Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of its claims that employees of the UN relief agency Unrwa are members of terrorist organisations, an independent review led by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna has said.
The Colonna report, which was commissioned by the UN in the wake of Israeli allegations, found that Unrwa had regularly supplied Israel with lists of its employees for vetting, and that “the Israeli government has not informed Unrwa of any concerns relating to any Unrwa staff based on these staff lists since 2011”.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of its claims that employees of the UN relief agency Unrwa are members of terrorist organisations, an independent review led by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna has said.
The funding was cut despite the dire needs of 2.3 million people in Gaza, most of whom have been forced from their homes by the Israeli offensive since 7 October and have been struggling to find water, food, shelter or medical care.
The UN secretary general António Guterres said on Monday that he accepted the recommendations from the Colonna report, about ways to improve Unrwa’s capacity to monitor and address neutrality issues.
The Colonna review suggests a number of ways that neutrality safeguards for Unrwa’s more than 32,000 staff could be improved, such as expanding the capacity of the internal oversight service, providing more in-person training and more support from donor countries.
The absence so far to underpin Israeli allegations has raised questions about the snap decision by donor countries to cut millions of dollars of funding to Unrwa as the Gaza death toll soared, the health system collapsed and famine began to loom.
Mark Seddon, the director of the centre for UN studies at the University of Buckingham, said on the X social media platform: “On the basis of completely unverified claims by the Israelis, some governments immediately cut funding to Unwra.
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