At the very moment the United Nations, through the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), acknowledges the devastation in the occupied West Bank, UNRWA management is actively punishing its staff, and the United Nations Appeals Tribunal (UNAT) reinforces this by refusing to recognize the exceptional hardship they endure.
In July 2025, OHCHR warned that the Israeli “Iron Wall” operation has already forced the displacement of some 30,000 Palestinians and forms part of a broader pattern contributing to the illegal annexation of the West Bank and that there was an unprecedented “sharp surge in killings, attacks, and harassment of Palestinians by Israeli settlers and security forces” with Palestinian injuries in June 2025 reaching their highest monthly total in over 20 years.
The United Nations Appeals Tribunal (UNAT), however, took a shocking opposite view: that such devastation is no more than the ordinary lot of Palestinians.
In Hejab v. Commissioner-General of UNRWA (Judgment No. 2025-UNAT-1570, issued last month), the Tribunal shockingly found that:
“the difficult economic conditions of living in the ‘occupied Palestine territories’ do not make Mr. Hejab’s case exceptional” and that,
“difficulty in finding another job for an older staff member close to retirement in – Occupied Palestine- cannot be considered as an unusual circumstance” (paras. 65–67).
This reasoning exposes just how profoundly disconnected UNAT is from the daily realities of Palestinian life and their unimaginable suffering. While OHCHR acknowledges forced displacement, widespread killings, and economic collapse, the UN Tribunal reduces these very conditions to routine or normal challenges. It is against this backdrop that the case of Khaled Hejab must be examined. Equally disturbing is that it was not only the UN Tribunal that failed Mr. Hejab. UNRWA management itself set the stage by building untruthful and inflated allegations to justify the Palestinian senior staff’s dismissal. On the surface, the Agency proclaims its duty of care and its commitment to staff but in reality it is actively engineering the removal of Palestinian staff.
The particularities of the case make UNAT’s dismissal all the more troubling. UNRWA management dismissed Mr. Hejab on multiple baseless and distorted allegations, including an alleged conflict of interest, supposed mismanagement, and the deletion of private WhatsApp messages.
That supposed conflict of interest was nothing more than the fact that Hejab and a contractor had been neighbors for forty years in the same refugee camp and had attended the same school. UNRWA chose to treat this as compromising his integrity, as if such proximity were evidence of collusion.
But what does it even mean to be “neighbors for forty years” in the context of a Palestinian refugee camp? This is not New York, Geneva, or Paris, where people have the privilege of choosing neighborhoods, schools, jobs, or even countries of residence.
For Palestinians, the occupier decides: where they are born, where they live, where they can or cannot relocate. Entire generations are confined to the same camps, towns, or villages, with mobility dictated by checkpoints, military orders, and residency restrictions. Daily life is governed not by free choice but by military occupation.
UNRWA knows this damn well. After all, they serve all Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. The Agency has administered Palestinian camps for decades. It knows that in such settings, “neighbors” does not mean privilege, collusion, or concealed financial ties. It means survival in cramped, controlled, and immovable living conditions. UNRWA twisted Hejab’s own social reality into a ground for unlawful dismissal, punishing a staff member for circumstances dictated by the very structures of the Israeli occupation.
These accusations rested entirely on the findings of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). Yet both the UNRWA Dispute Tribunal and the Appeals Tribunal observed that the Agency treated the OIOS investigation as if it were evidence itself, rather than conducting its own assessment of facts. Both UN Tribunals criticized this abdication of responsibility, underscoring that disciplinary measures must be based on established facts and not OIOS investigative conclusions that cannot withstand scrutiny.
The UNRWA Dispute Tribunal (UNRWA DT) eventually rescinded the termination, recognizing the flaws in the Agency’s decision. But when Hejab turned to the Appeals Tribunal (UNAT) seeking enhanced compensation arguing that his case was “exceptional” given the economic collapse in the occupied territories, his long unemployment, and his age close to retirement, the Tribunal dismissed his plea. It ruled that difficulty in finding another job or enduring the economic conditions of the occupied Palestinian territories did not amount to exceptional circumstances, calling them instead “routine or normal challenges.”
Such reasoning lays bare just how profoundly disconnected UNAT is from the daily realities of Palestinian life and their unimaginable suffering. While OHCHR acknowledges forced displacement, widespread killings, and economic collapse, the UN Tribunal reduces these very conditions to routine or normal challenges. I argue that the outcome reflects the cultural bias of UNAT judges, who apply Western standards of choice and mobility to a Palestinian reality defined by occupation and dispossession.
The UNAT bench applies standards shaped in and for Western contexts where mobility, career options, and social networks are taken for granted and then judges Palestinians against them.
What for a judge in New York or Geneva looks like an ‘ordinary difficulty’ is in fact the lived consequence of systemic occupation and dispossession. By erasing that difference, the Tribunal entrenches an unequal standard of justice: international staff are measured against realities of choice, while Palestinian staff are measured against conditions imposed by force.
Equally alarming was the Tribunal’s own note, in a footnote about the lack of due process, that UNRWA had asked Mr. Hejab to produce evidence while at the same time blocking his access to his UN email account, the very repository of the documents he needed to defend himself.
From my own experience, I know this is not an isolated occurrence. UNRWA and other UN entities routinely deploy this tactic under the false pretext of “data protection,” denying staff access to their records while preserving those same records for the Agency’s own use in building a case. The asymmetry of power this creates is staggering: staff are expected to fight blindfolded, while management has unfettered access to every document, communication, and confidential record. This is a deliberate erosion of any aspect of due process. Indeed, judges in previous cases have highlighted that depriving staff of access to their files tilts the balance fundamentally against them, stripping proceedings of fairness.
Not only was Mr. Hejab denied access to his own email records to mount an objective and fair defense, but management also decided it would scrutinize his private WhatsApp messages. Why should UN management have access to the personal communications of a staff member? And if such intrusion is deemed acceptable, then why are staff not given equal access to the WhatsApp messages of senior management, where real collusion and misconduct are far more likely to be revealed? The selectivity of this intrusion underscores once again how accountability flows in only one direction: downward and never toward those in positions of authority.
The case of Mr. Hejab is emblematic rather than exceptional. It illustrates a recurring structural flaw: the United Nations internal justice system applies abstract legal standards that are wholly detached from the realities of occupation, while UNRWA management manipulates those standards to eliminate staff it wishes to remove. This produces a dual regime of accountability: international staff are assessed within contexts of autonomy and mobility, whereas Palestinian staff are judged within conditions of displacement, restriction, and occupation: conditions that are then shockingly dismissed as “ordinary.” This reasoning cannot be reconciled with the principle of judicial neutrality; it constitutes the entrenchment of institutional bias, concealed beneath the veneer of legality.
UNAT judges may sit in the comfort of Geneva or New York, but they are not adjudicating cases for staff living in those contexts. They are judges of international administrative law, and many of the staff who come before them live under conditions radically different from those of their white, Western colleagues. In cases involving Palestinian staff, those conditions include occupation, forced displacement, restrictions on movement, and a daily absence of choice. To ignore this is not neutrality; it is blindness. UNAT judges must be trained to understand the cultural and political realities in which staff live and work. Without such understanding, they simply cannot adjudicate fairly. Otherwise, the system ceases to be justice at all; it becomes a bureaucracy reinforcing inequality under the cover of law.
