Do we really need the UN any more? For a long time I’ve felt that some parts of it, including UNRWA and the International Court of Justice, both with their obsession against Israel, should be deep-sixed (UNRWA is the only UN refugee agency tasked with “refugees” in one area, and several countries, including the US, have defunded it). Seriously, how much good does the UN really do?
If you need more evidence that parts of the UN are actually complicit in terrorism, have a look at the allegations of the three young Israeli women just released by Hamas. Yep, they said they were held in a UNRWA-run “humanitarian camp”. The article below also discusses claims that other hostages were held in Gazan hospitals, hospitals that were raided by the IDF to the loud objections of the rest of the world. If you think the UNRWA people who ran the camp were totally unaware of the fact that it contained Israeli hostages, well, . . . . . that’s not the way it works in Gaza.
Click below. I’ll give an excerpt from each source (indented). The first is from the think tank FDD, which describes itself as nonpartisan but Wikipedia calls “neoconservative” and was founded as pro-Israeli. But it’s no matter: the three allegations below have appeared on several sites as well.
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Israeli Hostages Held in UN camp: The three female Israeli hostages released last weekend following the ceasefire in Gaza revealed on January 21 that they were incarcerated in a refugee camp operated by UNRWA — the United Nations agency catering exclusively to the descendants of Palestinian refugees — for part of their time in Hamas captivity, according to Israel’s Channel 13 network. Details as to which of the eight camps run by UNRWA in Gaza were used have not been made available. Following the October 7, 2023, atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel, in which several UNRWA employees participated, Israel accused the agency of actively colluding with the Iran-backed terrorist organization, passing legislation last October barring it from operating in the Jewish state.
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Trump Halts UNRWA Funding: Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump halted U.S. funding for UNRWA via an executive order on his first day in office on January 20. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, strongly criticized UNRWA and labeled the United Nations a “den of antisemitism” during her Senate confirmation hearing on January 21.
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Hamas Kept Hostages in Hospitals: According to an exclusive report from Fox News Digital, Hamas terrorists captured by Israel confessed that Israeli hostages had been imprisoned in the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza at different times during their ordeal. Anas Muhammad Faiz al-Sharif, one of the terrorists in Israeli custody, was quoted as describing the hospital — which was raided by IDF troops on December 28, resulting in the arrest of more than 200 terrorists — as “a safe haven for them because the [Israeli] military cannot directly target it.”
From the Jewish News Service (again, click to read). Note that the UN knows of these allegations and are taking them seriously (see video below).
An excerpt:
Reports that freed Israeli hostages had been held in U.N. shelters in the Gaza Strip amount to “a very serious allegation,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told JNS on Wednesday.
“We call on those who have information on this to share it formally with UNRWA or other parts of the United Nations so that we can investigate it further,” Haq told JNS at the global body’s press conference in New York.
Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, who were released on Sunday, said Hamas had held them in U.N. camps that the global body created during the war to protect Gazan civilians and to provide them with food and water.
It wasn’t clear from public records and reporting in which camps they were held, when and for how long. Israeli intelligence, taken from captured Hamas terrorists, assessed that several Israeli hostages were held at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, Fox News reported.
These are different hostages from the ones released the other day (four more will be released tomorrow), but of course when the IDF raided that hospital because of reports that Hamas was there, they were excoriated for raiding a hospital. The director of the hospital, now in an Israel jail, was a colonel in Hamas, tons of weapons were found, and several captured Palestinian terrorists admitted that the hospital held hostages at one time.
This, of course, needs to be investigated, as the UN official (Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General), says in the video below, but I wouldn’t lightly dismiss the allegations of all three recently-released women hostages that they were held in a UN camp. This video starts at the time when Haq is questioned about the hostages (22:45), and you need listen for only a couple of minutes.
And here’s a report (perhaps a bit superfluous) from Israeli “citizen spokeswoman” Ruth Wasserman Lande, discussing the hostages’ claim of being in an UNRWA, The sensible thing is to simply dissolve UNRWA, which is, as Lande says, “a Hamas front”, and fold its mission into the existing single UN organization that deals with refugees.
“Do we really need the UN any more?”
Sometimes, I think that the U.S. should divest from the UN, force it out of its New York City headquarters,* and wash its hands of it. But then, coming back to my senses, I realize that if the U.S. leaves the U.N., that playground for Jew hate will lose a critical dissenting voice. This is a common dilemma. Do I remain a member of the organization and try to repair it from the inside? Do I leave and call for reform from the outside? Or do I walk away entirely and apply my energies and talents elsewhere?
I despise what I see at the U.N, including calls for Israel’s expulsion, but I think that the U.S., as a founding member, needs to stay. We’ll see if Ambassador Stefanik can be effective in turning the U.N. around. I can’t imagine that the Trump administration is happy with what it’s seeing. But how much of a difference can it make? We’ll find out.
