Hillel Neuer’s appearance on the Fox News Rundown with Eben Brown to discuss why UNRWA must be dismantled.
Eben Brown, Fox News: Leadership at both the United Nations and its subordinate agency, the UN Relief Works Agency in the Palestinian territories (UNRWA), continue to make charges against the state of Israel that it is committing atrocities in Gaza, where Israel is prosecuting a war against the Hamas terror syndicate and allied jihadi groups, a war sparked by Hamas infiltrating southern Israel and capturing civilian hostages on October 7th of 2023.
But time and again, it’s been shown that UNRWA, as it is called, a recipient of billions of dollars from the taxpayers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France and other Western powers, continues to fund and provide political cover for the terrorism perpetuated by Hamas, even to the point that UNRWA’s officials failed to denounce terrorism against Israelis. It’s even kept silent this past week as the Israeli Health Ministry submitted to the UN its clinical report about the torture and mental abuses suffering by hostages recovered in the first return of hostages. Some of those patients continue to need intensive physical and psychiatric treatment.
Hillel Neuer: The UN has been selling us a false narrative.
Eben Brown, Fox News: Hillel Neuer is the executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch. He speaks to us from Jerusalem.
Hillel Neuer: The US and other Western nations which are giving over a billion dollars to this agency called UNRWA. That false narrative is that UNRWA is, these are their words, life-saving, lifeline, backbone of humanitarian assistance, indispensable, irreplaceable. That’s the mantra for UNRWA.
That’s a false narrative because the truth is the opposite. We’re told that UNRWA is the firefighter, and that UNRWA is how the UN teaches Palestinians about UN values of peace, tolerance of human rights. It’s complete nonsense. The truth is the opposite. The truth is that the thousands of terrorists who invaded Israel and committed the massacre on October 7th, 90 percent of them are graduates of UNRWA schools. That’s according to the UNRWA legal advisor in Gaza. He told me that in a French interview in March, 90 percent. UNRWA teaches Palestinians in Gaza. Your home is not here in Gaza.
Your home is in Tel Aviv. And that is why for generations they haven’t resettled a single Palestinian. America is given, I think, it’s five or seven billion dollars over generations. They haven’t resettled a single Palestinian because their goal is to perpetuate them in dependency as refugees because one day they’re going to dismantle Israel. We’ve got to put an end to it. UNRWA is not the firefighter. UNRWA is the arsonist.
Eben Brown, Fox News: You talk about resettling refugees. I want to draw a parallel, if I can, and I think others have drawn this parallel as well. There was another United Nations Relief Works Agency that operated in Korea post the Korean War and it resettled refugees, people who had to get up and move and who ended up in either North or South Korea, in some cases, maybe a great distance, but maybe not such a great distance away from where they used to be, but now in separate countries or under different governing bodies, that agency was in existence for, I think, a whopping three years. UNRWA in the Palestinian territories, Gaza, whatnot, they’ve been around since 1948, haven’t they?
Hillel Neuer: Yeah.
Eben Brown, Fox News: Why such a difference?
Hillel Neuer: Well, because you’re really identified the essence of UNRWA, the raison d’etre of UNRWA, which is not to resettle refugees. It is a it has a it has a pathological agenda. I mean, I’m based in Geneva, right across the street from me is the UNHCR, the High Commission for Refugees. That’s the UN Refugee Agency, like that temporary agency you mentioned in Korea in the 50s, UNKRA. Likewise, the UN Refugee Agency, their goal is to resettle refugees.
There are wars all the time. Millions of people are moved across borders, rightly or wrongly, and they want to make a new life. And UN Refugee Agency has resettled millions of refugees. UNRWA is the opposite. UNRWA takes those of Palestinian descent, including 2 million who live in Jordan today, who have Jordanian citizenship, who’ve been living in Jordan for three generations, and they tell them, you are a refugee. You are a refugee, and you’re going to one day go back to Israel.
When they say go back to Israel, they don’t mean to come as a nice tax-paying citizen who’s going to contribute. They mean to dismantle Israel. And Palestinians say, we have the right of return, and that means through resistance, which for them is terrorism. So this is a pathological agency. Like you said, there’s no other UN agency like it.
So the Swiss foreign minister-of all countries, Switzerland, the neutral country-their foreign minister, Ignazio Cassis, in 2018, in a rare moment of truth, a moment of candor, he visited one of the facilities in Jordan, and he came back to Switzerland and he said, this is a “perverse logic.”
I’m quoting, “perverse logic. UNRWA is not part of the solution, they’re part of the problem. We are perpetuating the conflict, we need to put an end to it.” Then he got slammed by all the Swiss elites, the foreign ministry people. He got slammed and he hasn’t said that again. So that’s the reality and that’s why I’m happy.
