Geneva, Switzerland—“Does the UN hold my son?” an Israeli mother asked just feet from where the ignoble United Nations convened its 55th United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. Ayelet Samerano asked this devastating question of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres following a bombshell report that one of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) staffers in Gaza, a Hamas member, took her child’s corpse into Gaza in an UNRWA vehicle. His lifeless body has remained in Gaza since the October 7th terrorist attacks.
For years, the UNHRC has convened with the stated goal of “strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe”; it goes without saying that it has failed spectacularly at these goals virtually since its inception – and its recently-convened session marked no meaningful exception.
Continuing the UNHRC’s abysmal history of covering for brutal dictators, and its perverse obsession with condemning Israel, this year’s first session of course included no mention of one of the worst ongoing human rights abuses in the world, China’s genocide of its Muslim Uyghur population.
However, this year, right next door to the UNHRC’s kickoff session, the United Nations’ watchdog nemesis kicked things off with a splash. UN Watch, the most significant oversight body that focuses on UN accountability, hosted a Summit for the Future Beyond UNRWA featuring former UN senior staff, policymakers, and parliamentarians from around the world. The February 26 summit was dedicated to showing that there is a future for Palestinians without the UN’s agency dedicated solely to so-called Palestinian refugees: UNRWA.
In the hours before the conference, Hillel Neuer, UN Watch’s Executive Director, announced that he had collected over 100,000 signatures from people around the world who are in favor of shutting down funding for UNRWA. UNRWA’s supporters, including Democrats in Congress like the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, claim it is indispensable. Jayapal, of course, infamously wanted to “be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians” when she was asked about the systematic rape of Jewish women by Palestinian terrorists in the aftermath of October 7th.
The summit kicked off shortly after the UN’s Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, announced plans to meet with Iran’s foreign minister. For several hours, documentation of almost unfathomable UNRWA rot were discussed, including by its former legal counsel, James G. Lindsay, and Bonnie Glick, who cut off all American assistance to the Palestinians while serving as the Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump Administration.
Most harrowing of all, however, were remarks by Ayelet Samerano, an Israeli woman whose rationale for being there was far more tragic than your standard conference speaker. Ayelet’s son, Yonatan Samerano, was among the over 1,200 Israelis, Americans, Thais, Europeans, Argentines, and more who were murdered by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and ordinary “civilians” from the Gaza Strip, who carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
As if that weren’t horrific enough, CCTV footage shows an UNRWA employee dragging Yonatan’s limp corpse and lugging it into the back of an UNRWA vehicle, to take him to Gaza to be, at best, used as a bartering chip in order to force Israel to release convicted Palestinian terrorists.
As Ayelet addressed the crowd in Geneva, she stopped her remarks to play a lovely video tribute to her son, which turned dark as it switched to the footage of Faisal Ali Mussalem Al Naami, an UNRWA-employed social worker, taking Yonatan’s body to Gaza. Like thousands of others, Yonatan was at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel, when he fled to a nearby Kibbutz after Palestinian terrorists, alongside, reportedly, Taliban members, broke into southern Israel to launch their murderous rampage of war crimes.
Yonatan, Ayelet said, “was not armed, he was not in a war situation, his only weapons were his smile, happiness, and charm.” And yet, he was murdered simply for living in Israel, and his mother pleaded with the UN to help her reclaim his body.
“Does the UN hold my son? Do you know where he is? Bring him back to me. Mr. Guterres, look me in the eyes and answer me NOW, where is my son? Bring him back home.” Guterres, the former socialist leader of Portugal, of course, seemed to have other priorities, like meeting with senior Iranian leadership.
A UN employee kidnapped a murdered Israel’s body--how is it possible that this agency hasn’t been burned to the ground? Glick notes that in fact “UNRWA’s original mandate should have ended generations ago. UNRWA, if it were a real refugee agency, would have resettled Palestinians into third countries, like Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.” However, if UNRWA fulfilled that goal, it “would see its mandate disappear if there were no longer any Palestinian refugees, so instead it maintains that Palestinians, unique among all populations in the world, can neither become citizens of the countries in which they are born, nor can they resettle permanently anywhere,” Glick said.
