Exclusive: review finds government yet to substantiate claims UN relief agency staff have ties to Hamas or Islamic Jihad

Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of its claims that employees of the UN relief agency Unrwa are members of terrorist organisations, an independent review led by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna has said.

The Colonna report, which was commissioned by the UN in the wake of Israeli allegations, found that Unrwa had regularly supplied Israel with lists of its employees for vetting, and that “the Israeli government has not informed Unrwa of any concerns relating to any Unrwa staff based on these staff lists since 2011”.

Allegations of the involvement of Unrwa staff in the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel led major donors in January to cut their funding to the agency, the main channel of humanitarian support not only to Palestinians in Gaza but to Palestinian refugee communities across the region.

The funding was cut despite the dire needs of 2.3 million people in Gaza, most of whom have been forced from their homes by the Israeli offensive since 7 October and have been struggling to find water, food, shelter or medical care.

Most of the donor nations have resumed their funding in recent weeks. UK ministers had said they would wait for the Colonna report to make a decision on resuming funding. US financial support of Unrwa has been blocked by Congress for at least a year in the wake of the allegations.

On Monday, the Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson, Oren Marmorstein, accused more than 2,135 Unrwa workers of being members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He said the Colonna review was insufficient and an “effort to avoid the problem and not address it head on”.

“The Colonna report ignores the severity of the problem, and offers cosmetic solutions that do not deal with the enormous scope of Hamas’ infiltration of Unrwa,” he said.

He added that Israel calls on donors not to give money to Unrwa in Gaza and instead to fund other humanitarian organisations in the territory.

Colonna told reporters she had good relations with Israel during the review but was not surprised by the Israeli response. She said she had appealed to Israel to “please take it onboard, whatever we recommend – if implemented – will bring good”.

Louis Charbonneau, the UN director at Human Rights Watch, said: “I don’t think the findings in the Colonna report are particularly surprising. Governments who haven’t should immediately resume full funding to Unrwa so it can deliver aid to desperate civilians. Many Palestinians are facing famine because of Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.”

A separate investigation is being carried out into the 7 October attack by the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. The UN said that inquiry had not yet been completed.

The Colonna review, an assessment of Unrwa’s neutrality drafted with the help of three Nordic research institutes and due to be published later on Monday, makes clear that Israel has yet to substantiate any of its broader claims about the involvement of Unrwa staff in Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

It notes that in March “Israel made public claims that a significant number of Unrwa employees are members of terrorist organisations”. “However, Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this,” the report says.

Alongside the Colonna report, a more detailed assessment was sent to the UN by the three Nordic research bodies – the Swedish-based Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, the Norwegian Chr Michelsen Institute, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.

Their report says: “Israeli authorities have to date not provided any supporting evidence nor responded to letters from Unrwa in March, and again in April, requesting the names and supporting evidence that would enable Unrwa to open an investigation.”

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Monday he accepted the recommendations from the Colonna report about ways to improve Unrwa’s capacity to monitor and address neutrality issues.

“Moving forward, the secretary general appeals to all stakeholders to actively support Unrwa, as it is a lifeline for Palestine refugees in the region,” the UN chief spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, said in a statement.

The Colonna review makes clear that Unrwa is “indispensable” to Palestinians across the region.

“In the absence of a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians, Unrwa remains pivotal in providing lifesaving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank,” the review says. “As such, Unrwa is irreplaceable and indispensable to Palestinians’ human and economic development. In addition, many view Unrwa as a humanitarian lifeline.”

The Colonna review suggests several ways neutrality safeguards for Unrwa’s more than 32,000 staff could be improved, such as expanding the capacity of the internal oversight service, providing more in-person training and more support from donor countries. But it notes that they are already more rigorous than most other comparable institutions.

“The review revealed that Unrwa has established a significant number of mechanisms and procedures to ensure compliance with the humanitarian principles, with emphasis on the principle of neutrality and that it possesses a more developed approach to neutrality than other similar UN or NGO entities,” it says.

One of the frequent Israeli criticisms of Unrwa is that its schools across the region use Palestinian Authority textbooks with antisemitic content. The technical report provided by the Nordic institutions, however, found very limited evidence for those allegations.

“Three international assessments of PA textbooks in recent years have provided a nuanced picture,” the report says. “Two identified presence of bias and antagonistic content, but did not provide evidence of antisemitic content. The third assessment, by the [German-based] Georg Eckert Institute, studied 156 PA textbooks and identified two examples that it found to display antisemitic motifs but noted that one of them had already been removed, the other has been altered.”

The absence so far of evidence to underpin Israel’s allegations has raised questions about the snap decision by donor countries to cut millions of dollars of funding to Unrwa as the Gaza death toll soared, the health system collapsed and famine began to loom.

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