Israel is being accused of failing to demonstrate the terrorist connections of the United Nations agency supporting Palestinians at Gaza, best known by its acronym, Unrwa, following an investigation commissioned by UN that critics say was “rigged” to bolster donor funding toward the agency.

“Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence” of claims that many of the UN agency’s employees are members of terrorist organizations, the review group, headed by a former French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, asserts in a report released Monday. The group says it has discovered that Unrwa has “a more developed approach to neutrality than other similar UN or NGO entities,” with tools in place to ensure “humanitarian” compliance. 

Unrwa’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, announced in January he would appoint an “independent entity” to examine the agency’s “neutrality” following allegations that 3,000 Unrwa teachers belonged to a group praising the Hamas massacre. The possible involvement of at least 12 Unrwa staffers in the October 7 attacks is under a separate investigation by the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services.

Critics, though, are throwing into question the “independent” nature of the investigation by Ms. Colonna, who they suggest is a cheerleader for Unrwa. Just a week before she was appointed by Mr. Lazzarini in January, she pledged to him “full support for your work,” which she said is “more useful than ever.” 

Ms. Colonna reaffirmed this support during a briefing with reporters at the UN’s headquarters at New York City on Monday. Unrwa “plays an indispensable and irreplaceable role in the region,” she said, and “a vital role in the humanitarian response in Gaza.” The UN’s secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, accepted Ms. Colonna’s recommendations in a statement on Monday. 

Ms. Colonna’s conclusions fly in the face of a report sent to the review group this month by a watchdog group, UN Watch, which asserts that Unrwa’s Gaza workforce has been infiltrated by Hamas since at least 2004. “We sent them all the evidence, they ignored everything,” the head of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, tells the Sun. He argues on X that “the entire investigation is rigged” to ensure that the findings will “provide cover” to donor nations.

According to UN Watch’s report, 14 or more Unrwa employees participated in the October 7 massacre. Thousands of Unrwa employees have held rallies for Unrwa teachers disciplined for “encouraging terrorism” or “venerating Hitler” on social media, the report says. Last month, the Unrwa system in Lebanon held a strike following the suspension of two Unrwa teachers, one of whom was a senior Hamas leader.

When Ms. Colonna visited Israel in March as part of her investigation, a former Knesset member, Einat Wilf, presented her with research demonstrating that “Unrwa could never be neutral,” she tells the Sun. “Other than a thin layer of donor-facing European managers at the top, it is a purely Palestinian organization, committed to the Palestine ethos of no Jewish state via ‘return.’” The review group, Ms. Wilf says, “did not want to listen.”

“To argue that Unrwa can maintain any neutrality,” Ms. Wilf asserts, “is willfully blind at best and more probably guided by malicious intent to preserve Unrwa as the useful tool that it’s been for decades to funnel UN legitimacy and Western money to the ongoing effort to undo the Jewish state.”

Unrwa insisted in a February statement that it always takes “very seriously any allegation” about staff misconduct and that “Unrwa reviews all allegations of misconduct.” Yet UN Watch has noted that these investigations take place only after a third party reports a neutrality violation and no regular, comprehensive review of its staff is currently in place. 

It is now up to donor nations to decide whether to resume their contributions to the UN agency at Gaza. The U.S. Department of State announced in January that it had “temporarily paused additional funding for Unrwa.” Before that pause, though, America had already committed $51 million to Unrwa’s work in the West Bank and Gaza for 2024.

Congress passed legislation in March, which was later signed into law by President Biden, to deny any Unrwa funding until March 2025. A senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Richard Goldberg, is now calling to “defund Unrwa permanently.”

Mr. Neuer points to what appear to be cozy relations between Ms. Colonna and Mr. Lazzarini. When the two met last June, she expressed concern over food insecurity in the Palestinian Authority, and Unrwa gave thanks for France’s “strong support.” The country has increasingly supported Unrwa in recent years and was the sixth-largest contributor to the agency’s budget in 2023.

Mr. Neuer also questions the impartiality of the three Scandinavian institutes that aided the review — the Chr. Michelsen Institute, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights. The CMI, for one, asserted in a 2022 report that claims that Unrwa “instigates violence” through, say, school teachings are “unfounded.”

Ms. Colonna told reporters on Monday that the investigation found incitements to violence in some of the Unrwa curriculum, including “glorification of jihad, incitation to violence, maps of the current world … not showing the existence of Israel.” She asserted, though, that “enhancing interactions between Unrwa and its donors is imperative to foster trust and to strengthen partnership.”