The executive director of U.N. Watch on Monday called for the indictment of Philippe Lazzarini, the outgoing commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East ( UNRWA), accusing him of crimes against humanity over the agency’s alleged role in enabling and perpetuating Hamas terrorism.
Speaking at the second JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem, Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based watchdog organization, argued that UNRWA had become deeply intertwined with Hamas and should be held accountable for its actions and failures.
“For years, UNRWA has been funded by Western governments—the European Union, Canada, Australia and others—with millions of dollars,” he said. “Yet it has not resettled a single Palestinian refugee. Its structure perpetuates the conflict rather than resolves it.”
He challenged UNRWA’s repeated claims that it teaches U.N. values and human rights, citing senior figures in the agency’s teachers’ unions who he said had ties to Hamas.
Among them is Suhail al-Hindi, the longtime head of UNRWA’s teachers’ union in Gaza, whom Neuer described as a member of Hamas’s political bureau who was photographed with the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who Israeli troops killed in 2024.
He also cited Fathi al-Sharif, head of UNRWA’s teachers’ union in Lebanon, who was killed in an Israeli strike. Hamas later identified al-Sharif as one of its leaders.
“I’m not telling you he was Hamas,” said Neuer. “Hamas told you he was Hamas.”
He dismissed repeated claims by U.N. officials that Hamas’s clandestine nature made such affiliations difficult to detect. “It wasn’t underground,” he said. “It was public. It was on social media. Hamas announced it openly.”
With Lazzarini preparing to leave office some six years after his appointment to head UNRWA, Neuer said the time had come for legal accountability.
“We are demanding the indictment of Philippe Lazzarini for crimes against humanity,” he said.
Neuer praised the United States for ending roughly $400 million in annual funding to UNRWA but warned that several Western governments—including France, Britain, Canada and Australia—continue to support the agency financially.
“The battle is far from over,” he said. “UNRWA has become an arm of Hamas. If we want accountability and if we want peace, governments must stop funding it.”
The role of UNRWA, an agency set up to help Palestinians that operates according to its own, disputed, definition of a refugee, is only part of the of broader U.N. double standard on Israel, Neuer said.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said two weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, that, while he condemns Hamas’s attacks, they “did not happen in a vacuum,” Neuer recalled. “Effectively, Antonio Guterres was justifying the attacks of Oct. 7, but not everything that Guterres said was wrong,” Neuer said. “If Mr. Guterres had just a smidgen of self-reflection, we might have asked who was the educator of the Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel on Oct. 7 and committed atrocities? Who taught them? Well, according to the UNRWA former legal advisor, Yoran Sufi, 90% of those in Gaza attended UNRWA schools. UNRWA schools. Didn’t happen in a vacuum? You’re right, of course the attacks did not happen in a vacuum. The perpetrators of the atrocities were graduates of your education system, student terrorists, graduates of your schools,” Neuer said, addressing Guterres.
Neuer added that the U.N. Human Rights Councilis preparing to hear today Reem Al-Salam of Jordan, who is the U.N. rapporteur on violence against women. “She also happens to be the global denier of violence against Israeli women. And she’s about to speak this afternoon in Geneva, and she is going to present her latest report, which, among other things, accuses Israel of genocide,” Neuer said.
The U.N. rapporteurs “are supposed to be the U.N.'s crown jewels, independent human rights experts,” but in reality some of them “are subverting human rights. And we document it,” Neuer said. He noted how UN Watch exposed the antisemitic rhetoric of U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, and her history of denying antisemitism as a factor in Israel-hatred. In February 2024, she wrote on X to French President Emmanuel Macron that the victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel were “not killed because of their Jewishness, but as a reaction to Israel’s oppression.”
In 2014, she stated: “America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust.” Albanese has since said that she regrets this remark.
