Congress has cut off aid to UNRWA until March 2025. Experts told it UNRWA has for years failed to clean up its act or investigate staffers’ links to Hamas.
Three expert witnesses testifying before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on May 17 said a recent U.N. investigation into its troubled agency assisting Palestinians in Gaza was a whitewash.
They told the Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, chaired by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), that the Colonna Report was released by a committee stacked with agency supporters handpicked by the agency’s director.
The agency, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), has overseen relief distribution and other services to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since 1949.
Former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna led the U.N. investigation. It included representatives of three institutions that witnesses said were regarded as pro-UNRWA: the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Sweden, the Christian Michelsen Institute in Norway, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
The nine-week investigation began in response to Israeli allegations of the deep entanglement of UNRWA with Hamas, the terror group controlling Gaza.
Those allegations have already had an effect: $450 million in foreign aid was halted, and President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan foreign aid bill halting all aid to UNRWA until at least March 25, 2025. The United States had been providing a third of UNRWA’s billion-dollar budget.
Ms. Colonna’s committee began work a week after the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 30–19 to halt UNRWA’s funding.
The Colonna Report “was set up solely to whitewash UNRWA’s record,” according to Mr. Smith. The House subcommittee wanted to examine that, he said, as well as “U.S. funding to organizations other than UNRWA, which are affiliated to terrorists or otherwise promote violence against Israelis.”
Ms. Colonna’s panel released a 54-page report of dense bureaucratic language obscuring the gravity of Israel’s charges: that at least a dozen UNRWA employees participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, that 1,200 UNRWA employees belong to the banned terrorist organization controlling Gaza, and that 6,000 of its 13,000 employees have family members in Hamas.
