Israel-UN relations grow more fraught as world body piles on criticism of Gaza war
Sides have escalated rhetoric post-Oct. 7: Netanyahu lobs accusations of antisemitism at global organization, as its expert on Palestinians suggests Jewish state should be expelled
Israel’s long-contentious relationship with the United Nations has since October 7 spiraled to new depths, amid insults and accusations and even a questioning of the country’s continued UN membership.
Addressing the UN General Assembly on Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the world body of treating his country unfairly.
“Until this antisemitic swamp is drained, the UN will be viewed by fair-minded people everywhere as nothing more than a contemptuous farce,” he thundered.
The past year has seen repeated accusations from within the UN system that Israel is committing “genocide” in its war in Gaza, which erupted following Hamas’s October 7 massacre, while Israeli officials have leveled charges of bias and even accused the UN chief of being “an accomplice to terror.”
Even before October 7, Israel complained of UN bias, pointing for instance to the towering number of resolutions targeting the country.
Since the creation of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006, more than a third of the over 300 condemnatory resolutions have targeted Israel, the country’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva Daniel Meron told AFP, describing this as “mind-boggling.”
Temperatures have risen further in recent days amid Israel’s escalating strikes on the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon, which began launching rockets at Israel on October 8, a day after Hamas’s devastating attack.
“There has been a great deterioration” in the relationship, said Cyrus Schayegh, an international history and politics professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute. “It has gone from fairly bad to really bad.”
UN ‘betrayal’
Since Hamas’s devastating massacre inside Israel nearly a year ago, UN-linked courts, councils, agencies, and staff have unleashed a barrage of condemnation and criticism of Israel’s ensuing military operation in Gaza.
“We feel the UN has betrayed Israel,” Meron told AFP.
Some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in Hamas’s October 7 attack and 251 hostages were taken to Gaza, of whom 97 are still being held there, including 33 the military says are dead.
Israel then launched its military operation in Gaza, vowing to eliminate the terror group and rescue the hostages.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 41,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 17,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s population as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 348.
Just weeks after the war began, Israel called for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to resign when he asserted that Hamas’s massacre “did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”
‘Impunity reigns’
Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the UN rights office, said a lack of accountability in the Middle East crisis appeared to have made “the parties to the conflict more brazen.”
“We rang the alarm bells multiple times and now there is the impression that impunity reigns,” she told AFP, lamenting increasing attacks on UN bodies and staff expressing concern over the situation. “This is unacceptable.”
Israel has especially taken aim at UNRWA, the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees. Israel and pro-Israel lobbying groups have for years accused UNRWA staff of antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism, particularly within UNRWA’s extensive education system.
Throughout the IDF’s campaign in Gaza, Hamas weapons and facilities have been found embedded in UNRWA sites. Israel has also identified UNRWA employees who directly took part in the October 7 atrocities.
UNRWA saw a series of funding cuts after Israel accused more than a dozen of its 13,000 Gaza employees of involvement in the October 7 terror onslaught and said many of its workers were members of terror groups. In August, the UN announced that nine UNRWA employees “may have been involved” in Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and will be fired from the organization.
Agency chief Philippe Lazzarini has accused Israel of conducting “a concerted effort to dismantle UNRWA,” which has suffered dramatic human and material losses in Gaza, with more than 220 staff killed.
Netanyahu demanded earlier this year that UNRWA, which he said “perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem (and) whose schools indoctrinate Palestinian children with genocide and terror … be replaced by responsible aid agencies.”
‘Pariah’
Francesca Albanese, the UN independent rights expert on the Palestinian territories, who has faced harsh criticism and calls for her ouster from Israel over past antisemitic comments and remarks appearing to justify Hamas’s October 7 massacre, recently suggested the country was becoming a “pariah.”
“Should there be a consideration of its membership as part of this organization, which Israel seems to have zero respect for?” she rhetorically asked journalists last week.
Meron slammed Albanese as “antisemitic and really an embarrassment to the UN.”
The Times of Israel exposed Albanese’s history of antisemitic comments in an investigation in late 2022.
Albanese said during the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas that the “Jewish lobby” was in control of the United States. She has also sympathized with terror organizations, dismissed Israeli security concerns, compared Israelis to Nazis, said Israel controlled the BBC, and claimed that the Jewish state started wars out of greed.
Israel criticized Albanese after she and other UN-mandated rights experts said in November that Palestinians in war-battered Gaza were “at grave risk of genocide.” In a statement on October 14, she accused Israel of aiming to ethnically cleanse Gaza, while not mentioning the shock Hamas attack on Israel that started the war.
Albanese was banned from Israel in February after she denied that the October 7 atrocities were motivated by a hatred of Jews and claimed they were “in response to Israel’s oppression.”
