Report: Israel did not express concern about UN agency staff helping refugees

UNITED NATIONS — An independent review of the neutrality of the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees found that Israel never expressed concern about anyone on the staff lists it has received annually since 2011. The review was carried out after Israel alleged that a dozen employees of the agency known as UNRWA had participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks.

In a wide-ranging 48-page report released Monday, the independent panel said UNRWA has “robust” procedures to uphold the U.N. principle of neutrality, but it cited serious gaps in implementation, including staff publicly expressing political views, textbooks used in schools the agency runs with “problematic content” and staff unions disrupting operations. It makes 50 recommendations to improve UNRWA’s neutrality.

From 2017 to 2022, the report said, the annual number of allegations of neutrality being breached at UNRWA ranged from seven to 55. But between January 2022 and February 2024, U.N. investigators received 151 allegations, most related to social media posts “made public by external sources,” it said.

In a key section on the neutrality of staff, the panel, which was led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, said UNRWA shares lists of staff with host countries for its 32,000 staff, including about 13,000 in Gaza. But it said Israeli officials never expressed concern and informed panel members it did not consider the list “a screening or vetting process” but rather a procedure to register diplomats.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry informed the panel that until March 2024 the staff lists did not include Palestinian identification numbers, the report said.

Apparently based on those numbers, “Israel made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organizations,” the panel said. “However, Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this” to the refugee agency.

Israel’s allegations led to the suspension of contributions to UNRWA by the United States and more than a dozen other countries. That amounted to a pause in funding worth about $450 million, according to Monday’s report, but a number of countries have resumed contributions.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday called on donor countries to avoid sending money to the organization.

“The Colonna report ignores the severity of the problem, and offers cosmetic solutions that do not deal with the enormous scope of Hamas’ infiltration of UNRWA,” ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein said. “This is not what a genuine and thorough review looks like. This is what an effort to avoid the problem and not address it head on looks like.”

Colonna urged the Israeli government not to discount the independent review. “Of course you will find it is insufficient, but please take it on board. Whatever we recommend, if implemented, will bring good,” she said.

Colonna stressed that U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed the independent review panel to review UNRWA’s neutrality — not to investigate Israeli allegations that 12 UNRWA staffers participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. Guterres ordered the U.N. internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, known as OIOS, to conduct a separate investigation into those Israeli allegations.