UNRWA Commissioner-General Phillipe Lazzarini responded, saying that UNRWA was not aware of this and "In the past, whenever suspicious cavity was found close to or under UNRWA premises, protest letters were promptly filed to parties to the conflict, including both the de facto authorities in Gaza (Hamas) and the Israeli authorities. The matter was consistently reported in annual reports presented to the General Assembly and made public."
As someone who has discovered UNRWA websites that extolled martyrdom and antisemitism, UNRWA employee social media posts that support murdering Jews and UNRWA schools that directly teach students to murder Jews, I wanted to see how transparent UNRWA has been about incitement in previous investigations.
In my experience, UNRWA was quick to take down websites and even to discipline employees that violated its policies, but they never seemed to actively try to fix the underlying problem. And the things that they did discover were not publicized, but hidden under innocuous sounding sections of reports that didn't spell out what exactly the violations were.
After my and UN Watch's exposes, UNRWA began to take steps to address these issues we found - but even in their official reports, one gets the impression that the reason is to protect their own reputation and funding, not to ensure that there was true neutrality.
In their 2015 Operational Report - the year I had discovered so many damning examples - they wrote in one table:
Real or perceived breach of UNRWA neutrality as humanitarian actor• Donors reduce their financial support.• Reputation of UNRWA as a non-neutral actor creating distrust among beneficiaries and partners
The organization started a Department of Internal Oversight Services to investigate these sorts of issues. But even they admit that their reason for existence is to make UNRWA look good more than actually rooting out the deep-seated problems in UNRWA itself. Their 2017 report about their response to the social media posts that support terrorism says:
The Ethics Office took the lead in developing a new mandatory, all staff, e-learning course on social media and neutrality, two issues representing a significant reputational risk to the Agency.
Not a risk to the students learning hate. No, the main risk of teachers who openly support terror is the reputational risk to UNRWA, which results in bad publicity and a loss of revenue.
Similarly, in 2015 they began doing "neutrality inspections" of schools to look for visible examples of things that were "non-neutral." They found them. But they only dealt with a few:
Neutrality issues that could be addressed included the removal of political graffiti or posters on the outside walls of the installations. Many of the issues that remained unsolved related to long-standing memorials to individuals killed in the conflict that the Agency was unable to remove.
Meaning, UNRWA refused to remove memorials to known terrorists, because it would upset - UNRWA employees.
They decided that the reputational risk of employees publicly protesting to keep memorials to terrorists was higher than the reputational risk of someone outside finding out about the memorials - so instead of removing the incitement and support for terror they made a calculation based on the comparative reputational risks and chose to keep the memorials.
Anyone see a problem here?
Which is what is happening now with the revelations of UNRWA employees moonlighting s Hamas terrorists and Hamas siphoning off UNRWA electricity (and probably network access.) The response is about the importance of maintaining the flow of cash to UNRWA more than anger at finding terrorists inside the organization.
In the end, the claim of "neutrality" is ludicrous anyway. The entire purpose of UNRWA is to keep the fake refugee issue alive, with the sole purpose of destroying Israel one day via "return." It doesn't get less neutral than that.
