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Calls for a reassessment of UN’s funding and role intensify amid growing scrutiny.
By Robert Williams, Gatestone
To understand how the UN effectively runs the Hamas propaganda war, it is important to know that the UN, through its agency for Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), is effectively embedded with Hamas in the Gaza Strip…
“The UN has 13,000 employees in tiny Gaza. They know exactly what’s going on… They all knew Hamas’ terror infrastructure was in the hospital compound, where Israel wouldn’t attack. They lied to the world for 16 years. To paint Israel as evil.” — Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, November 16, 2023.
[T]he UN has sustained an incessant campaign, especially on social media, that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting schools, children, civilians, hospitals and healthcare workers. While those are protected from attack during war by international law, that protection does not apply to schools, hospitals and other civilian sites that are used for military purposes.
When Israel carried out an airstrike on an ambulance in northern Gaza, which was being used by Hamas terrorists, [UN Secretary-General António] Guterres expressed that he was “horrified” with Israel’s action, while ignoring Hamas’s war crimes. In practice, the UN and Hamas act as partners in crime.
Above all, the UN’s transparent complicity with Hamas should convince the US, finally, that much of the UN is a destructive organization that prolongs wars, and needs immediately to have its funding decimated, and be reduced in importance to the corrupt relic that it is, deserving no place in this century.
Since October 7, when Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and massacred at least 1,200 and kidnapped another 240 Israelis and people of other nationalities, the United Nations has been acting as the unofficial propaganda arm of the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist organization.
The propaganda campaign’s main aim – besides smearing Israel – appears to be to build overwhelming international pressure on Israel to agree to an indefinite ceasefire , which will give Hamas the needed time to regroup and replenish to continue its terrorist activities and to avoid being eliminated by the Israeli Defense Forces.
To understand how the UN effectively runs the Hamas propaganda war, it is important to know that the UN, through its agency for Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), is effectively embedded with Hamas in the Gaza Strip: it can be difficult to make any meaningful distinction between the two organizations. On October 7, in fact, as the Hamas massacre of civilians in Israel unfolded, UNRWA employees in Gaza celebrated. UN Watch wrote in a report last month:
“As soon as news of the horrific slaughter broke, which was livestreamed on social media by some of the terrorists, United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff immediately celebrated and justified it on Facebook… UNRWA has been a breeding ground for Palestinian terrorists from its early days… The perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre, in which 11 Israeli athletes were murdered… almost all were raised and educated in UNRWA schools… Likewise, Mohamed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s Al Qassem Brigades who masterminded the October 7th massacre, was also educated in an UNRWA school.”
According to Associated Press:
“From 2014-2020, U.N. agencies spent nearly $4.5 billion in Gaza, including $600 million in 2020 alone. More than 80% of that funding is channeled through the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, who make up three-fourths of Gaza’s population. Some 280,000 children in Gaza attend schools run by UNRWA, which also provides health services and food aid.”
The UN, through UNRWA in Gaza, likely knows everything that happens there, including the terrorist infrastructure of the underground Hamas tunnels and their use of hospitals and ambulances. Yet throughout this war, the UN has done nothing but feign “horror and shock” at Israel’s necessary measures against Hamas terrorists embedded within civilian society in Gaza. As the executive director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, pointed out:
“The UN has 13,000 employees in tiny Gaza. They know exactly what’s going on… They all knew Hamas’ terror infrastructure was in the hospital compound, where Israel wouldn’t attack. They lied to the world for 16 years. To paint Israel as evil.”
On October 24, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stooped to a new low when pushing a typical Hamas narrative of grievances. He said that the October 7 attacks “did not happen in a vacuum,” thereby seemingly justifying the terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the UN has not bothered in the least to address in concrete and horrifying detail what happened during the October 7 massacre – the mass rapes, the horrific torture, the ruthless murders and the kidnappings.
This silence on what happened on October 7 is, sadly, in keeping with the UN’s demonization of Israel around the clock. The UN invokes international humanitarian law – which Hamas, not Israel, is breaking by building military installations in protected civilian spaces (which, when used for military purposes become unprotected) and using civilians as human shields. Meanwhile, the UN never calls for Hamas to stop using its civilians as human shields to protect its weapons and show dead babies to the television cameras – to imply that their deaths were Israel’s fault.
Why are Gazan civilians not allowed to take shelter from aerial bombardments in Hamas’s 300 km of underground tunnels? Why did the Israel Defense Forces have to protect the Gazans fleeing south for their lives — as Israel had cautioned them to — while Hamas tried at gunpoint to prevent them from leaving?
Everything that the UN says and does regarding to Israel’s military operations in Gaza turns Hamas’s war crimes on their head — to try to blame them on Israel. Meanwhile, the UN parrots as fact whatever outlandish claims Hamas produces, including Gazan casualty numbers, which oddly never include any mention of Hamas terrorists, but mostly women and children.
