Hillel Neuer appeared on i24 News to discuss the latest revelations against UNRWA, the disparaging remarks towards UN Watch made in Australian Senate by a foreign ministry official, and the future of U.S. funding to UNRWA.
Hillel Neuer: For 10 years, we at UN Watch have been sending the United Nations detailed information about nearly 200 of their UNRWA teachers, school principals, who were encouraging and promoting terrorism, who were sharing Nazi videos, pictures of Adolf Hitler, calling to slaughter Jews openly, slaughter Jews wherever you see them. And their attitude for 10 years was to either ignore UN Watch, to downplay incitement to terrorism, and often to disparage and attack us.
The latest revelations by the Israeli government of the identities that we’re seeing on the screen now of UNRWA teachers, UNRWA social workers who were taking part in pulling away bodies. Supposedly an aid worker, a school teacher, is teaching children and they participated in the attacks of October 7th.
Israel this past weekend revealed the identities of a number of them—it was 12 a couple of weeks ago, now it’s 30 more, so we’re talking about 42—but an estimated 1,200 in Gaza literally belong to Hamas and Islamic jihad. So the notion that these are a few bad apples is a complete lie. The rot is systemic, and that’s why we’re holding a conference on Monday to replace UNRWA.
i24 News: Yes, we want to talk about that in a moment. But I want to talk about what happened in the Australian Senate. Because, I mean, you would assume that people would want this information and would deal with it correctly. But actually, one member of the Australian Senate chose to attack you and your organisation, instead.
Hillel Neuer: Well, he actually is a senior official of the foreign ministry. His name is Marc Innes-Brown. He was testifying in the Senate, indeed. And rather than show what I think are Australian values of human rights and caring about aid, having a certain integrity of aid going to the people who need it, Marc Innes-Brown — by the way, he’s a former Australian ambassador in Tehran, he may have got what they call “clientitis,” where he went native, so to speak, and adopted the Islamic regime’s approach rather than an Australian attitude — so he attacked us.
He said that there are organizations — he was referring clearly to us, UN Watch — that we are exaggerating. He said that our report circulated a photo that was false. This is a lie. Our report did not have the photo that he was talking about, about an alleged protest that never happened. So he was looking to cherry-pick anything to just throw mud at us.
Our report about this telegram channel of 3 ,000 UNRWA teachers has names of the teachers, their contract numbers, the celebration of the October 7th attacks, screenshots of it.
The evidence is there. He couldn’t refute a single thing. We’re writing to the Australian Senate. I’m in touch with the senators. I’m willing to appear. I’ve appeared before them in the past. We’re going to confront Marc Innes-Brown and any other foreign ministry around the world who continue to serve as apologists for UNRWA.
It’s our tax money and our foreign ministry officials in Canada, in Australia, are being apologists for this front group, really a front group for Hamas, I’m sad to say.
U.S. Ambassador David Satterfield was interviewed recently. And he said, the sense that he reads from the Congress is that they’re not looking to reinstate funding for UNRWA. I think it’s very significant. We’re already seeing the United States signaling that other agencies, the World Food Program, UNDP, UNHCR, UNICEF, they’ll be receiving US funding and not UNRWA. And that really is a segue into the conference we’re holding on Monday.
