The European Union Commissioner responsible for crisis management, Janez Lenarčić, urged international donors today, Tuesday, to fund UNRWA after a report concluded that Israel did not provide evidence that hundreds of the agency’s employees belong to resistance factions.

Lenarčić welcomed the report “for its confirmation of the large number of compliance regulations imposed at the agency and recommendations for improving them.”

He wrote on “X”: “I call on donors to support UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), which represents a lifeline for Palestinian refugees.”

An independent group conducting a review of UNRWA said it found “problems related to neutrality” in its expected report issued yesterday, Monday.

But a study led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna indicated that “Israel has not yet provided evidence to support” its accusation that UNRWA employed more than 400 people.

The group conducting the review was formed after Israel in January accused some UNRWA employees of participating in the attack on October 7, 2023. In the weeks that followed, several donor countries suspended or froze funding amounting to about $450 million.

Several countries have resumed funding since then, including Sweden, Canada, Japan, the European Union, and France, while other countries, including the United States and Britain, have not done so.

Last month, US President Joe Biden signed a law prohibiting any funding from Washington until March 2025.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, recently said that the freeze in funding for the relief agency in Gaza in light of the Israeli war has turned the region into a “humanitarian hell,” in light of the dire need of the Strip’s population of 2.3 million people for food, water, shelter and medicine.

Colonna's team was tasked with assessing whether UNRWA was "doing everything in its power to ensure neutrality," while Guterres launched a second investigation to investigate Israel's accusations.

Despite a strong framework to ensure it maintains the principle of humanitarian neutrality, the review found “problems with neutrality”, including instances where staff shared political posts on social media and the use of a small number of textbooks with “problematic content” in some UNRWA schools. ".

But she added that "Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence" to accuse UNRWA of employing more than 400 people.

UNRWA began its operations in 1950 and provides services to approximately six million people across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.