Edited by: Fern Sidman

The Swiss foreign ministry will temporarily stop payments to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) amid a brewing corruption scandal among the agency’s leadership, website swissinfo reports.

Created in 1949, UNRWA supplies aid to more than three million of the five million registered Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and territories assigned to the Palestinian Authority.

However, it is also notorious for its anti-Israel activities. During the 2014 counterterrorism Operation Protective Edge, Hamas rockets were discovered inside a school building run by UNRWA, according to an INN report.

Likewise, a booby-trapped UNRWA clinic was detonated, killing three IDF soldiers, as was reported by INN. Aside from the massive amounts of explosives hidden in the walls of the clinic, it was revealed that it stood on top of dozens of terror tunnels, showing how UNRWA is closely embedded with Hamas.

INN reported that in a more recent incident, the director of UNRWA operations in Gaza expressed his support for the anti-Israel marches along the Israel-Gaza border and pledged that the organization’s medical centers will provide care for “Palestinian refugees” who might sustain injuries during them.

World Israel News has reported that the UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, and his close confidantes, have been accused of “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and abuses of authority for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives,” UNRWA’s Ethics Office said in a confidential report.

Kraehenbuehl, 53, is a Swiss national. The report accuses him of using the financial crisis last year caused by the U.S. cutting funding to UNRWA due to its corruption as an excuse to take “an extreme concentration of decision-making power” for themselves, according to a World Israel News report.

According to the report, soon after he was appointed in 2014 he began taking trips to the Gulf with an UNRWA official, Maria Mohammedi, and their relationship went “beyond the professional.” He appointed her as his senior adviser and used his authority to enable her to travel with him at the organization’s expense, according to the WIN report.

INN reported that the internal document describes “credible and corroborated” allegations of serious ethical abuses, including those directly involving Krahenbuhl.

The report was sent to the United Nations secretary general in December.

UNRWA has already come under criticism from the Swiss government, which paid the agency $20 million just this year, swissinfo reports.

The Swiss foreign ministry told AFP in an email that it had already made its annual contribution of 22.3 million Swiss francs ($22.5 million, 20.2 million euros) to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

The ministry said it was “suspending any additional contributions” to UNRWA — already in crisis due to US funding cuts — pending the findings of United Nations investigators who are examining the ethics report.

In May, Swiss Foreign Affairs Minister Ignazio Cassis said that that U.N. relief agency hinders peace by keeping Palestinian refugees in camps, where they continue to dream of returning home, rather than helping them integrate into their countries of residence, according to the World Israel News report.

“It is unrealistic that all of them can fulfill this dream. Yet the UNRWA keeps this dream alive,” Cassis said. “For a long time the UNRWA was the solution to this problem, but today it has become part of the problem. It supplies the ammunition to continue the conflict. By supporting the UNRWA, we keep the conflict alive. It’s a perverse logic,” he said

INN reported that UN investigators have since visited UNRWA’s offices in Jerusalem and Amman, collecting information related to the allegations, sources familiar with the matter said.

In a related development, INN reported that Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon called on the international community to suspend funding provided to UNRWA Refugee Agency following the publication of the internal report.

“The report reveals alarming, but not surprising, findings,” Danon said. “In addition to propagating false information about its refugee population, UNRWA has in recent years worked to redirect world funds to continue this corruption industry that has served its leadership.”

“The international community, which generously finances UNRWA, must immediately suspend the budgets assigned to the agency. The aid money should be gradually transferred to the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), instead of helping the UNRWA leadership continue engaging in a series of ethical offenses.”

INN reported that Danon added that “UNRWA has removed itself from the values expected of an international organization, and should not be rewarded for its internal corruption.”

(For more on Israel’s response to UNRWA, please click on this link: http://thejewishvoice.com/2018/09/05/netanyahu-welcomes-trump-unrwa-decision/)

US Special Representative for International Negotiations, Jason Greenblatt, responded on Monday to the publication of the UN ethics report which found mismanagement and abuses of authority at the highest levels of UNRWA, according to an INN report.

“We’re extremely concerned about UNRWA allegations. We urge a full and transparent investigation by the UN. UNRWA’s model is broken/unsustainable and based on an endless expanding number of beneficiaries. Palestinians residing in refugee camps deserve much better,” tweeted Greenblatt, according to the INN report.

UNRWA said it is cooperating fully with the investigation and that it cannot comment in detail because the probe is ongoing.

Nikki Haley, the former US Ambassador to the UN, commented on the damning report as well, according to the INN report.

“This is exactly why we stopped their funding: Reports top officials of UNRWA engaged in ‘abuses of authority for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives,’” tweeted Haley.

