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<div class="gmail-inner-article-top"><h1 class="gmail-">UN report demolishes Israeli propaganda campaign against UNRWA</h1><p class="gmail-">Israel
has waged a multi-year campaign against the UN aid group for
Palestinian refugees in hopes of eradicating the right of return</p><div class="gmail-another-name"><p><a href="https://thecradle.co/authors/news-desk-9" style="color:rgb(164,4,4)">News Desk</a></p></div><div class="gmail-another-name" style="margin-top:16px"><p><span>APR 22, 2024 - </span><font size="1"><a href="https://thecradle.co/articles/un-report-demolishes-israeli-propaganda-campaign-against-unrwa">https://thecradle.co/articles/un-report-demolishes-israeli-propaganda-campaign-against-unrwa</a></font></p></div></div><div class="gmail-inner-article-img"><img src="http://thecradle-main.oss-eu-central-1.aliyuncs.com/public/articles/02e74f8c-00ad-11ef-b564-00163e02c055.jpeg" alt="" width="394" height="222" style="margin-right: 0px;"><span><font size="1">Food aid arrives at a UNRWA school-turned-shelter in Gaza (Photo credit: UNRWA)</font></span></div><div class="gmail-inner-article-content"><div class="gmail-row"><div class="gmail-col-md-8 gmail-col-sm-7"><div class="gmail-article-content"><span><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>The <i>Guardian</i> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/22/israel-unrwa-staff-terrorist-links-yet-to-provide-evidence-colonna-report">reported</a> 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.”</p><p>The <i>Guardian</i>
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.</p><p>The Colonna review was drafted with the help of three Nordic research institutes and will be published later on Monday.</p><p>It confirms that Israel has yet to provide any evidence of its claims.</p><p>It
notes that in March, “Israel made public claims that a significant
number of Unrwa employees are members of terrorist organizations.”</p><p>“However, Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this,” the report says.</p><p>The Colonna review makes clear that UNRWA is “indispensable” to Palestinians across the region.</p><p>“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.</p><p>“As such, UNRWA is
irreplaceable and indispensable to Palestinians’ human and economic
development. In addition, many view UNRWA as a humanitarian lifeline.”</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p>The assessment refuted Israeli
claims that Palestinian children are taught antisemitic content in
UNRWA-run schools, which use Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks.</p><p>“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.”</p><p>As <i>The Cradle’s</i> William Van Wagenen <a href="https://thecradle.co/articles-id/23350">reported</a> 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.</p></span></div></div></div></div>
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