UNRWA violating its mandate again to attack Israel ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, March 04, 2024

UNRWA violating its mandate again to attack Israel

An unpublished investigation by the main United Nations agency for Palestinian affairs accuses Israel of abusing hundreds of Gazans captured during the war with Hamas, according to a copy of the report reviewed by The New York Times.
The report was compiled by UNRWA, the U.N. agency that is itself at the center of an investigation after accusations that at least 30 of its 13,000 employees participated in the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. The authors of the report allege that the detainees, including at least 1,000 civilians later released without charge, were held at three military sites inside Israel.
The report said the detainees included males and females whose ages ranged from 6 to 82. Some, the report said, died in detention.
The document includes accounts from detainees who said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month.

I cannot comment on the report itself without seeing it. It appears to rely almost exclusively on witness testimony, which even Amnesty has admitted is often unreliable. It requires real expertise to weed out facts from suppositions and assumptions in from supposed witnesses, expertise that UNRWA is not known to have.

However, we do know UNRWA's mandate. And this report is certainly not within that mandate.

UNRWA's mandate is based on UN General Assembly resolutions:

UNRWA has a humanitarian and development mandate to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees pending a just and lasting solution to their plight. ...

The Agency’s mandate has evolved over the years, as set out in various General Assembly resolutions, to extend to the provision of emergency services to persons in its area of operations who are currently displaced and in serious need of continued assistance as a result of the 1967 and subsequent hostilities. ...

UNRWA provides humanitarian assistance and contributes to protection of refugees through essential service delivery, primarily in the areas of basic education, primary health care and mental health care, relief and social services, microcredit, and emergency assistance, including in situations of armed conflict, to millions of registered Palestine refugees located within its five fields of operations (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza).The Agency does not have a mandate to engage in political negotiations or durable solutions.

But it appears to be more than willing to spend its funding on items that fall quite a bit outside its mandate.

UNRWA's job does not include researching and writing reports on alleged human rights violations by Israel. It has neither the mandate nor the expertise to write such a report. (Neither do Amnesty and HRW, by the way, as they regularly violate every formal anti-bias standard required for objectivity.)

Given that UNRWA has been under financial pressure, why is it spending so much time and money on something that has nothing to do with its mandate?

It appears that UNRWA is playing the "offense is the best defense" game. As it itself is under investigation for its employees being linked to terrorism, it wants to change the conversation to say that Israel is the only violator of human rights in the region.

UNRWA would never even consider writing a report about Hamas human rights abuses of the people the organization is pledged to protect. That in itself shows how biased UNRWA is.

No matter what the report says, and no matter how professional or amateur it is, the report itself shows that UNRWA violates not only its own mandate but also its own vaunted dedication to neutrality.

Nations who fund UNRWA should be asking themselves - is this a humanitarian aid organization or an anti-Israel propaganda outfit? Which part of UNRWA's supposedly transparent budget is being used for reports like this? And what other activities does UNRWA do outside its mandate that it hides inside its budget?

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