How a UN agency puts unfiltered Hamas propaganda on the record?

A little-known United Nations agency is republishing reports about Gaza’s humanitarian situation based on unfiltered reports produced by a human rights group with links to Hamas, resulting in the terror group’s propaganda being placed on the record in UN documents widely shared with humanitarian relief groups.

The Press Service of Israel has learned that the agency in question, the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is republishing reports produced by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization.

OCHA is responsible for the Relief Web, an information portal widely used by the international humanitarian community that hosts more than one million reports, evaluations and guidelines on humanitarian situations around the world. A TPS-IL review found 114 Euro-Med reports published on the Relief Web since October 7, an average of one report every two days.

Data published on Relief Web often makes its way into UN documents.

However, the OCHA and Euro-Med reports on the Middle East paint a picture of alleged war crimes committed by Israel that are not supported by facts and have not been independently verified.

Since October 7, the Euro-Med reports disseminated on Relief Web accuse Israel of “genocide,” organ theft, using banned thermal weapons, buring Palestinians in mass graves, massacring Palestinians in Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, deliberately using Palestinians as human shields, and sexually assualting Palestinian women.

The reports provided no evidence, and either downplayed or disregarded evidence of Hamas abuses and war crimes — including readily available information about murder, torture, rape and kidnapping.

“Any organization, even such as the one related to Hamas, a terrorist organization that is outlawed in several countries in the world, including the Gulf countries, can come and take control of the information that passes within the UN organization, disseminating lies, like these,” Yifa Segal, an international law expert from Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told TPS-IL.

“It happens because the UN’s immunity is absolute. There is no administrative petition or the legal route that can be taken to challenge this. The UN system is open to such significant exploitation, and there is no way for the truth to come out,” Segal explained.

“The chance that anything will change is zero. This is mainly because there is no one except Israel in this case to intervene and stop it. And Israel stands alone.”

A 2020 Defence Ministry document in English, Arabic and Hebrew with then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s determination that Euro-Med founder and chairman Ramy Abdu is a Hamas operative, authorizing the seizure of his assets.