From the American government side of things, Representative Chris Smith, a longtime member of the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee, made the trip to Geneva to speak at the summit and said that the socialist Guterres’s priorities are completely backwards. “If you say you don’t have the time, you haven’t stated a fact; you’ve stated a priority,” the veteran human rights activist said, urging Guterres to make meeting with Samerano a priority.
Glick, too, urged “progressive politicians and students who call for a ceasefire in order to save ‘innocent Palestinians’ to think about Ayelet Samerano.” Beyond her, they should “think about the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who did not ask for Hamas to rape, murder, slaughter, and kidnap their friends and family members…UNRWA social worker Faisal Ali Mussalem Al Naami do not deserve funding from donors,” she said. “They deserve jail sentences for the rest of their lives. UNRWA does not deserve bailout funding, it deserves to be shut down completely.”
Samerano, unsurprisingly, told the UN to “clean your house,” but Neuer, the convener of the conference, made it clear that the problems go well beyond Al Naami kidnapping Yonatan. UNRWA and UN officials have brushed off the evidence of UNRWA employees from Gaza being members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations. They claim that there are but a few bad apples in UNRWA, something which they have never investigated.
“A few bad apples? Really? We documented hundreds,” Neuer said. He recently testified before the U.S. Congress about UNRWA’s “Terrorgram,” a 3,000-person Telegraph group filled with UNRWA teachers who “celebrated Hamas’s October 7th massacre while at the same time asking when their UNRWA salaries will be paid.” In making the case for a systematic dismantling of UNRWA, Neuer noted that “it’s not rotten apples, it’s rotten to the core.”
Despite the legion of problems plaguing UNRWA, the European Union announced plans to reinstate its funding; and Asmund Aukrust, a Labour parliamentarian from Norway, nominated the terrorist-harboring agency for the Nobel Peace Prize last year, shortly after Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians. However, not all European elected officials are as morally bankrupt.
David Lega, a Member of European Parliament (MEP) from Sweden, had a different take on the near-ubiquitous chant shrieked by confused activists on college campuses across America: “From the river to the sea, hostages must be freed,” Lega said, warning that “no organization is irreplaceable.”
Lega was joined by Assita Kanko, an MEP from Belgium – who has directly condemned the EU’s decision to restore funding to UNRWA. “UNRWA teachers and staff have celebrated, praised or glorified Hamas' attack. The investigation is not yet complete. But apparently the EU doesn't care?” she said. “The world needs to stop fueling Hamas directly or indirectly. Why does Europe care so little about its own people and values?”
Unfortunately, UN Watch’s words fell on mostly deaf ears in Geneva. However, some in Congress have been seeking to cut its funding off for months. Senators Pete Ricketts and Tim Scott unveiled the Stop Support for Hamas Act in the weeks after the October 7th terrorist attacks which would, in part, cut off all U.S. aid to UNRWA.
Ricketts’s fellow Nebraskan, Representative Don Bacon, a former Air Force General, told Town Hall that since “UNRA’s employees helped massacre 1,200 Israelis, including Americans…We don’t want America’s tax dollars to support this agency that helped these Hamas terrorists.” If Ricketts’s bill becomes law, Bacon will get his wish.
Smith, from Geneva, echoed these sentiments. “UNRWA is a corrupt, anti-Semitic, terror-complicit agency, and everybody needs to say that,” he said – condemning it as a “child soldier factory.”
The problem with claims that UNRWA is uniquely suited to handle specifically Palestinian refugees is that it is the only such agency in the world, handing them a level of Palestinian Privilege that is denied to millions of refugees and internally displaced persons around the globe. When international law is applied to any group other than Palestinians, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) handles them in the case of the former, and the United Nations Migration Agency handles them in the case of the latter.
Only the Palestinians get their own agency – which experts who know this field say is absurd. Zlatko Zigic, who spent 20 years at the United Nations Migration Agency said that “UNRWA is not a refugee agency.” While there are multiple alternatives to UNRWA, Zigic suggested the UN itself is the problem. “UNRWA has a terrorism problem,” per Zigic, because the UN itself does not recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization – and therefore its subsidiary agencies, like UNRWA, can’t either.
When the United Nations itself can’t recognize reality and designate Hamas as a terrorist organization, perhaps the need for full-scale dismantling goes beyond the so-called refugee organization.