U.N. helps Hamas

OPINION:

“The United Nations,” President Harry Truman once said, “is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members.” Decades later, the U.N. has a new mission: helping Hamas.

Recent events show that a body created from the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust is seemingly hellbent on aiding the terrorist group in its efforts to destroy the Jewish state.

On May 14, the Israeli military released footage of Hamas terrorists using a U.N. Relief and Works Agency compound in eastern Rafah as an operating base. The building, Israeli forces said, “is a central point for the distribution of aid on UNRWA’s behalf” for the Gaza Strip. But the footage showed something else: Hamas utilizing U.N. facilities and vehicles.

Terrorists could clearly be seen going in and out of vehicles marked “U.N.” at the top and casually storing weapons and fighters in the cars. In some of the footage, Hamas casually strolls the perimeter of the building, seemingly without a care in the world. In other portions, however, terrorists could be seen “shooting at civilians at the UNRWA logistics compound,” the Israeli forces said. Hamas acts as though the building and vehicles are theirs. Indeed, they effectively are.

Israel has “conveyed the findings to senior officials in the international community and called on the U.N. to conduct an urgent investigation into the matter,” the Israeli military said. But Jerusalem shouldn’t hold its breath.

As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, has documented, Hamas has a long history of using U.N. buildings, including schools, to perpetrate attacks. A 2015 internal investigation found that UNRWA schools were used by Hamas to “hide weapons” and “launch attacks” during the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. Employees of the U.N. entity have also been caught praising Hitler and calling for Israel’s destruction.

Perhaps most damningly, UNRWA employees, including teachers, took part in the Oct. 7 massacre, the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Agency vehicles and facilities are also alleged to have played a role in the attack. Some intelligence estimates indicate that no less than 1,200 of UNRWA’s 12,000 employees in Gaza “have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong” those U.S.-designated terrorist groups.

The Trump administration, recognizing UNRWA’s pernicious role, cut off funds to the organization. The Biden administration restored funding, only to cut it off after the revelations of UNRWA’s participation in the Oct. 7 attack. Some reports, however, indicate that the White House secretly lobbied for others to increase aid to UNRWA, hoping to offset the agency’s losses.

But it isn’t just UNRWA that helps Hamas. It is the U.N. itself.

The U.N. was recently caught fudging casualty statistics from the latest war in Gaza. On May 6, the organization’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated that 9,500 women and 14,500 children had been killed in the conflict. Yet a mere two days later, the office demonstrated its unreliability by mysteriously cutting the numbers in half, asserting that 4,959 women and 7,797 children had been killed — an astonishing drop. Indeed, it’s a difference of more than 11,000.

The U.N. office never explained the change in numbers, but many media outlets failed to question the international organization. In a May 10 press conference, UNRWA deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq simply cited “the fog of war,” and didn’t explain the reason behind the revision.

David Adesnik, director of research for the Foundation of Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, has said that “for months, the U.N. put its trust in numbers generated by Hamas-controlled sources, and the Biden administration put its trust in the U.N.” Moreover, “these numbers served as the basis for relentless criticism of Israel, with President Biden accusing it of ‘indiscriminate bombing’ and deciding, ultimately, to withhold shipments of war.”

Other officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, have cited the U.N.’s figures. Ditto for major U.S. news outlets such as The Washington Post and USA Today. And they all should have known better.

For years, it has been known that the U.N. bases its figures on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which has both a clear incentive to lie and inflate numbers, as well as a track record of doing just that. Both news outlets and the policymakers that they influence are aware of this.

Indeed, in May 2023, the Post published information from CAMERA warning that trusting the Hamas-run ministry was akin to “trusting a fox to guard a henhouse.” Unfortunately, the Post, like the U.N., has continued to parrot these Hamas-supplied figures, even writing pseudo “fact checks” and “analyses” to defend their decision to do so. Among the Post’s reasons? The U.N. trusts the figures. Yet this is more of an indictment than a defense.

The U.N.’s track record of anti-Israel bias is undeniable. More recently, the body voted to support the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood-level rights. But the Palestinian Authority, led by Fatah, Hamas’ rival for power, has praised the Oct. 7 attack and continues to pay tax-deductible salaries to those who murder and maim Jews. And its bid for statehood at the U.N. is but an attempt to circumvent good-faith negotiations with Israel.

Back when Harry Truman was president, many Americans still believed that the U.N. could help build a more peaceful world. But the United Nations of today trusts, indeed actively aids, those who seek to perpetrate another Holocaust. That’s a fact. And it’s one that the mainstream media would do well to acknowledge.

• Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.