Untenable: UN must stop protecting Israel’s terror foes in Gaza and Lebanon

By Hillel Neuer (Published originally in the NY Post)

Picture a United Nations worker.

What do you see?

A paper-pushing bureaucrat, perhaps, or an ineffective peacekeeper in a blue helmet?

Perhaps you should imagine something more nefarious.

On Oct. 7, 2023, members of one UN organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, actively took part in the Hamas terrorist massacres in Israel.

Last week, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed that the terrorist who commanded the attack that led to the abduction of American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin and other hostages was an UNRWA employee.

Meanwhile, in the months since Oct. 7, members of another UN group, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, provided cover, intentionally or not, for Hezbollah terrorists as they rained down more than 10,000 missiles, drones and rockets on Israeli civilians.

The only function UNIFIL performs at this point is to shield Hezbollah’s terrorist operation, which continues to threaten Israel from its northern border.

“We were totally subject to Hezbollah,” a former UN peacekeeper told the Danish newspaper B.T. last month.

“We clearly had limited freedom of movement,” the soldier said. “For example, we never operated after dark for fear of Hezbollah.”

The United Nations’ ineffectiveness and ineptitude is a long-running narrative among its critics.

But this global organization can also be actively harmful.

Nineteen UNRWA staff members were internally investigated for taking part in the Oct. 7 invasion and murder rampage that slaughtered over 1,200 innocents and dragged another 240 hostages into Gaza.

A top Hamas commander killed in Lebanon turned out to be the principal of a UNRWA school — and the head of the country’s UNRWA Teachers Union.

A Hamas command room was discovered inside UNRWA headquarters in Gaza.

That’s why last week, Israeli lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to approve two bills essentially barring the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants from operating within Israel, and severely curtailing its activities in Gaza and the West Bank.

And just like Hamas subverted UNRWA, Hezbollah has subverted UNIFIL.

That organization was created in 1978 to assist Lebanon in restoring effective authority in the south.

As the IDF uncovers Hezbollah stockpiles of weapons and bunkers in southern Lebanon, as it continued to do this week, their proximity to UNIFIL positions is striking.

After the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1701, giving UNIFIL one job: to ensure that southern Lebanon would be “an area free of any armed personnel, assets, and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL.”

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Their one job was to disarm Hezbollah.

Instead, under UNIFIL’s watch, Iran’s terrorist proxy built an arsenal of 150,000 missiles — and became far more powerful than Lebanon’s own military.

Since Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’ horror spree, Hezbollah has fired thousands of missiles, rockets and drones at Israel, setting its north on fire and displacing over 60,000 Israelis from their homes.

It is now clear that UNIFIL frequently acts as a human shield — perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not — for Hezbollah’s attacks on Israelis.

In the last month alone, over 25 rockets have been fired at Israel from Hezbollah compounds known to be embedded near UNIFIL posts.

Hezbollah fighters are ambushing Israeli soldiers from hideouts near UNIFIL positions, including an attack last month that killed two Israeli soldiers.

Since its ground invasion of southern Lebanon, Israel has discovered multiple Hezbollah tunnels dug within 100 meters of UNIFIL positions.

UNIFIL can’t claim it didn’t know.

Six years ago, I visited Israel’s border with Lebanon to see for myself.

I warned the United Nations that Hezbollah was digging massive invasion tunnels under the border, embedding missiles in Lebanese homes, and violating Resolution 1701 and the Geneva Conventions.

For UNRWA and UNIFIL to continue operating in their present form is untenable.

Like Hamas and Hezbollah, the terrorist organizations in which they have become intertwined, these organizations must be dismantled — so that Gaza and Lebanon can be freed from the control of violent extremists and their enablers.

Hillel Neuer is executive director of United Nations Watch, a non-governmental monitoring organization in Geneva.