*which we may not be able to do since it’s considered international territory.
Elegantly stated. +1.
I don’t believe we need the UN, or maybe it just needs a complete overhaul. I came to that conclusion a long time ago when a Saudi Arabian man Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, ( here it’s important to clarify that Dr. Ashrawi is actually a Palestinian politician and activist, not Saudi Arabian) was put in charge of the Women’s Rights department. It felt like an oxymoron—having someone from a country where women don’t have equal rights leading that department. It’s the same with when Ahmed Shaheed, an Iranian man who was put in charge of the Human Rights department. Then we had Prince Zaid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein, who was a Jordanian diplomat and the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, How can we take these organizations seriously when the people in charge of them come from countries with such poor records on the very issues they’re supposed to be advocating for.
Never mind how biased they are towards the only democratic country in the middle east and always hold it too double standards.
I am a democratic but was happy with trump pick to the UN and that he stopped funds to URWA
Are there two people called Hanan Ashrawi? You refer to a Saudi Arabian man with that name in charge of the UN women’s Rights department, and to a Palestinian politician with that name. I know the Palestinian politician with that name, a woman with a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. I was trying to get information about the Saudi Arabian man you mentioned, but was not able to get information about him.
Right. And make sure the staff rotate between other UNHCR priorities, to ensure loyalty. Send every single employee from Gaza to work in Congo next, if they want to keep the job.
Wikipedia:
The whole idea of UNRWA is sick. Imagine if Poland still had “refugee camps” for “non-citizens” forcibly expelled from land lost to Ukraine in the 1940s. Or rather, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Kept bottled up to keep boiling hatred alive. Or worse, imagine if Germany did the same, had “camps” for the Sudeten descendants, instead of integrating them. (Germany is a much closer analogy, these people were also displaced after a failed war of aggression in the 1940s.) Imagine deciding that all of their lives should be forever devoted to a lost cause. And that supposedly liberal democracies provide most of the funding for this evil scheme, 8 decades later?
Excellent points.
I’m so utterly unsurprised.
I am hoping for some deportations of foreign students on our campuses for simping for terror while breaking the law.
Three decades I was one of those students but I never would have cheered for monsters. Hell…. I was afraid of jay walking! Georgetown U. instilled that into us at orientation: “While you’re a guest here, don’t break American laws!”
D.A.
NYC
D.A.
NYC
Sorry in advance for this probable offence against DaRoolz, Dr. C. When I read about the destabilizing campus protesters who threaten, block, break, or cancel, I feel the same way for a few minutes. When the rage dissipates, I remind myself about the sacred, to me, nature of the first amendment’s protection of political speech and move on. Sometimes it takes a’while.
When I was a kid I raised money at Halloween for Unicef, and heard from my parents about how wonderful the U.N. was as a force for peace throughout the world. But I stopped believing that long ago. Iran on the UN human rights council? What a joke. Peacekeepers in Lebanon. Less than useless. Is Putin deterred by fear of the UN? Is anyone?
I don’t agree that it’s important for the U.S. to stay in the UN as a dissenting voice. If the US leaves, the UN becomes irrelevant. Good riddance. Ending our funding for UNWRA is a good start. Now let’s finish the job.
My main concerns about the US withdrawing from the UN would be the significant change in the balance of power within the Security Council and the loss of the US’s veto.
I saw posts on TwiX about the hostages being held in UN shelters yesterday, but I couldn’t find any sources for the claim so it’s good to see that the allegations are being reported properly now.
Utterly reprehensible that the claims are not being more widely covered – especially now that the UN has responded to them. In the past, I would have excused the media on the basis that they don’t report on allegations made to the UN at this stage, but it seems that they do, provided that Israel can be portrayed as the bad guy: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/un-deeply-concerned-israel-using-unlawful-lethal-force-in-west-bank
Why is anyone surprised that the UN is corrupt and antisemitic? You only need to look at the countries that make up the UN membership. They are principally kleptocracies, dictatorships, tyrannies and rogue states, plus a few Western democracies weakened by social justice activism.
I would have preferred if Mr. Trump had pulled us out of the UN rather than WHO. We pay the lion’s share of expenses for the organization, but they hate us, along with Israel. As well, they are ineffective. They have done far too little to quell many conflicts, and this has resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. They are utterly worthless.
I’m a man of few words. The US should withdraw from the UN and give the gibbering idiots a week to get out of NYC. Convert the UN building into condos.
I’m sympathetic to this view, but as JezGrove suggests above, the strongest argument to staying involved with the UN is the old adage about keeping one’s enemies closer.