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.”
Israel has stated that Hamas arms have been found in or under some of the 2,000 buildings that the agency controls in Gaza, that a Hamas spy computer center tapped the UNRWA building above it for electric power, and that at least two hostages were held in the homes of likely UNRWA staffers, including a teacher and a doctor.
Ms. Colonna “has a long history of support for UNRWA and hostility to Israel,” according to Mr. Smith. All three organizations tapped to work with her have similar histories, he said.
“Senior officials connected to the report repeatedly stated that their goal was to, quote, reassure donors and to provide donors with further cover,” he said.
One of the witnesses, Hillel Neuer, spoke of UNRWA’s refusals to appear with him or debate him. On May 13, he was disinvited from a panel discussing UNRWA at the Stimson Center in Washington after, he was told, UNRWA’s representative refused to participate if he was there.
“[The Colonna Report] is, we’re told, an independent audit that has given UNRWA a clean bill of health exonerating the agency of all charges of its ties with terrorism. This headline was repeated around the world and used by several countries to reinstate funding,” Mr. Neuer said.
“There’s one problem, though, Mr. Chairman. These claims are completely false.”
The investigators were not impartial, he said. UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini had denounced Israel’s charges of terror ties as a disingenuous, politically motivated, and a smear campaign, according to Mr. Neuer.
“In doing so he irreparably tainted the credibility of the inquiry,” Mr. Neuer said.
Mr. Lazzarini picked Ms. Colonna to head it a few weeks after she had posted her backing of UNRWA on social media. She had done that, Mr. Neuer said, after his own group, U.N. Watch, had exposed a social media group in which 3,000 UNRWA employees had celebrated the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
“He chose someone who he knew very well was sympathetic to UNRWA, to say the least,” Mr. Neuer said.
And France is UNRWA’s fourth-largest donor. A former UNRWA spokesman subsequently told the Al Jazeera television network that “the report by the former French foreign minister, quote, will provide the donors with further cover.”
“The report says the following: UNRWA, quote, ’remains pivotal in providing life saving humanitarian aid. UNRWA is irreplaceable and indispensable, [a] humanitarian lifeline.' Mr. Chairman, we didn’t need to have an independent review group of the French foreign minister and three Scandinavian institutes to produce those lines. Those words are the official UNWRA talking points,” Mr. Neuer said.
He derided the report for its proclamation that “UNRWA has established a significant number of policies and mechanisms and procedures to ensure compliance with a more developed approach to neutrality than any other similar U.N. or NGO entities.”
“The truth is the complete opposite,” Mr. Neuer said.
He compared the report to the Soviet Union’s Stalin-era constitution, a soaring statement of human rights—guaranteeing direct elections, freedom of conscience, and other liberties. The Soviet dictator proclaimed it the most democratic constitution in the world.
“The reality was the complete opposite,” Mr. Neuer said, noting that the constitution came into play in 1936, just before the Great Purge began, a terror resulting in the arrest and then execution or deportation to Siberia of millions of citizens.
Yona Schiffmiller, research director for NGO Monitor, a group watchdog nonprofit group, said Hamas’s coercion makes accountability and oversight of UNRWA unlikely. U.S. law bans funding groups that promote violence, terrorism, anti-Semitism, or the employment of individuals espousing those.
James G. Lindsay, former general counsel for UNRWA, former Justice Department criminal lawyer, and author of a 2009 report on the group, told the committee that he walked away from it when it became apparent that while it stated that it was vetting staff members for terror ties, it wasn’t doing it.
He saw a quote from the UNRWA commissioner-general in the Canadian media saying, “Yes, I know we have Hamas people working for us, but it’s not something we worry about.”
He objected to UNRWA’s management, “and I was rebuffed.”
“And so I moved on,” Mr. Lindsay said.
The Colonna Report itself documents indirectly how incompetent the agency is, he said. Of its 50 recommendations, he said, about 37 “reflect obvious management deficiencies, things like the need for training, better coordination with other agencies, better enforcement of rules, employing more women as managers, that any competent management team would have long ago addressed with prodding from an independent review.”
He noted that of the 5.9 million Palestinians UNRWA designates as “refugees,” 1.8 million don’t meet the legal definition because they are citizens of and live in Jordan. Someone can’t be a citizen and a refugee at the same time, he said. Others should be stricken from the assistance rolls for their criminal records or support of terrorism, he said.
The hearing was slightly disrupted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Several had “FREE GAZA” written on their arms. They held their arms up in the air and checked the monitors of the hearing’s cameras to make sure the messages were showing. One wore a “Free Palestine” T-shirt.
At one point, Mr. Smith stopped the hearing to admonish them, noting that showing signs was illegal. Some shouting broke out off camera, and he then had police clear them from the hearing chamber.
