[News] UN report demolishes Israeli propaganda campaign against UNRWA

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 UN report demolishes Israeli propaganda campaign against UNRWA

Israel has waged a multi-year campaign against the UN aid group for
Palestinian refugees in hopes of eradicating the right of return

News Desk <https://thecradle.co/authors/news-desk-9>

APR 22, 2024 -
https://thecradle.co/articles/un-report-demolishes-israeli-propaganda-campaign-against-unrwa
Food aid arrives at a UNRWA school-turned-shelter in Gaza (Photo credit:
UNRWA)

Israel has failed to provide any evidence of its claims that employees of
the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) are members of “terrorist
organizations,” according to an independent review led by former French
foreign minister Catherine Colonna.

In January, Israel claimed without evidence that some UNRWA staff – until
then the primary conduit of humanitarian aid into the besieged and bombed
Gaza Strip – were members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and
had participated in the Hamas-led attack on Israeli military bases and
settlements on 7 October, known as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

The Israeli allegations promptly caused the US and other western nations to
cut funding to UNRWA. This came amid reports from rights groups that Israel
was using starvation as a weapon against the 2.3 million Palestinians in
Gaza.

The *Guardian* reported
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/22/israel-unrwa-staff-terrorist-links-yet-to-provide-evidence-colonna-report>
on
22 April that the “Colonna report,” which was commissioned by the UN in the
wake of Israeli allegations, found that UNRWA had regularly supplied Israel
with lists of its employees for vetting, and that “the Israeli government
has not informed UNRWA of any concerns relating to any UNRWA staff based on
these staff lists since 2011.”

The *Guardian* added that most donor nations have resumed their funding in
recent weeks. However, UK ministers had said they would wait for the
Colonna report to decide whether to resume funding. The US Congress has
since banned any future financial support of UNRWA.

The Colonna review was drafted with the help of three Nordic research
institutes and will be published later on Monday.

It confirms that Israel has yet to provide any evidence of its claims.

It notes that in March, “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,” the
report says.

The Colonna review makes clear that UNRWA is “indispensable” to
Palestinians across the region.

“In the absence of a political solution between Israel and the
Palestinians, UNRWA remains pivotal in providing life-saving humanitarian
aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to
Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank,”
the review says.

“As such, UNRWA is irreplaceable and indispensable to Palestinians’ human
and economic development. In addition, many view UNRWA as a humanitarian
lifeline.”

The report added that “UNRWA has established a significant number of
mechanisms and procedures to ensure compliance with the humanitarian
principles, with emphasis on the principle of neutrality and that it
possesses a more developed approach to neutrality than other similar UN or
NGO entities.”

The three Nordic research institutes—the Swedish-based Raoul Wallenberg
Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, the Norwegian Chr Michelsen
Institute, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights—sent the UN a more
detailed assessment of the Israeli allegations against UNRWA.

The assessment refuted Israeli claims that Palestinian children are taught
antisemitic content in UNRWA-run schools, which use Palestinian Authority
(PA) textbooks.

“Three international assessments of PA textbooks in recent years have
provided a nuanced picture,” the assessment says. “Two identified presence
of bias and antagonistic content, but did not provide evidence of
antisemitic content. The third assessment, by the [German-based] Georg
Eckert Institute, studied 156 PA textbooks and identified two examples that
it found to display antisemitic motifs but noted that one of them had
already been removed, the other has been altered.”

As *The Cradle’s* William Van Wagenen reported
<https://thecradle.co/articles-id/23350> in February, Israel’s
evidence-free allegations against UNRWA are part of a multi-year campaign
to dismantle the agency that began before 7 October. Israel wishes to
deprive Palestinian refugees of lifesaving assistance and to eradicate the
notion that they will one day return to the lands they were expelled from
by Zionist militias in 1948 when the state of Israel was created.
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