UN Watch was quoted by media outlets around the world in March 2026 on numerous topics, including the appointment of Zeina Jallad, a Hamas apologist, as a “human rights expert” at the UN.
Appeared on News Nation, March 15, 2026:
Key Quote:
The Iranian regime has the blood of hundreds of Americans on its hands. They’ve been chanting every day “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” manufacturing missiles, pursuing an illicit nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, UN agencies — UNESCO, UNICEF, UN Women — have been condemning the U.S. and Israel but haven’t been mentioning that Iran itself massacred tens of thousands of its own people just a few months ago.
Appeared on Free Expression by the Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2026:
Key Quote:
People, Iranians, human rights activists that we’re in touch with around the world were begging the international community to save them. And this one U.N. entity, which has no mandate other than to speak out for the protesters, has decided to condemn the U.S. and Israel…For 47 years this regime has called for death to America, death to Israel. And they’ve been taking ongoing measures to do that. They’ve been spending over a trillion dollars to build an illicit nuclear program, thousands of missiles to attack American personnel around the world, try to assassinate my friend Masih Alinejad, the great Iranian journalist and women’s rights activist in Brooklyn. They tried to assassinate President Trump.
Appeared on The Honest Take podcast by Honest Reporting, March 22, 2026:
Key Quote:
It’s not pleasant to walk into a room where you look around and it’s being run by dictators and state sponsors of terrorism, or those who are complicit—those who may be democracies but, in one form or another, are complicit. It’s not a pleasant feeling. And then you have the UN officials, who are ostensibly neutral but, you know, sometimes can be themselves unfriendly, to put it mildly. So you’re walking into a hostile arena. It’s not pleasant. I know I have my 90 seconds to speak, and you try to make it count. So you kind of buckle up, you suck it up, you go in there, you stand tall, and you speak words of truth.
Appeared on The Brink podcast, March 9, 2026:
Key Quote:
I’m seeing a disgraceful reaction by the U.N. to what’s going on. Let’s keep in mind that since mass protests began in the end of December several months ago, the U.N. was mostly silent, mostly indifferent to protesters being gunned down to the tune of tens of thousands in just two days. There were muted responses and they basically did nothing to stop massacre of protesters. This same body this week has sprung into action immediately condemning the U.S. and Israel for answering the call of the millions of Iranian protesters who said: “Save us. Do anything you can to stop the mass murder.” And when the military action finally came, the U.N., which did nothing to help them, is condemning the help that the Iranians asked for. Never in the history of the U.N. have we seen such a betrayal and contempt shown for the U.N.’s own founding values.
Appeared on the Real Talk with Rabbi Rowe podcast by Aish, March 22, 2026:
Key Quote:
I tell my interns and our associates who are beginning at the United Nations to remind themselves that they’re entering an Orwellian upside down world. It’s a dystopian universe. If you live in Canada or the UK or Switzerland, you live in a democracy. It’s a place that has the rule of law. It’s not perfect, but has a rule of law. It has independent courts, it has free elections, majority rule, basic respect for individual rights. When you enter the United Nations, you have none of those things. You’re entering a place where the powers include China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela — yes, the U.S. and the others have some Influence. But it’s a place where many of the leading figures at the Human Rights Council, for example, are China, Qatar, Cuba, Pakistan. Of the Women’s Rights Commission, the Islamic Republic of Iran was elected a few years ago. And they have influence.
Featured in the National Post, “UN Watchdog Bashes Mark Carney’s ‘Procedural Theatre’ on Iran War,” March 28, 2026:
Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, “Meet the U.N.’s New Human-Rights Authority,” March 25, 2026:
Council president Ambassador Sidharto Suryodipuro of Indonesia has proposed Palestinian academic Zeina Jallad to be the Special Rapporteur investigating the human-rights risks of unilateral coercive measures…The elevation of Ms. Jallad suggests a gesture to the Palestinian lobby, says Hillel Neuer of the nonprofit UN Watch. Ms. Jallad is currently legal adviser to the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, who has accused Israel of genocide and rejects Israeli sovereignty.
Quoted in Fox News, “Afghanistan Accuses Pakistan of Killing Hundreds in Kabul Hospital Strike,” March 18, 2026:
“U.N. officials swiftly condemned U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran’s regime as unlawful ‘aggression’ … Yet Pakistan’s airstrike on Kabul’s Omid Hospital — killing over 400 civilians — has drawn only a belated ‘strong condemnation’ … and standard pleas for ‘de-escalation’,” Executive Director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer told Fox News Digital.”This restrained response — no personal outrage from Guterres, no emergency session naming Pakistan, and no equivalent chorus from U.N. rapporteurs, or agencies like WHO, U.N. Women, and UNICEF — reveals rank hypocrisy,” he said. “When hundreds of vulnerable Afghans die in a hospital, the U.N. offers measured words. Yet when the U.S. or Israel can be blamed — justifiably or not — the condemnation is immediate and overwhelming. When some victims matter far more than others, the U.N. reveals its cynical political agenda. This double standard doesn’t uphold human rights, it erodes them.”
Quoted in De Telegraaf, “Greta Thunberg and Jeremy Corbyn at Congress Against Israel in Amsterdam,” March 7, 2026:
Albanese has been under fire for some time. Recently, she shared an AI-generated photo intended to represent the body bags of children killed in Iran. “Intended to stir up outrage against the US and Israel,” says Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, an organization that critically monitors the UN. “She refuses to remove that photo, even after it was proven to be fake.” “It is remarkable that Albanese, Greta Thunberg, and Jeremy Corbyn can find the time to participate in this event in Amsterdam to condemn Israel, but remain silent about the recent massacre perpetrated by the Iranian regime among tens of thousands of protesters,” says Neuer. He speaks of ‘selective indignation’. “It exposes a movement that is driven less by universal principles than by ideological hostility towards Israel and the West.”
