Below is an excerpt of Hillel Neuer's opening remarks:

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Hillel Neuer. I am the executive director of United Nations Watch. We are marking our 31st year since we were founded here in Geneva to monitor the United Nations and hold it accountable to the principles of its own charter.

I would like to welcome all of you, and people watching around the world online, to the first-ever international summit for a future beyond UNRWA.

We are at a turning point. Just a few weeks ago, most of the donor states of UNRWA led by the US froze their funding for the first time to this agency over evidence that members of the UNRWA staff actually took part in the atrocities of October 7th. Evidence, as reported in the Wall Street Journal that anywhere between 1,200 to 1,500 employees of UNRWA, a so-called humanitarian group, actually belong to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And with us here, we will hear from her later is Ayelet Samareno, she is the mother of 21-year-old Yonatan who tragically was murdered on th October and his lifeless body is seen on a video, and we will see it later when she speaks, was taken away by an UNRWA social worker. It is seen on video of [him] driving a white SUV with UNRWA license plates. That just underscores so much of what we will hear today. The problem with this supposedly humanitarian organization.

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I’ll just say a word or two about where we are. We are meters away from the UN European headquarters. And the Israeli ambassador who I will introduce in a moment just stepped out of the opening ceremony of the 2024 Human Rights Council session, opened by Mr. Secretary General Guterres.

The Human Rights Council was founded in 1946. Its first significant act was to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. In that document, in the preamble, it says, – this was 1948– the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created in response to “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” That is the essence of what the United Nations was supposed to be about, what the Human Rights Council was supposed to be about.

And we are just across the street from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC, which is the bastion of humanitarian law.
We are at the center point of universal human rights and humanitarianism in this very spot.
And so we ask, are these human rights and humanitarian bodies, are they actually acting against barbarous acts?
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And I want to ask Mr. Guterres, Mr. Guterres has said repeatedly, and he’s right next door, so I ask you, you have said repeatedly, UNRWA is irreplaceable. Well, we are going to hear from humanitarian experts, we are going to hear from Zlatko Zigic, who served at the UN migration agency. We are going to hear from Bonnie Glick who was the deputy administrator of USAID, from Jose Garson, an expert at the UN capital development fund, that, guess what, UNRWA is not irreplaceable. There are millions of refugees and other individuals who have humanitarian needs who are addressed by an array UN bodies that are not riddled and infested with terrorism.

There are other alternatives, but sadly Mr. Secretary General you gave orders, we know that because it was reported by veteran UN reporter Colum Lynch in Devex last week that the Secretary General Guterres has urged the heads of UN principle relief agencies, including World Food Program and UNICEF to rebuff appeals by Israel and the US to undertake work currently carried by the world body’s beleaguered Palestinian refugee agency.

In other words Secretary General Guterres, notwithstanding efforts by ambassador David Satterfield, the US humanitarian envoy and the USAID and the State Department to find other agencies that can do the work. Guterres has given them orders: “you are prohibited from picking up any of the services that Palestinians need, you are not allowed to do it.” So this is what we are facing.

For more, visit https://unwatch.org/future-beyond-unr...