I’ve been testifying around the world this past year after the massacre especially. I was in Congress four times. In March, the Congress passed a law, bipartisan, the Republicans initiated it, Biden needed to sign it to allow other foreign aid to go through. They froze UNRWA funding until March. I’m hopeful that the incoming Trump administration will maintain the freeze and ending the money isn’t enough. We need to sanction that agency because it’s the arsonist, it’s perpetuating conflict, and we need to hold them criminally accountable.
For 10 years, we’ve been sending UNRWA, and we have the receipts on our website, we’ve been sending them warnings, your staff are promoting terrorism. Last year, we told them, the head of your teachers union in Lebanon, overseeing 2,000 teachers, Mr. Fathi al-Sharif, is a Hamas guy, and we sent them 100 pages of screenshots from his Facebook account showing that he’s clearly a Hamas guy. And then they did nothing, and then Israel eliminated him in September.
On the day he was eliminated, a missile came to his apartment, second floor apartment outside of the city of Tyre, Lebanon. And on that day, Hamas said, you killed our leader. Hamas said, and they put out videos showing this Mr. Fathi al-Sharif, a school principal for UNRWA, the teachers union leader for UNRWA, that in fact, he was a close confidant of Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.
Pictures of him, and they praised, they eulogized his jihadi education. You couldn’t make the stuff up. And UNRWA didn’t do anything. And in the end, justice was delivered to him. But the point of the story is this guy for decades was teaching generations of Palestinians, and the American taxpayers were paying for it. The U.S. gave billions of dollars to fund people like Fathi al-Sharif, no more.
Eben Brown, Fox News: Let’s try to put some more faces to the name here. UNRWA is not just simply an agency that is faceless. It has a very vocal director, if that’s their commissioner-general, I believe, is his title.
Hillel Neuer: Yes, Philippe Lazzarini.
Eben Brown, Fox News: This is someone who openly commits to this, doesn’t he?
Hillel Neuer: If you said there’s an agency that’s a humanitarian agency, some kind of a non-profit agency, and they run schools and medical facilities, and numerous of their managers of their school principles are not just promoting terrorism, but actually senior terrorists, the head of the teachers union in Gaza. I spoke about Mr. Sharif in Lebanon, but in Gaza, the same thing. The head of the teachers union in Gaza for many years, a guy named Suhail al-Hindi was an elected member of the Hamas Politburo. He’s now one of the Hamas leaders. He’s interviewed regularly on Al Jazeera.
If this were any other agency in the world, okay, in the democratic world, and you said the heads of the humanitarian agency at several levels are actual terrorists or terror chiefs, the agency would be shut down in a second. Yet, here we have this obscene, absurd, illogical, immoral situation where numerous Western states, and I have to include here the State Department. It’s very sad that the State Department is a major defender of UNRWA. They told UNRWA, they said, look, Congress isn’t letting us fund UNRWA, but we love UNRWA.
But the reality is, I’m happy to say that this past year, the Congress forced the Biden administration to stop funding UNRWA, at least until March. The Netherlands amazingly voted to begin defunding UNRWA. Switzerland, where I testified in April, Switzerland’s lower house voted in September to defund UNRWA. It’s going to be in the Senate on January 20th. The U.S. will be busy with the inauguration, but I’m going to be in the capital city of Bern, Switzerland, testifying in this with the Senate about UNRWA.
Sweden amazingly two weeks ago announced their ending funding for UNRWA. But there’s still the U.K., France, Germany, Australia, Canada, under Justin Trudeau, are ardently defending UNRWA. Norway is the biggest defender of UNRWA. They are trying to whitewash everything I told you. They make up fake inquiries that tell lies and say, we looked into it, everything is fine now. This is what we’re up against.
Eben Brown, Fox News: But there’s also like a top heavy or a top down problem here. I mean, the UN above UNRWA all the way to the Secretary-General has expressed very similar sentiments here. And I think it’s perhaps maybe demonstrated very recently the Israeli Health Ministry released a report that they are forwarding to the United Nations that is essentially a clinical report, the results of the interviews of the Israeli hostages that were taken during the October 7th attacks that were released, I believe, November of 2023.
And they detail some very graphic and awful things that these victims were subjected to in terms of abuse and sexual abuse and starvation and being kept inside locked rooms and locked boxes, even young children. There has been radio silence from the UN on this, not even, I think, an acknowledgement of receiving the report, but the Gaza Health Ministry, which we know is Hamas operated and an arm of Hamas’ propaganda wing, is his gospel truth. There’s an imbalance here. And it’s more than just UNRWA, isn’t it?
