UN finds UNRWA has ‘mechanisms’ ensuring neutrality, but ‘critical areas’ require action
Independent panel will issue recommendations to tackle issues on April 20; US lawmakers reach deal to continue ban on funding agency until March 2025
An interim report from a United Nations independent review into allegations against UNRWA has found that the relief agency for Palestinian refugees has mechanisms in place to ensure its neutrality, but also deficiencies that must be addressed.
The review group submitted the interim report with these conclusions to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday.
Next, the panel will develop its final report with recommendations for how UNRWA should address neutrality concerns going forward and present it to the public on April 20.
The review group was established following Israeli allegations in late January that 12 of UNRWA’s employees actively participated in Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught on southern communities, when terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 253 hostages to Gaza. Those staffers have already been fired by the agency.
Israel argues that Hamas’s infiltration into the agency runs far deeper and that some 1,500 employees (some 10%) have active ties to terror groups.
The United States, along with more than a dozen countries, suspended its funding to UNRWA in January after the allegations were raised, although several have since resumed payments.
The panel’s interim report found “that UNRWA has in place a significant number of mechanisms and procedures to ensure compliance with the Humanitarian Principle of neutrality, and the group has also identified critical areas that still need to be addressed,” according to a statement from Guterres’s spokesman Wednesday, which didn’t specify the areas in need of fixes.
“The review group will now develop concrete and realistic recommendations on how to address these critical areas to strengthen and improve UNRWA,” the statement added.
The review group is led by former French foreign affairs minister Catherine Colonna, and the panel worked with three research institutes — Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Norway’s Chr. Michelsen Institute and Denmark’s Institute for Human Rights.
Colonna interviewed UNRWA staff as well as Israeli and Palestinian officials as part of the investigation.
Israel has long pushed for UNRWA’s closure, arguing that it helps perpetuate the conflict with the Palestinians since it confers refugee status upon descendants of those originally displaced around the time of Israel’s War of Independence, unlike other refugee groups around the world.
The agency has also been found to employ antisemitic staffers and use textbooks Israel deemed antisemitic and inciteful.
US funding halt to continue until March 2025
An agreement reached by US congressional leaders and the White House on a massive bill funding programs in the military, State Department and a range of other areas will continue a ban on US funding for UNRWA until March 2025, two sources said on Tuesday.
The US Senate passed legislation last month cutting off funding for the agency, part of a $95 billion bill providing aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan that has stalled in the House of Representatives.
Backers of the aid have been trying to get it restored, calling on Washington to support the relief body as aid groups work to ward off famine in Gaza.
The two sources familiar with the agreement said the funding would be blocked for a year, and that details of alternative efforts to provide humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza would be discussed after the legislation is made public.
The White House and congressional leaders declined to comment on details of the agreement until texts of the spending bills are released.
Protests against agency
On Wednesday, a few dozen Israelis protested outside the Jerusalem office of the agency, calling for its dismantling over its alleged ties to Hamas.
“UNRWA has allowed terrorism,” said American-Israeli protester Allison Epstein. “It is not an organization for peace. It has taught generations of Palestinians to hate Jews. It’s time to dismantle it.”
Around her in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, protesters chanted: “UNRWA is Hamas! Hamas is UNRWA!”
Washington has said that UNRWA has an “absolutely indispensable role” to play in distributing aid in Gaza, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said the “entire population” is suffering “severe levels of acute food insecurity.”
UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini complained this week that he was blocked from entering Gaza after Israel said he had not followed proper procedures for coordinating his visit.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell joined calls urging Israel to allow him in.
UNRWA “is playing an indispensable role in bringing relief to the afflicted civilian population in Gaza,” Borrell said in a social media message that also urged Israel to grant visas to other humanitarian workers.
COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry body governing civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, said on X that Lazzarini had not followed “the necessary coordination processes and channels” when requesting entry into Gaza.
UNRWA was established in 1949 following the war surrounding the founding of Israel, when 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes.
It employs 30,000 Palestinians to serve the civic and humanitarian needs of 5.9 million descendants of those refugees — in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and vast camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In Gaza, it is providing shelter for some one million people newly displaced by the war between Israel and Hamas, sparked by the October 7 massacre.
