UNRWA to be booted from Israel with good reason

Decisions by Israel’s Knesset voting:

• 92 to 10 to approve a law barring the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating in Israeli territory and
• 87 to 9 in favor of curtailing UNRWA’s activities in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by banning state authorities from having any contact with UNRWA

Have been met with a chorus of international disapproval--including a statement issued on October 27, 2024 by the Foreign Ministers of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom expressing their grave concern over the proposed legislation--before the 120 Knesset members had voted.

These seven Foreign Ministers were blatantly attempting to interfere in Israel’s internal affairs using their respective Governments--not their Parliaments--as their Trojan horses.

The Foreign Ministers statement papered over the reasons that had brought Israel’s parliament to take such drastic action to boot UNRWA from Israel within 90 days:

“We once again condemn in the strongest possible terms the brutal and unjustified terror attacks by Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023. UNRWA has taken steps to address allegations regarding individual employees’ support for terrorist organizations and demonstrated its willingness to pursue and implement reform of internal processes in line with the independent review of April 2024, led by Ms. Catherine Colonna, on UNRWA neutrality. We call on UNRWA to continue its path of reform as a priority, demonstrating its commitment to the principle of neutrality, and ensure that its activities remain entirely in line with its mandate. We will continue to actively monitor and support this process.”

The Foreign Ministers failed to acknowledge:

• Ten staff working for UNRWA had been sacked because of their involvement in the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel. 2 others were dead.
• The head of Hamas’s Lebanon branch had been suspended from his teaching job at UNRWA in March following allegations concerning his politics.
• The Colonna review (p.29) had highlighted that the 2022-2023 UNRWA Rapid Review of Palestinian Authority textbooks used in UNRWA-run Gazan schools had found 3.85 per cent of all textbook pages raised “issues of concern to UN values, guidance, or position on the conflict,” either because they were deemed “educationally inappropriate” or because they were not in line with UNESCO standards.

Even if marginal, Colonna regarded these issues constituted a grave violation of neutrality. Among the various issues, recurrent ones were the use of historical maps in a non-historical context, e.g. without labelling Israel; naming Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine; naming cities in Israel as Palestinian cities; the use of the word Zionist (e.g. “Zionist occupation” referring to Israel).

• The discovery in February of a subterranean data centre running under UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza--complete with an electrical room, industrial battery power banks and living quarters for Hamas terrorists operating the computer servers--with electrical cables leading from the UNRWA server room above to the Hamas server room in the tunnel below.

Cables running from a UNRWA server room to a Hamas data center underground in Gaza City, February 8, 2024. (Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)

• UNRWA’s continuing use of misleading Gaza Ministry of Health numbers reporting Gazans killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 without attempting to ascertain how many were terrorist combatants
• UNRWA inflaming Jew-hatred worldwide and leaving UNRWA’s registered Gazan refugees at risk in a war zone by not moving them to UNRWA-run refugee camps outside Gaza.

Seven Foreign Ministers assurances could never assuage Israel’s anger at what Gaza had become under the very eyes of UNRWA and its 13000 employees by October 7, 2023.

Declaring UNRWA persona non grata in Israel is certainly justified.

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Author’s note: The cartoon--commissioned exclusively by the author--is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”--one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators--whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades