Neta Heiman Mina, whose elderly mother, Ditza Heiman, was taken hostage by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, and held prisoner in Gaza for nearly two months, spoke on Tuesday at the 63rd Session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, during a panel on human rights education, confronting the UN over its continued funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) despite its ties to Hamas.
UNRWA was founded in 1949 and operates in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, providing humanitarian aid and education for Palestinians.
Tuesday's panel, held to mark the anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training, included UN ambassadors and representatives from various member states as well as representatives from human rights and UN-affiliated organizations.
For 48 days of her 53-day-long captivity, her mother - aged 84 at the time of capture - was held hostage by an UNRWA teacher, Mina said in her 90-second statement on behalf of both the Geneva-based UN Watch and international NGO Ingénieurs du Monde.
'My mother wasn’t the only one'
"An UNRWA teacher, Abed, kept [Heiman] trapped in his attic in terrible conditions with very little food," Mina said. "I ask the United Nations: how could you place the education of Gaza’s next generation with someone involved in holding an elderly woman hostage?"
"My mother wasn’t the only one," Mina continued. "We know of other UNRWA employees connected to the massacre and kidnappings of October 7th. Why did UNRWA allow Suhail al-Hindi to be in charge of 8,000 teachers in Gaza while he was a member of Hamas?"
In a written press statement, UN Watch noted that the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training explicitly states that human rights education should "contribute to the prevention of human rights violations and abuses and to the combating and eradication of all forms of discrimination, racism, stereotyping and incitement to hatred, and the harmful attitudes and prejudices that underlie them."
UNRWA overstated progress on institutional changes, preserved terrorism issues
Mina's statement came on the heels of a scathing report published by UN Watch on Monday, which claimed that UNRWA has substantially overstated its progress on institutional changes, substituting administrative paperwork for actual reform while underlying issues involving terrorism and incitement remain unaddressed.
The investigation, titled the “Report Card on UNRWA Reform,” analyzed the agency’s implementation of 50 recommendations issued by an independent review group led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna.
The Colonna review was originally commissioned by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in early 2024 to restore donor confidence after devastating revelations surfaced that UNRWA employees had participated in the October 7 massacre, which led 17 donor states to temporarily suspend $450 million in funding.
While UNRWA now says it has successfully completed 41 of the 50 recommended reforms, the UN Watch analysis concludes that this figure is misleading, noting that, at most, only 13 recommendations have been fulfilled as prescribed.
“UNRWA has graded its own homework and awarded itself high marks,” UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer said. “But issuing a policy is not the same as enforcing it. Drafting a plan is not the same as implementing it, and closing a recommendation does not mean that the underlying problem has been solved.”
Alex Carson contributed to this report.