Hillel Neuer: Secretary-General Guterres of the UN has been a major defender of UNRWA’s pathological agenda. And he basically issued an instruction. It’s quite interesting because in the past year, the Israelis said, look, we’ve had it with UNRWA. You know, right now we’re in Gaza. We’re not going to deal with UNRWA anymore. And they passed a law of that effect, which will go into force in a month or two.
And Israel said, look, let’s deal with other agencies. We’ll deal with other UN agencies. We’ll deal with other huge nonprofit charities that feed people. We don’t want to deal with terror-infested UNRWA. And then all the agencies, even I’m sad to say Cindy McCain from the World Food Program, she’s head of the World Food Program in Rome. And I’m disappointed because she’s someone who otherwise I have a lot of respect for.
But she seems to be following what her underlings are telling her. And all the different UN development agencies, the UNDP, the UNHCR, all these agencies find numerous statements saying, oh, no, no, no, there’s no way we could ever replace UNRWA. Then it was very clear and there was a report in a website called Devex, which deals with development stories.
They reported that Guterres issued an instruction to all the agencies, don’t you dare step in and replace UNRWA in any capacity. And so all the agencies lined up and said, UNRWA is irreplaceable. Well, it’s ridiculous. Around the world, all these giant agencies have rushed in. In weeks, they can give food to 10 million people, even more. Gaza is a tiny piece of territory, 2 million people. It could be replaced in a minute. Guterres refused to do that. But you gave another example of how unspeakable horrors have been documented and submitted to Guterres’ agency.
And look, Guterres, from the start, back in October, just a week or two after the massacre, weeks after the massacre, he went before the UN and he said, yes, I condemn Hamas. But he said, the Hamas attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum, didn’t happen in a vacuum, right? This is the old context thing, right?
From the heads of Harvard and Penn, so it depends on the context. If there’s a context, he says, oh, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. He went on to enumerate numerous alleged Palestinian grievances over decades, how the Palestinians have suffered because of Israel. And effectively, Guterres was justifying Hamas barely weeks after the massacre. And you know, that message, that narrative permeated throughout the UN.
Eben Brown, Fox News: You mentioned replacing UNRWA. Isn’t there a risk of it just simply getting renamed and the same people end up running whatever comes next as a successor agency or effort? Or should something happen outside of the UN? I mean, we’ve seen the Israeli government, for instance, in COGAT. They’ve delivered an amazing amount of aid. They’re not allowed to distribute it because the UN tells them not to. That only the UN and UNRWA can distribute it within Gaza. But it’s the state of Israel delivering it to the border.
Hillel Neuer: Yeah, that’s right. Look, certainly there’s been a malicious campaign by UNRWA and its other UN agencies to say that Israel isn’t allowing an aid, which is a complete lie. Israel has sent in millions of tons of food aid and medical aid in the past year. And you can see actually stacks of giant containers sitting in the Gaza side of the border, and they haven’t been distributed by the UN. So there’s a lot of lies out there. The reality is, and you asked about replacing, I want to make a distinction.
There’s the current crisis, where there’s an ongoing war with Hamas on the ground and the Palestinians there. Some of them are collaborating with Hamas, but others aren’t. We don’t want them to starve. They should have food and medical treatment and so forth. So there’s an immediate need. And for the immediate need, if it’s not UNRWA, then it’ll have to be another agency helping them because there’s a war going on. But certainly very quickly, after the current emergency, the temporary emergency, we must refrain from speak about replacing UNRWA because the mistake is to think that UNRWA is the firefighter, that we need to replace it. No, UNRWA is the arsonist, as Dr. A. Notwellford said.
If we understand that UNRWA is the arsonist, telling Palestinians that you have to dismantle Israel, that your home is not in Gaza, but your home is in Tel Aviv. If we understand that, then we will not speak about replacing this agency. We’re talking about ending it. The idea that Palestinians can’t cover themselves. Guess what? They built hundreds of miles of terror tunnels. It’s like an engineering feat. It’s not so easy to be right next to the Mediterranean Sea, then build tunnels a few yards away and to be building successfully hundreds of miles of terror tunnels with hardened concrete and air conditioning and electricity. If they can do that, they can distribute a few sacks of flour.
They can do it. But we had this bizarre situation where the UN said, we’re going to take care of everything for you, and you Hamas, for the past 20 years, all you need to do is to build the missiles and the terror tunnels. Hamas said it when they were asked early on, one of the Hamas leaders, I think it was in Qatar or Lebanon, he was in Qatar and he was asked, why don’t you give shelters to your Palestinians? You have hundreds of miles of terror tunnels. He said, no, no, no. He said, taking care of the refugees, the Palestinians, that’s not our job. That’s the UN’s job.
Eben Brown, Fox News: Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, thank you for your time and for appearing with us here on The Fox News Rundown, Evening Edition.
Hillel Neuer: Thank you for having me.
