(Note: The title of this article is based on a phrase attributed toMark Twain: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." In this case, the author wishes UNRWA the opposite!) As UNRWA complies with the Knesset’s order to withdraw from Israel after 58 years, Israel must ensure that neither the UN nor NGOs attempt to resurrect or reconstitute it in another form. On January 28, 2025, UNRWA will be banned in Israel. It will be deemed a terrorist organization. Strong Israeli anti-terrorism laws will come into effect, criminalizing the organization and its activities in Israel. The US should follow suit, as I argued here . Assuming last week’s reports are correct and that UNRWA is voluntarily demobilizing, it is time to discuss how to ensure that reports of UNRWA’s death are not greatly exaggerated. First, as the evidence confirms, most UNRWA employees are worse than toxic. This should be treated as a denazification process. Accordingly, all prior UNRWA staff members – around 30,000 – should face 20-year bans from serving in any UN, NGO, corporation, or other organizations that provided goods or services (or has any contact at all) with Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, Judea, or Samaria (“PaliOrgs”). Second, not a single prior UNRWA employee should be permitted to step foot in a Palestinian Arab school. This prohibition should extend to daycares, children’s centers, community centers, and universities. This is especially important after evidence confirmed that some UNRWA teachers turned out to be armed terrorists. Legislation from around the globe prohibiting convicted child abusers from working in education or entering school premises provides a useful precedent. All 30,000 former UNRWA employees should also be banned from receiving any remuneration from PaliOrgs. Volunteering at a PaliOrg should also be unlawful, as even this category of “service” will be abused. Third, UNRWA senior staff members who are not Israeli citizens or residents of Gaza, Judea or Samaria should receive lifetime bans from entering Israel, Gaza, Judea or Samaria. They have no place in Israel; they have blood on their hands. Finally, let’s address financial auditing. The Knesset needs to add teeth to its 2016 NGO Funding Transparency Law. It must incorporate the lessons learned about how UNRWA funds terror and terrorist, and how the UN agency made Jew hatred mother’s milk for children in Gaza. There are two ways in which UNRWA has stolen billions from the US and other UNRWA donors and earmarked it for terror. The first is by skimming. The second is by “job” creation. Let’s look at the skimming method first. As I wrote in the prior UNRWA article, the UN agency skims donor funds and sends them directly and indirectly to terrorists and terror organizations. This is currently being litigated in a U.S. Federal Court. How do they do it? If you look at UNRWS’s annual budget and operations reports you will notice that they ignore generally accepted accounting practices (GAAP) or the European equivalents (IFRS and IASB). Accordingly, the UN agency’s expense reporting is opaque. UNRWA’s expense categories are so deliberately vague that they are useless to draw meaningful conclusions as to how funds were used. The use of overly general, omnibus expense categories in financial statements is precisely the strategy a bad actor would employ to hide transactions. Or in UNRWA’s case: a strategy to help pay for terror. Let’s turn to the second method . Evidence demonstrates that at least two thousand terrorists in Gaza hold UNRWA jobs, pull regular UNRWA paychecks, but work for other terrorist organizations. UNRWA admits to a 4.7% daily absenteeism rate the last time it was measured. That is three times higher than a typical employer. Does anyone believe it is that low? The suspicion is that large numbers of UNRWA jobs – thousands perhaps – are doled out to terrorists. It affords them a comfortable living and a steady income while they participate in Gaza’s biggest industry: terror. How do we fix this? Auditing. For 58 years, UNRWAs financial statements were not reviewed or audited by competent outside auditors. That is disgraceful for a public agency with a $1.6 billion budget in 2022. In 2016, the Knesset passed the NGO Funding Transparency Law, but it did not apply to UNRWA. And it also only applies to NGOs that receive more than 50% of their funding from foreign political entities. The Knesset must eliminate this requirement. The 2016 law should be applied to all PaliOrg’s, and even UN agencies and foreign governments operating in Israel. The auditing must also be more meaningful. It must be conducted by an Israeli-regulated auditor licensed by the Auditor’s Council. The auditor’s annual report must contain the names of each individual who received funds. Auditing must also occur quarterly. This will be a big expense, no doubt. But we are talking about a group of people who just got caught raping and murdering innocent civilians. I will not shed any tears if quarterly auditing means they need to shell out thousands a month to accountants to make sure they are not back to their old tricks. The auditors should also be required to carry substantial professional liability insurance. That will hopefully weed out small and shady operations, to avoid a situation where a crooked PaliOrg finds a crooked auditor to rubber stamp quarterly reports. If a PaliOrg cannot account for every dollar, its directors should be criminally liable. If an auditor cannot trace all the funds, the auditor should be required to report the PaliOrg. Similarly, if a PaliOrg’s employees or money contributes to terror, the directors should be criminally liable. Outside of violence, if the PaliOrg’s work contributes to Jew hatred in textbooks or general antisemitism, the directions should be criminally liable. All PaliOrgs should have a minimum of 10 board members. That way there are always an ample number of feet in the fire.
