On 23 October, UN Staff 4 Gaza issued a press release announcing the launch of a memorial project for UN personnel killed by Israel in Gaza. The group is led by former senior UN staff, many of whom I have worked with.
Before getting into what is fundamentally wrong, on multiple levels, with this action and with this press release, I want to acknowledge what is positive. It is the first time a public statement explicitly uses the word killed and names the perpetrator, Israel :
“More than 370 members of UN personnel have been confirmed killed by the Israel Defense Forces since October 2023.”
Most others still refer to these colleagues as “dead,” carefully omitting the party responsible. That UN Staff 4 Gaza names Israel directly is due in large part to the fact that its leaders are former senior UN officials; otherwise, they would have been dismissed immediately by the organization. Still, they deserve credit for calling things by their name. The release also correctly states that the majority of those killed were UNRWA staff, not general “UN staff,” a distinction long overdue.
It is precisely because its leaders are former UN staff that they have space for more forceful action and bolder language, unless this entire exercise is simply a PR moment, a gateway to a few interviews on Al Jazeera or other international media, followed by silence.
A memorial has symbolic value, but it falls painfully short of what UNRWA staff killed in Gaza actually deserved. Given the positions and titles these former officials once held, they can do far more. If they genuinely seek to honour UNRWA staff, they can begin by addressing the Secretary-General and the Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, and demand to know why the families of the UNRWA staff killed in Gaza continue to be denied their entitlements.
I doubt the staff who were killed were wondering about a future memorial. Their concerns were very different: If I die, who will take care of my children? Who will support my spouse, my parents? Who will ensure my children have access to education, medicine, stability? That they have enough funds if they choose to escape this hell voluntarily?
No one lies awake at night hoping that their children will one day visit a monument with their name etched on it. They hope their children will survive and be protected.
Many will interpret this as diminishing the efforts of UN Staff 4 Gaza. It is not. I respect most of them, and I know several personally who carry the Palestinian cause with sincerity. This is precisely why their voices, reputations, and platforms matter, and why they should be used for something that will actually serve the families of the UNRWA staff killed by Israel in Gaza, many of whom were killed in the line of service.
There is another point that must be said plainly. If those killed had been American, British, German, Canadian, take your pick, there would already be dozens of committees, campaigns, and advocacy groups demanding justice, pushing relentlessly for reparations, lobbying governments, flooding the media. But when the victims are Palestinian, the system stops at pity. It never reaches action.
This is what a colonial hierarchy looks like: grief is permitted, justice is not.
A brief reminder: the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, gave the bereaved families USD 300 each instead of the USD 126,000 to which they are entitled. And no, the reason is not that UNRWA has a “different set of rules.” The management deliberately excluded the Gaza staff from the annual insurance coverage.
Another reminder: to this day, the Commissioner-General has not released the Provident Fund savings of the deceased staff. These savings belong to the staff and their families, not to the Agency. Nothing prevents UNRWA from releasing these funds or, at minimum, continuing to pay their salaries against their accumulated savings until compensation is properly processed.
If the goal is truly to honour the UNRWA staff killed by Israel in Gaza, then start with real work.
A memorial is beautiful, but beauty does not feed children, does not pay school fees, does not treat trauma, does not bring stability. What will come next is predictable: the unveiling, the photo ops for senior officials, and another round of speeches, while the families still search for someone willing to raise their case and push it forward.
A memorial may stand in stone, but justice must stand in action. Right now, the former is moving ahead, and the latter is nowhere in sight.
While UNDP Gaza leadership continues to communicate publicly about supporting Palestinians to return home, its own long-serving Palestinian staff who fled under active bombardment have already been informed that their contracts will be terminated by the end of the year.
@AlessandroMrakic, the UNDP Head of the Gaza office regularly highlights UNDP’s role in helping Palestinians rebuild their homes.
Jaco Cilliers states that “Gazan residents are eager to return home and rebuild their lives.”
Tom Fletcher praises UNDP-cleared roads that “give us access to people in need of aid.”
All of these messages are accompanied by a growing number of polished photo-ops and high-visibility field posts, yet none of them acknowledge the situation of UNDP Gaza’s own Palestinian personnel, who are part of the Gaza community. These staff delivered UNDP’s mandate from inside Gaza for years. They survived destruction and were forced to flee only when staying meant risking death.