The US, which was previously UNRWA’s largest contributor, last year cut a full $300 million in funding to the agency, according to the INN report.

Following the US cut, several European Union (EU) and Arab countries promised to contribute approximately $50 million each, while the EU itself promised to give $23 million.

In an article that appeared on the Jewish Voice website on July 21st of this year, entitled “Do UNRWA Donors Realize They’re Funding Terrorism?” author Palak Gupta wrote:

“A total of 23 countries announced more than $110 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on June 25, with the biggest contributions coming from the EU, Germany and Britain.

The announcement of contribution had come at Pledging Conference at Trusteeship Council Chamber at UN HQ in New York on June 25.

The delegations and the amounts pledged are listed below:

• European Union (€21 million);
• Turkey ($10 million);
• Philippines ($10,000);
• India ($5 million);
• Sweden ($5 million);
• France (€20 million);
• Germany (€29 million);
• New Zealand ($1 million);
• Belgium (€11.6 million total for 2019);
• Estonia (€280,000);
• Ireland ($22 million);
• Norway ($2 million in addition to $26.4 million already paid);
• Indonesia ($200,000 in addition to the $1 million already paid);
• United Kingdom ($24 million for a total of $83 million for 20192020);
• Switzerland ($1 million to the $21 million already paid in 2019);
• Kazakhstan ($50,000);
• Pakistan ($250,000);
• Cyprus (€100,000)
• The Holy See ($40,000).

The critics of the UNRWA allege that a large chunk of agency’s staff (particularly in Gaza) is affiliated to the Gaza-ruling Hamas and that the 70-year-old UN aid agency, functions on the idea of refugee — whose definition is unique to Palestine and thereby is subjective in nature.

The refugee population of Palestine has only grown from 7,11,000 in 1948 to over 6 million in 2018, points out Kay Wilson, a British-born Israeli who survived the brutal machete attack which took place in 2010. The continuous growth of the Palestinian refugee population has in turn, only ratcheted up the need for an increase in funding.”

(To read Palak Gupta’s entire article on UNRWA please click on this link: http://thejewishvoice.com/2019/07/21/do-unrwa-donors-realize-theyre-funding-terrorism/)

In January of 2019, Israel National News reported that the Israel National Security Council had decided that starting next school year, permits to UNRWA schools will be revoked.

Hadashot TV news has reported at the time that the decision to revoke the permits came after President Trump announced that the US will be cutting close to $300 million from the agency.

Former Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat proposed to expel UNRWA from Jerusalem. Instead, the Jerusalem Municipality would provide health, education, welfare and sanitation services to all the Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, according to the INN report.

Last October, Barkat stated, “The US decision to stop funding UNRWA creates a rare opportunity to deal immediately and decisively with the PA’s intention to perpetuate the ‘refugee problem’ and encourage incitement.”

He then added, “There are no refugees in Jerusalem, only residents. They will receive their services from the Jerusalem Municipality alone, like all residents.”

While Palestinian Arabs living in Jerusalem hold Israeli residency cards, they are not official Israeli citizens. They have complained that there is discrimination by the municipality against them when it comes to services, as was reported by INN.

Barkat said his proposal for the municipality services taking over “will be far superior to those that UNRWA provided.” He accused the UN agency of failing the 20,000 Arab residents living in the Shuafat refugee camp.

Israel has logged multiple complaints against the agency for using UNRWA schools and ambulances to hold Hamas weapons, according to the Israel National News report.

UN Watch has found that at least 10 UNRWA employees used social media to incite stabbing and shooting attacks against Israelis.

(To read more opinions on UNRWA please click on the following op-ed article by Daniel Greenfield: http://thejewishvoice.com/2018/08/29/defund-unrwa-now-ever/)

In August of 2018, an i24 News report indicated that Jared Kushner, President Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law, had been actively working to end the special refugee status of nearly five million Palestinians through the abolishment of UNRWA, according to a report from Foreign Policy magazine.

“It is important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA,” Kushner wrote in an email to other senior officials last year, including Mideast peace envoy Jason Greenblatt just a few days before the US announced it would cut more than half of its 125$ million in annual aid to UNRWA.

The Trump administration pointed to Palestinians’ lack of willingness to negotiate with Israel with the US as mediator as the primary reason for the cut, I24 News reported.

“This agency perpetuates the status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace,” Kushner wrote.

“Our goal can’t be to keep things stable and as they are… Sometimes you have to strategically risk breaking things in order to get there,” he reportedly added.

             (World Israel News & Arutz Sheva)

Read more at: worldisraelnews.com and israelnationalnews.com