By UN Watch ——Bio and Archives--June 2, 2017
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GENEVA – UN Watch today demanded that UNRWA chief Pierre Krahenbuhl apologize for using images of a girl from a bombed-out Syrian building as part of a global campaign to raise money for the organization by pretending the girl is a Gaza victim of Israeli actions.
UNRWA is now running the above photo on Facebook and in paid Twitter ads. It is also now UNRWA’s cover image on both Facebook and Twitter.
UNRWA's narrative of the photo tells of a girl named Aya from Gaza who is said to be 11 years old now, and who has suffered from the Israeli blockade of Gaza, occupation, and walls."Imagine being cut off from the world – for your whole life. That’s reality for children like Aya. The blockade of Gaza began when she was a baby, the occupation in the West Bank before her parents were born. Now she is eleven, and the blockade goes on. Aya’s childhood memories are of conflict and hardship, walls she cannot escape, and the fear that the only home she knows, however tiny, could be gone when she returns from school. This Ramadan, please help support children like Aya who have known nothing but conflict and hardship. Donate here"Yet in fact neither the girl nor the bombed-out building are in Gaza; the photo was apparently taken near Damascus, in 2014. Here is UNRWA tweeting the original image in a January 2015 story on Syria:
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UN Watch is a Geneva-based human rights organization founded in 1993 to monitor UN compliance with the principles of its Charter. It is accredited as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Special Consultative Status to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and as an Associate NGO to the UN Department of Public Information (DPI).