The Swiss Parliament’s lower house, the National Council, has adopted a motion to “immediately suspend” support for UNRWA, the UN agency for “Palestinian refugees”.
The vote, which was approved on Monday, passed by a vote of 99 to 88. Two related motions called on Switzerland to instead send aid directly to Gazans, and to seek a solution to replace UNRWA altogether.
The parliamentary motion’s explanatory comments specifically cite the reports of UN Watch, the independent non-governmental organization based in Geneva, in decrying UNRWA staff glorification of terrorism.
When the parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing in April on UNRWA, Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, was the only critical voice to be invited as an expert witness.
“By calling for an immediate suspension of UNRWA funding, and for the agency to be replaced, the parliament of Switzerland has sent a powerful and unequivocal message: that UNRWA is tainted to the core by its complicity with terrorism,” Neuer said on Tuesday.
“This is the first defunding of UNRWA following the rigged Colonna Report, and the Swiss parliament’s decision amounts to a devastating rejection of the entire report,” he added.
“The rebuke of UNRWA is especially poignant coming from Switzerland, which is the guardian of the Geneva Conventions, and is rightly upholding international humanitarian law against an agency that is cynically abusing those principles,” said Neuer.
“The vote is also a slap in the face to UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, a Swiss national who invested an enormous amount of time this past year lobbying in Switzerland to block this motion. Lazzarini failed, and the facts prevailed.”
Neuer added that if “Lazzarini and UNRWA truly cared about the complicity of senior UNRWA staff with terrorism, he would agree to meet with me and see our latest dossier. I am again urging him to meet with me. I will meet with him in Geneva, Amman, Jerusalem. I will meet with him anywhere.”
“But the truth is that the real leaders of UNRWA are not the handful of internationals who do the agency’s fundraising in the West. It is rather individuals like Fathi al-Sharif, head of UNRWA’s staff union in Lebanon and a senior leader of Hamas. Or officials like Suhail al-Hindi, who long headed UNRWA’s staff union in Gaza and is an elected member of the Hamas Politburo alongside Yahya Sinwar,” said Neuer.
“The entire organization has been infiltrated and hijacked by Hamas terrorists to serve the terror group’s war aims.”
Israel said in January of this year that UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 Hamas attacks. In the weeks that followed, numerous donor states suspended or paused some $450 million in funding to UNRWA, though some have since resumed funding to the agency.
Israel presented a dossier showing that the UNRWA workers who participated in the Hamas massacre kidnapped a woman, handed out ammunition and actively took part in the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, where 97 people were murdered.
After Israel presented the accusations against the UNRWA staff, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced the creation of a review group, headed by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, to look into the Israeli allegations.
The group released its report in April. The report found neutrality-related issues" in UNRWA but also claimed that Israel had yet to provide evidence for allegations that a significant number of its staff were members of terrorist organizations.
Last month, the UN acknowledged for the first time that employees of UNRWA may have been involved in Hamas’ October 7 massacre in Israel.