UNRWA refuses to correct "2200 civilians killed" lie (UPDATE: Cover-up!)

On Friday, I noted that a speech given by UNRWA Deputy Commissioner-General Margot Ellis contained a major falsehood in a speech she gave.

Referring to the Gaza war, she said "This summer, around 2,200 civilians were killed in 50 days."

Perhaps she misspoke and she meant to say "people" instead of "civilians." Even that is problematic, because it would be equating the lives of the innocent and the terrorists in an attempt to inflate the seeming callousness of the IDF towards human life.

However, it is increasingly hard to give that benefit of the doubt. For one thing, this is the transcript of the speech as written, and one would expect that an official giving a major speech in front of a UN committee would be very careful with her words.

Moreover, UNRWA has refused to correct this.

I emailed to two UNRWA spokespeople on Friday. I tweeted spokesperson Chris Gunness multiple times as well.I know some of my readers also emailed about this. But the lie is still on the UNRWA webpage. 

A newspaper would usually correct such an egregious error quickly, because newspapers want to appear to care about the truth.. If a UN organization refuses to issue such a clear correction, it appears as if they actually want to tell the world the lie that Israel only kills civilians.

When a UN organization is so willing to allow a anti-Israel lie be spread, and it does nothing to fix the lie, that goes a long way towards explaining why Israel can never trust the UN, and UNRWA specifically, to be fair.

UPDATE: In classic UNRWA fashion, they changed her remark to "people" it  - but without admitting that they made a mistake to begin with.

Which means, of course, that they will never apologize for libeling Israel in the actual speech. Because why should a record of the speech reflect what was actually said to UN officials? Easier to change history and pretend that you never did anything wrong, just as UNRWA has done before. 

This is the level of transparency that UNRWA has. And it is outrageous that an organization funded to the tune of over a billion dollars a year is allowed to act as if it has no obligation to truth and transparency.

(UNISPAL archives continue to include the offensive phrase.)