How do New Zealanders feel about their government sending their tax money to a terror-supporting, hate-promoting organisation? An organisation, further, once under the auspices of a former NZ prime minister?
Following numerous allegations and charges against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) over its ties to terrorists with involvement in the Hamas terrorist massacre in Israel, the scandal-hit agency is facing new allegations of wrongdoing.
U.N. Watch a Geneva-based NGO, has released parts of a 150-page dossier that Executive Director Hillel Neuer told Fox News Digital shows "high-level UNRWA staff who are complicit with terrorists, who meet with them regularly."
How much more evidence does the Luxon government need before it does the decent thing and once again ceases funding to the UNRWA? At least the Albanese government has the poor excuse of being too-obviously anti-Israel.
We already know that a UNRWA chief boasted of teaching Palestinians to kite-surf, just months before Hamas used kite-surfers to perpetrate the October 7 atrocities. We also know that senior UNRWA participated in those atrocities. We also know that ‘textbooks’ by the UNRWA glorified killing Jews.
U.N. Watch’s latest dossier also includes interviews of UNRWA students taken by local Palestinian film crews over a period of three weeks during the summer of 2024. In one interview, a 14-year-old former student of UNRWA’s Ein Arik co-ed school said that his school taught him “to fight back and resist” so that “Palestine will be liberated and our lands will return to us by the good grace of Allah.” The child later explains that the solution for Jerusalem is to “kill the Jews. We get rid of the Jews.”
A second NGO, IMPACT-se has reported extensively on educational materials used in UNRWA schools for over two decades. In a Nov 13 report, IMPACT-se names 12 high-ranking UNRWA principals, deputies, directors or deputy directors of training centers who held membership in either Hamas or PIJ. The report notes that nine of the 12 participated in the terror attack of Oct 7, with “some even serving as Nukhba operatives,” members of the special forces units of Hamas. Two of the dual UNRWA- and Hamas-member principals headed schools “under which Hamas tunnels were built.”
The latest IMPACT-se review complements findings from March 2023 that two UNRWA schools headed by Hamas members had “promote[d] violence and terrorism in self-created study material.” Now, IMPACT-se has named three additional schools where Hamas operatives served as UNRWA staff.
Who is seriously surprised? So, what are they up to now that’s even worse than all that?
Neuer’s group then released photographs of senior UNRWA staff, including [UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini] and former UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl, meeting with alleged terror leaders. “You wouldn’t find these photos on [UNRWA officials’] own social media,” he said. “We found them our own ways, but they don’t post them.”
Neuer pointed Fox News Digital to two undated photos showing Lazzarini meeting with groups that included members of terror organizations, including the Jihadi Islamic Movement, the Islamic Ansar League, and Hamas.
In another photo dating back to late 2014, multiple UNRWA regional directors met with senior Hamas member Ali Baraka. Neuer said, and reporting from Al Watan Voice confirms, that the UNRWA staff wanted to “to congratulate [Baraka] on Hamas’ anniversary.”
In another instance, Neuer said he was able to find a photo and transcript from a February 2017 meeting between former UNRWA chief Pierre Krahenbuhl, Baraka, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and others. According to U.N. Watch, Krahenbuhl reportedly told the assembly that “we are united, and no one can separate us.”
Baraka was directly involved in October 7.
In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced “terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion charges” against Baraka and five other Hamas leaders for their roles in Hamas’ Oct 7, 2023, terror attack, which killed 40 Americans and over 1,000 others.
Such company the UN keeps. And, being a UN organisation, you just know there’s going to be plenty of rapey stuff going on.
Krahenbuhl and his staff were investigated in 2019 for reports of “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority.” Krahenbuhl resigned from his position, but in April 2024 was named the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Why not? He sounds the very model of a major human rights quango leader, frankly.
He’ll probably be appointed UN Secretary-General next.
