The U.N.’s Kosher Stamp for Terror

"Earlier this week, the Israeli Knesset took a first step toward banning the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from the country, following a series of revelations over the past year of its intimate, decadelong partnership with Hamas. Predictably, the United States joined the U.N. Security Council in ‘strongly’ warning against any attempts to ‘dismantle or diminish UNRWA’s operations and mandate,’ urging Israel to ‘respect the privileges and immunities of UNRWA.’ Although the agency was shown, among other things, to have paid salaries to leading perpetrators of the Oct. 7 atrocities and allowed the terror organization to locate its combat headquarters and data centers under its schools, there is supposedly ‘no alternative’ to UNRWA, or so the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. insisted.

UNRWA is not the only U.N. body that is receiving the full-throated support of the Biden administration despite actively cooperating with terrorists. On the northern front, the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) plays a similar role by allowing Hezbollah strike force members to use its bases as physical cover for the terrorist organization’s tunnel networks and for the underground staging areas from which it intended to launch a bloody invasion of Israel’s Galilee. Following the same warped logic it applied to UNRWA, Team Biden-Harris is now making the continuation and indeed the strengthening of UNIFIL’s role in southern Lebanon a key element of its proposal for an end to Israel’s operation against Hezbollah.

UNIFIL, in its current iteration, was given a mandate in 2006 via U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 to help ensure that the area south of the Litani River would remain free of any armed presence save its own and that of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Resolution 1701 was ostensibly meant to end the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war on terms that would prevent the Lebanese-based terror army from launching more attacks against Israel by giving the Israelis a demilitarized zone on their northern border enforced by international troops. The catch was that UNIFIL would implement its mandate in support of and in coordination with the Lebanese government and the LAF—which are both controlled by Hezbollah. Rather than decrease Hezbollah’s strength on Israel’s border, the group’s armed presence south of the Litani grew exponentially under UNIFIL’s oversight.

Accusations of assisting Hezbollah in collecting intelligence have come not just from captured Hezbollah fighters but also from within UNIFIL’s own ranks.

Just how blatantly Hezbollah operated with UNIFIL’s blessing became clear after Israel launched its invasion of southern Lebanon on Sept. 30. IDF units operating close to Israel’s northern border uncovered the openings of elaborate, large-scale Hezbollah tunnel networks a few yards away from UNIFIL positions. It was clearly impossible for UNIFIL commanders not to have been fully aware of the construction of those positions and their use by large squads of armed Hezbollah militants who moved in and out. Needless to say, the construction and deployment of Hezbollah’s tunnel network, which made a mockery of UNIFIL’s supposed role in demilitarizing southern Lebanon, was never reported back to the U.N. through official channels or made public. Instead, UNIFIL paid local Hezbollah operatives and supporters to act as contractors and provide other services, essentially melding its functions with those of the terrorist army for which it was providing cover..."