Displaced Palestinians wait to receive United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aid in the southern Gaza Strip on March 7.Mohammed Salem/Reuters
It took all of two sentences in a 54-page report from a United Nations review panel on UNRWA, the UN organization responsible for Palestinian refugees, for its apologists to triumphantly declare the contested relief agency exonerated on allegations that it harbours Hamas members.
“Israel made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organizations. However, Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this,” concludes the final report of the UN Independent Review Group on UNRWA, which was tabled this week.
This hardly constitutes an exoneration of UNRWA. The review panel, led by former French foreign-affairs minister Catherine Colonna, had no mandate to investigate Israel’s claims that 12 UNRWA staffers participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack or look into Israeli intelligence reports, revealed by The Wall Street Journal, identifying hundreds of UNRWA’s Gaza employees as Hamas members. Instead, the panel was struck to examine the procedures UNRWA has in place to ensure the neutrality of its employees and recommend ways to strengthen them.
The panel was formed on Feb. 5 by UN Secretary-General António Guterres to address concerns expressed by some donor countries – led by the United States, which has cut off funding for now – that the agency had been turning a blind eye to the pro-Hamas leanings of some employees, including teachers in UNRWA schools in Gaza and the West Bank. Its creation followed years of allegations that the agency’s schools and other buildings had been used by Hamas to store weapons or had sat atop Hamas tunnels.
UNRWA’s critics did not have high hopes for the review. They questioned the choice of Ms. Colonna to lead it, given that she expressed unwavering support for the agency in her previous job, which she had lost in a January cabinet shuffle by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Their fears were hardly calmed when Ms. Colonna turned to three organizations known for their pro-Palestinian activism to help conduct her review: the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Sweden, Norway’s Chr. Michelsen Institute, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
UN Watch, a long-standing UNRWA antagonist, had flagged countless anti-Israel comments made by staff members at those organizations, including a 2016 tweet by Wallenberg executive director Peter Lundberg that accused Israel of “building an oppressive system that is a combination of apartheid, Indian reservations, and the wall in Eastern Europe.”
Not surprisingly, the report goes far too easy on UNRWA, praising the agency’s neutrality rules and blaming any failure by its leaders to police wayward staff on a lack of resources or co-operation from Israeli authorities. At best, it delivers a light rap on the knuckles here and there.
“Neutrality-related issues persist,” the report says. “They include instances of staff publicly expressing political views, host-country textbooks with problematic content being used in some UNRWA schools, and politicized staff unions making threats against UNRWA management and causing operational disruptions.”
The report acknowledges that “UNRWA’s facilities have sometimes been misused for political or military gains, undermining its neutrality.” But it adds that “UNRWA, as a UN agency, does not have policing, military or wider investigative capacities or competencies required to detect such breaches.” It recommends “closer dialogue between UNRWA, the Israeli Defence Forces and the Palestinian Authority” to “remedy some of the information gaps.”
Good luck with that.
“Hamas has infiltrated UNRWA so deeply that it is no longer possible to determine where UNRWA ends and where Hamas begins,” Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz said in response. “The Colonna report ignores the severity of the problem and offers cosmetic solutions.”
A separate investigation into Israel’s allegations of UNRWA’s harbouring of Hamas members is being conducted by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). And it could be some time before its findings are made public. It is unclear whether its final report will be any more substantive than the review panel’s.
Canadian International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen did not wait for the Colonna report, much less the outcome of the OIOS investigation, to announce in March that Canada was resuming its support for UNRWA. Ottawa, which provided almost $40-million to the agency in 2023, had said it would suspend funding in the wake of Israel’s allegations of UNRWA staffers’ involvement in the Oct. 7 attack.
Ms. Colonna’s report is right about one thing. As the only aid organization with the staff, infrastructure and resources to deliver relief to Gazans on the scale that is needed, UNRWA remains “irreplaceable and indispensable to Palestinians’ human and economic development.” But its neutrality is also badly compromised.
And that leaves donor countries, including Canada, in the untenable position of providing funding to the organization to ensure it can perform its humanitarian mission, with the knowledge that – willfully or not – it also facilitates Hamas’s activities. That must not go on indefinitely.