TEL AVIV, Sep. 2 (Sputnik) – The organization was able to raise over $32 million for humanitarian efforts from donors last year following the war that Israel launched against Hamas, the organization’s director said.
The Israeli government is buying false advertising on Google search results for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in an attempt to discredit the agency, Wired reported on Monday.
The report says that the Israeli government draws search users to a website alleging that the UN agency has not declared whether or not employing Hamas members violates its neutrality and that the agency doesn't investigate its facilities for abuse by extremists, which the agency has strongly rejected.
At around the same time that Mara Kronenfeld, the executive director for UNRWA, found the advertisement, Israel had accused 12 of the agency’s staff of having participated in the October 7 attack by Hamas last year. UNRWA employs 30,000 people in total, making it the second-largest employer in Gaza after Hamas.
As a result, several western countries suspended financing of UNRWA after the accusations surfaced. The UN said in early August that it had fired staff members from the agency after an internal investigation found that they may have been involved in the attack. Overall, the agency fired 13 employees this year including nine whom an oversight body determined may have been involved in last year’s attack. All donor countries except for the US resumed their funding for the agency.
However, the report writes that UNRWA “does require independence from military interests” and added that an outside review found “evidence of facility inspections” and added that checkups happen frequently.
“There is an incredibly powerful campaign to dismantle UNRWA,” Kronenfeld said. “I want the public to know what’s happening and the insidious nature of it, especially at a time when civilian lives are under attack in Gaza.”
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said in a post on X that Israel’s defamatory advertisements continue to be used as a “weapon in the war in Gaza”.
According to the report, several current and former Google employees spoke to WIRED and said that this anti-UNRWA campaign is just one of several ad campaigns that Israel had crafted in recent months that has drawn criticism from both inside and outside of the company. As of late August, the slanderous advertisements have remained on Google, a separate report revealed.
And according to that report, between May and July when users searched 300 terms related to the agency, Israel’s ads would pop up 44% of the time as opposed to UNRWA USA’s own advertisements which would show up just 34% of the time.
UNRWA was first established in 1949, just a year after the Nakba (catastrophe) occurred in which 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes which created an unresolved refugee crisis. UNRWA supporters have claimed that Israel does not want the agency preserving Palestinians’ refugee status because it would give them a better chance of reclaiming occupied land someday.
The agency offers healthcare, education and humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Thus far, nearly 41,000 people in the Gaza Strip have been killed while more than 94,000 have been injured as a result of Israel’s war against Hamas, Al Jazeera reported.
Photo from AP
