Israel today condemned as a “disgrace” a United Nations report claiming that only nine employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa, may have participated in the October 7 attacks on Israel months after the allegations were first made by the Israeli government. America has suspended its funding for Unrwa until at least 2025.  

The United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services says, after completing its review, that the employees were possibly involved in the attacks, which took place in southern Israel and claimed the lives of around 1,200 Israelis.

“The evidence obtained by OIOS indicated that the UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the armed attacks of 7 October 2023,” the report says. “The employment of these individuals will be terminated in the interests of the Agency.”

“We have sufficient information to take the actions that we are taking,” a spokesman for the office, Farhan Haq, said at a press conference on Monday. 

Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said that the UN investigation, which, he said, focused solely on 19 relief agency employees, “is a disgrace” and “is too little, too late — ignoring thousands of agency employees involved to various degrees in Hamas’s terror activities.”

Mr. Erdan said that the UN “still refuses to recognize the reality of its agency.” He added that the Secretary General recently “chose to award Unrwa’s Gaza division his prestigious Secretary General’s Award for 2023.”

“The Secretary General must resign, and Unrwa must be shut down,” Mr. Erdan added.

While Mr. Haq did not detail the exact nature of the agency’s findings, he said there was “sufficient” evidence to warrant the employees’ terminations. “For us, any participation in the attacks is a tremendous betrayal of the sort of work that we are supposed to be doing on behalf of the Palestinian people,” Mr. Haq stated. 

Israel initially made the accusation that 12 employees of Unrwa were in some way involved in the October 7 attacks, which led the UN to focus its investigation on 19 individuals.

The organization said 10 of those individuals were not involved and were cleared of wrongdoing. In its own statement today Israel said it “provided the UN with detailed information regarding over 100 Unrwa employees who were direct members of the terrorist organization Hamas.”

In April, another investigative board led by a former French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, reported that Israel had not provided sufficient evidence of its claims at the time. 

Governments across the world were quick to suspend funding to Unrwa in the wake of the accusations. Congressional Republicans successfully placed a measure in last year’s annual funding package for the State Department that barred America from funding Unrwa through at least March 2025. 

Shortly after the allegations were made, however, many countries resumed their funding of the organization. Germany, the European Union, France, Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom were some of the first to resume funding just weeks after the allegations of Unrwa employees being involved in the attack were made.

_________

This story has been updated from the bulldog edition.