At a congressional hearing chaired by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) today, a panel of experts debunked the UN’s so-called independent review of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), exposing the report’s findings as predetermined in order to reassure donors. Officially called the report of the Independent Review Group, the document is widely referred to as the Colonna report after its chief author, former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna.

            “The revelations of recent months—about UNRWA’s complicity in the antisemitic atrocities of October 7 and involvement in supplying Hamas and protecting its terror tunnels—has been a dramatic wake-up call for a lot of people to the reality that UNRWA is one of the chief drivers of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis,” said Smith, Chairman of the House Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations Subcommittee.

             “UNRWA is an incubator of hatred and a child-soldier factory,” said Smith. “Yet, the Colonna report concludes that UNRWA is ‘irreplaceable and indispensable.’ The mandate of the review, however, was restricted to UNRWA’s ‘neutrality’ procedures, in order to avoid going into URNWA’s obligation to be independent and impartial, where it would have been impossible to hide its grotesque failures.”

            Entitled “Eliminating US Aid to Terrorists,” the hearing marked the fourth hearing chaired by Smith in the past year alone on UNRWA and its decades-long complicity in the most vicious forms of antisemitic hate. The panel of experts who testified at Smith’s hearing included Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of United Nations Watch; Yona Schiffmiller, Director of Research at NGO Monitor; and James Lindsay, Former UNRWA General Counsel.

            “UN Watch has demonstrated in detail why the Colonna Review was not truly independent, including because of the manifest bias and conflicts of interests of the examiners, and because both the UN and UNRWA declared the outcome in advance, in a mandate explicitly designed not to objectively examine potential wrongdoing, but rather to ‘reassure the donors,’” said Neuer.

            “The Colonna Report suffers from internal contradictions, conflicts of interest of its authors, and a disregard for extensive open-source incriminating information regarding UNRWA and its staff,” Schiffmiller said.

            Lindsay, who published an exposé in 2009 after serving with UNRWA for seven years, testified: “It is simply not true that UNRWA is ‘irreplaceable’. In every UNRWA field of operation the local authorities provide services…to those of their residents who are not defined as ‘Palestine Refugees’ by UNRWA… These local authorities, if UNRWA’s resources eventually were transferred to them, would simply expand their operations…”

            Smith, who authored legislation earlier this year to completely prohibit any US contributions to UNRWA, said the report was “set up solely to whitewash UNRWA’s record.”

            “Colonna has a long history of support for UNRWA and hostility toward Israel,” said Smith. “Ms. Colonna tapped three organizations to conduct the review—all of them have similar histories, including of throwing defamatory accusations such as genocide and apartheid at Israel. Senior officials connected to the report repeatedly stated that their goal was to ‘reassure donors’ and ‘provide the donors with further cover.’”

            Smith noted that the bipartisan foreign aid bill that became law in March prohibits US aid to UNRWA through next year, but noted that “before the prohibition took effect, the Biden Administration was contributing nearly 30 percent of UNRWA’s budget.”

            Smith said that the US should develop alternate ways to deliver aid to Palestinians, but emphasized that international aid organizations must be rigorously vetted by the US government to be kept clean of associations with antisemitic or terroristic associations.

            “Under absolutely no circumstances should the United States be subsidizing an organization that promotes the killing of innocent Jews and terror attacks on Israel,” Smith said.

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