroyed. I have even seen and investigated photo and passages of this. It’s real.
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Saturday night we spoke with a colleague and source of mine named Hillel Neuer. He is the executive director of UN Watch, which is a watchdog organization that works to expose corruption in the United Nations and, as they say in their mission statement, monitor the performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own Charter.
Neuer is a lawyer and a top expert on human rights and has been particularly invested in exposing inefficiencies and outright antisemitism within UNRWA. He is a leading, global expert in this field.
Critics of UNRWA are frustrated that after so many generations, there are still Palestinian refugees and that people can actually get grandfathered in, so to speak, by granting refugee status to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees who became refugees during the 1948 war for independence. There are actually two UN agencies for refugees. One is for the world, and the other is specifically for Palestinians. While the UN refugee agency or the UNHRC works to get people out of refugee status and offer them a better life, UNRWA has outright failed at that mission because it is not their mission. UNRWA actually has its own definitions of a refugee. For Palestinians, that status is given over at birth, even if the person was born and raised in the same place their whole life and was never displaced. That’s because, in essence, the idea that UNRWA lives with and breathes with is that Palestinians were displaced in 1948 and are actively working on returning the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to places they may have once lived, believe they lived, or to places throughout the sovereign state of Israel that they would like to live, etc.
UNRWA was founded in 1949, and the point was to help Arab refugees. That year, as Israel was born with international support and legislation from the United Nations, there were 700,000 Arabs, and I say Arabs because in that year there was no such thing as Palestinian. It was Jews and Arabs living in British-controlled Palestine, a name which was given over by Western forces. Not a name chosen by Arabs or Jews. It was assigned. Arabs were Arabs and Jews were Jews.
700,000 Arabs at this time were displaced, some having lost their homes or livelihoods when the State of Israel was officiated and the lines to create borders for the country were drawn up. About 150,000 Arabs were given Israeli citizenship and welcomed to live under Israeli sovereignty. Many Arabs at the time rejected the premise of a Jewish state and chose not to become Israeli, but 150,000 said yes. Today there are some 2 million Arab Israelis, many of which are proud to be Israeli and serve in the armed forces or are volunteering for the war effort right now. Countries that signed off on the drawn-up borders for Israel include Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. This happened after Israel won its war of Independence, which Israel fought against Lebanon and Syria in the north; Iraq and Transjordan – which was renamed Jordan during the war – in the east; Egypt, and contingents from Sudan and Palestinians and volunteers from Arab countries within what would become Israeli borders. After all of this
UNRWA worked with those 700,000 displaced people and called them and all their descendants refugees. Today the United Nations estimates there are more than 5.9 million Palestinians with refugee status who live off of what was supposed to be temporary humanitarian support. They live in tight quarters in refugee camps and are kept in this system while teaching youth that they must fight and kill Jews in order that they can return to what the place looked like before 1948.
Instead of making the number of refugees smaller, UNRWA has spent 74 years turning the initial refugee population into a demographic 8 times its original size. UNRWA has not resettled even one refugee. But again, that is not their stated purpose. They do not claim to resettle; they just claim to help.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres is now urging the donor countries to reconsider and says that Palestinians in desperate need should not face penalties due to the alleged actions of few. Despite 9 employees being dismissed in October after the attack and apparently, the UN warned UNRWA to remain neutral, Israel has vowed to exclude UNRWA from any role in taking care of Gaza post-conflict.
UNRWA released a statement on their site when the first grouping of countries pulled out their funds. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs. I will read it to you.
“It is shocking to see a suspension of funds to the Agency in reaction to allegations against a small group of staff, especially given the immediate action that UNRWA took by terminating their contracts and asking for a transparent independent investigation. The United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the highest investigative authority in the UN system, has already been seized of this very serious matter.
“UNRWA is the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival. Many are hungry as the clock is ticking towards a looming famine. The Agency runs shelters for over 1 million people and provides food and primary health care even at the height of the hostilities.”
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