When Hamas claimed on October 17 that Israel had bombed Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital, falsely asserting that hundreds of people had been killed, the UN rushed to blame Israel. Guterres used his speech at the Belt and Road Summit in China to condemn Israel for the explosion outside the hospital and to call for an immediate ceasefire, while Dennis Francis, president of the 78th session of the UN General Assembly announced that he was “shocked and horrified.”
On October 18, Israel published evidence showing that the strike on the hospital compound was a misfired rocket aimed at Israel and launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The UN said nothing. Instead, the UN has sustained an incessant campaign, especially on social media, that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting schools, children, civilians, hospitals and healthcare workers. While those are protected from attack during war by international law, that protection does not apply to schools, hospitals and other civilian sites that are used for military purposes.
Hamas’ unlawful military use of hospitals, schools and other civilian sites was first exposed years ago. Former US President Bill Clinton spoke about it in 2016. “When Hamas chooses to rocket Israel, it insinuates itself into hospitals and into schools,” he said.
NATO published a report in 2019, which bluntly stated:
“Hamas, an Islamist militant group and the de facto governing authority of the Gaza Strip, has been using human shields in conflicts with Israel since 2007. According to the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the war crime of using human shields encompasses “utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas, or military forces immune from military operations.” Hamas has launched rockets, positioned military-related infrastructure-hubs and routes, and engaged the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from, or in proximity to, residential and commercial areas.
“The strategic logic of human shields has two components. It is based on an awareness of Israel’s desire to minimise collateral damage, and of Western public opinion’s sensitivity towards civilian casualties. If the IDF uses lethal force and causes an increase in civilian casualties, Hamas can utilise that as a lawfare tool: it can accuse Israel of committing war crimes, which could result in the imposition of a wide array of sanctions. Alternatively, if the IDF limits its use of military force in Gaza to avoid collateral damage, Hamas will be less susceptible to Israeli attacks, and thereby able to protect its assets while continuing to fight.”
When Israel carried out an airstrike on an ambulance in northern Gaza, which was being used by Hamas terrorists, Guterres expressed that he was “horrified” with Israel’s action, while ignoring Hamas’s war crimes. In practice, the UN and Hamas act as partners in crime.
A Hamas terrorist who participated in the October 7 mass-murder of Israelis and was captured, said during a recent interrogation intercepted by Israel:
“Al-Qassam [the Hamas military wing] has its own ambulances, some of which are located on the military base. The appearance of the ambulances is similar to the civilian ambulances so that they will not arouse suspicion or be bombed by Israel.”
Another captured Hamas terrorist said:
“During combat, the ambulances are used, among other things, to evacuate fighters, commanders and operatives. They also transport food, cargo and weapons in them because that is the safest way to transport them.”
Yet another captured terrorist said that ambulances were useful to transport “important people” such as Hamas commanders because “the Jews don’t attack ambulances.”
When Israel published evidence of the Hamas military command center beneath Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, World Health Organization Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who covered up the transmissibility of the COVID-19 pandemic for China and is accused of trying to cover up three cholera epidemics in Ethiopia, immediately castigated Israel.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths, wrote:
“I’m appalled by reports of military raids in Al Shifa hospital in #Gaza. The protection of newborns, patients, medical staff and all civilians must override all other concerns. Hospitals are not battlegrounds.”
While these high-ranking UN officials disingenuously feign ignorance and expect the public to believe that they knew nothing about the Hamas base in Al-Shifa Hospital, foreign doctors and journalists have apparently been aware of it for years.
An unnamed British doctor, who worked at Al-Shifa hospital three years ago, recently said in a television interview:
“The main point was, when I was first asked to work there [at Al-Shifa], I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot… implicit was that it was being used for non-medical purposes… I stayed away, but I saw a few dodgy looking non-medical characters going in and out all the time. It was a ward leading to a basement.”
A journalist from Italy related that in 2009, upon arriving in Al-Shifa Hospital to interview wounded members of Fatah, he came almost face to face with the Hamas command and control center beneath the hospital:
“Shifa is a very large compound. I got lost inside it, and at some point I ended up on an underground floor, and I found myself in front of two armed Hamas men in military attire, who told me to get out. I got the impression they were guarding a security door that gave access to their underground infrastructure. Several Palestinian sources I spoke with later on confirmed that Hamas’s command and control center was located under Shifa Hospital and that [Hamas leader] Ismail Haniyeh had been hiding there throughout the duration of Operation Cast Lead.”
It is also likely that the UN, with its 13,000 employees in Gaza, knew, as did the nurses and doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital, that Israeli hostages were being held at Al-Shifa. Israel recently revealed that Hamas terrorists brought hostages there in broad daylight on October 7, with healthcare staff even holding doors open for the terrorists.
The UN’s pretend show of “shock and horror” that Israel is eliminating its Hamas partner in Gaza is too transparent for anyone to take seriously, although the international mainstream media certainly does, parroting whatever Hamas and the UN allege as facts.
Above all, the UN’s transparent complicity with Hamas should convince the US, finally, that much of the UN is a destructive organization that prolongs wars, and needs immediately to have its funding decimated, and be reduced in importance to the corrupt relic that it is, deserving no place in this century.
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