Featured in the Jewish Journal, “Hillel Neuer: Covering for Iran, UN Has Become ‘Megaphone for Mullahs,’” March 8, 2026:
Despite a career of calling out what he sees as the U.N.’s double standards and hypocrisies, he still expected the U.N. to speak out when it became clear the Iranian regime murdered thousands of protestors. “I was surprised,” Neuer told The Journal by phone from Geneva. “We had one of the most unprecedented uprisings for democracy taking place in the streets of Iran in dozens of cities. There were hundreds of thousands going out. Maybe millions. They risked their lives. The United Nations was founded to promote values such as human rights and freedom. It ought to have been the first organization to stand by their side and sadly, for weeks, they said nothing. The indifference, inaction and turning a blind eye was rather shocking.”
Featured in JNS, “UN Watch: Strikes on Iran Are Self-Defense, Not Illegal War,” March 11, 2026:
Amid the escalating conflict with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, JNS spoke with Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO known for monitoring and critiquing anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, about the legal ramifications of the war against Iran. “The first thing to understand is that a lot of the public debate is using the wrong legal framework,” Neuer told JNS. “Critics are treating this as if the United States and Israel suddenly launched a brand new war,” he said, “but in reality, there has been an ongoing armed conflict between Iran and Israel—and to a significant extent between Iran and the United States—for decades.”
Featured in JNS, “UN Watch Accuses Albanese of Distorting International Law,” March 23, 2026:
Dina Rovner, a legal advisor at UN Watch, wrote that Albanese’s conclusions offer “no new evidence of genocidal intent, an essential element of the crime,” and rely on debunked statements and non-mainstream legal theories that “radically expand the definition of torture beyond existing international law.” “The result is a complete inversion,” Rovner wrote. “Hamas’s openly declared genocidal intent and mass atrocities are recast as crimes committed by Israel. While the Hamas Charter is openly genocidal against Israel, Albanese attributes such intent to Israel.”
Quoted in the Times of Israel, “UN Rights Council Set to Appoint Expert Who Called Hamas a ‘Resistance Movement,’” March 27, 2026:
The UN Human Rights Council is set to appoint an academic who has defended Hamas to a special rapporteur position, against the recommendation of its own vetting group, according to the nonprofit group UN Watch…Special rapporteurs whose fields are nominally unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have also used their platform to denigrate Israel, such as Michael Fakhri, the special rapporteur on the right to food. Jallad is a legal adviser for Fakhri. She is also a legal adviser at UN Women and a “gender expert” for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, according to UN Watch.
Quoted in JNS, “Jerusalem Condemns Politicized, Pro-Hamas Selection to UN Post,” March 30, 2026:
UN Watch said the council overlooked a higher-ranked candidate in favor of Jallad, who heads the Palestine Land Studies Center at the American University of Beirut. The five-nation vetting committee had recommended Clara Portela, who wrote her doctoral thesis on “the imposition of sanctions in response to human rights violations.” But the Indonesian president of the Human Rights Council, Sidharto Suryodipuro, went to the second-ranked candidate. UN Watch said that Jallad appears to have been chosen for two reasons. First, because she is Palestinian, “and this is considered a gesture to the Palestinian Lobby at the UN.” Second, Jallad, who is currently a legal adviser to another special rapporteur and has served as a legal expert on other U.N. bodies, is the “ultimate insider.” And the UN human rights office likes to hire those “loyal to the system,” said UN Watch.
Quoted in The Jewish Chronicle, “Arab States Request Emergency UN Human Rights Council Debate on Iran’s ‘Military Aggression,’” March 19, 2026:
A group of Gulf states has called on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to hold an emergency debate on Iran’s “military aggression” against them. A diplomatic note was sent by a “coalition of Arab nations” to the council calling for an “urgent” change to its schedule, according to Hilel Neuer, director of human rights NGO UN Watch. Neuer told the JC: This is a turning point. For the first time, Arab states are leading a charge at the Human Rights Council to condemn Iran. Tehran targeted civilians in blatant attacks on its Arab neighbours, in a bid to make them pressure the US to stop hitting the regime. But the gambit backfired, and now even cautious regional actors are going after Iran on the world stage like never before.
Quoted in JNS, “Israeli UN Envoy Sees Opening, as Global Body Rebuked Iran This Month,” March 18, 2026:
Three weeks ago, a senior Iranian official spoke at a Human Rights Council high-level summit. “Nobody walked out of the room. He just said what he wanted to say, full of lies,” Meron said. “The U.N. mechanisms need to really put the finger on what is going on and to say this cannot go on.” That includes a more proactive, aggressive approach, according to Meron, who cited a recent conference in Geneva, which U.N. Watch sponsored and which featured Iranian human rights defenders and activists. “That’s what the U.N. should be about—to bring the voices of the people who are suffering under the regime there,” Meron said.
Quoted in the Times of Israel, “The Same Hate That Drove Jews from the Arab World,” March 14, 2026:
There’s an infamous video of Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, who, at the U.N., calls out to various Arab countries, and after citing how many Jews used to live in their countries, asks, “Where are your Jews?” Indeed, the atmosphere in these countries was so hostile to Jews that, despite Jews having lived in these lands for so long, the number is now almost zero.
Quoted in Il Giornale, “Jewish Hopes and Anxieties: ‘We Stand With the Iranians.’ Synagogues on High Alert,” March 1, 2026:
And while the UN condemns “the current military escalation in the Middle East,” Hillel Neuer, director of the pro-Israel NGO “UN Watch,” recalls that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently congratulated the Iranian regime on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, just a few weeks after that regime had “massacred tens of thousands of Iranians.”