Today, instead of being supported until they can safely return to Gaza and continue their service, they are being informed that their employment will be brought to an end. Many of those affected are women who worked throughout the years when Gaza was most difficult, sustaining essential programmes despite trauma, loss, and danger.
UNDP is presenting itself as a champion of Gaza’s recovery. That narrative is irreconcilable with the treatment of the personnel who built and sustained its presence on the ground. They are not temporary contractors nor external consultants. They are Palestinian professionals who delivered results long before surge deployments arrived, yet they are now being removed as other so called international surge staff fly in to take over the work they carried for years and being compensated generously for it.
Before speaking about helping the people of Gaza return home, UNDP must show responsibility toward its own staff who are the people of Gaza.
What is UNDP doing now, not in public communications, but in its employment decisions, to ensure its Palestinian staff who fled to Egypt are protected, supported, and enabled to return to their posts?
Why is UNDP Gaza punishing its own Palestinian staff for surviving a war?
UNDP leadership owes these staff clear answers and immediate action.
This week, I expose how Member States were told their contributions had funded “successful” projects for victims of sexual exploitation and abuse, while the UN’s own auditors found those very projects had failed completely.
In striking contrast to the Secretary-General’s triumphant account of successfully implemented projects for victims of sexual exploitation and abuse, the United Nations’ internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) depicts a system mired in mismanagement, absent oversight, and outcomes so hollow they verge on tragic irony.
Five projects costing over $815,000 were meant to help 628 survivors of sexual exploitation and abuse in the Central African Republic rebuild their lives. Instead, they reflected a pattern of institutional negligence disguised as implementation success.
Victims were trained in agriculture without access to land, in hairdressing without a hair dryer, and in pastry-making without ovens.
The so-called “income-generating activities” generated no income; only frustration. OIOS field visits to Alindao and Bambari found women who had dutifully completed their vocational courses yet could neither farm nor open a salon. Those trained in agriculture discovered only after graduation that they had no access to land whatsoever -no plots, no communal fields, no arrangements for leasing or use. The implementing office, astonishingly, had never verified whether participants owned or could access land before investing funds into agricultural training. In effect, they were trained for an activity that was structurally impossible.
Equally, those trained in hairdressing received “start-up kits” that omitted the most essential tools: no hair dryers, no scissors, no power supply solutions. OIOS noted that no marketanalysis or feasibility review had been conducted; the Mission never examined whether these trades were viable in the targeted areas or how victims might sustain them. The projects were conceived in spreadsheets, not in communities.
Projects were launched in locations chosen by “professional judgment”, meaning, effectively, at random. Communities with the largest number of victims, such as Dekoa and Sibut (which accounted for 21 per cent of all recorded victims), were simply left out.
The implementing partner, hand-picked without any comparative advantage analysis had no office, no staff, and no demonstrated capacity in the Central African Republic. There was no review committee, no competition, and no oversight. Trainers were recruited ad-hoc, curricula were missing for two of five courses, and attendance didn’t matter: beneficiaries who stopped attending still received completion certificates and start-up kits.
The project steering committee that should have provided governance was never established. Eleven of thirty-six weekly progress reports simply stated “Nothing to report” while projects were floundering. Even the Trust Fund team in DMSPC and the Senior Victims’ Rights Officer issued recommendations that went unheeded. The Mission failed to monitor progress, delayed disbursements, and excluded even basic provisions like transportation and food for trainees travelling several kilometres to training sites.
The result? A programme ostensibly designed to restore dignity to victims became a showcase of institutional negligence: vocational training without vocation, empowerment without power, assistance without assistance.
And yet, a triumph, according to the Secretary-General. While the OIOS audit revealed governance failure and zero impact, the Secretary-General (SG) presented an entirely different picture to the General Assembly.
In his report A/79/789 dated 17 February 2025, titled Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and abuse, the Secretary-General cited these same projects as a model of success. He proudly reported that since 2016, $5.1 million from 25 Member States had funded 21 projects, including those in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and South Sudan, with “medical care, psychological support and vocational training” provided to victims. He then called on Member States to move away from voluntary contributions and establish a “predictable and sustainable funding model.”
The Trust Fund in Support of Victims of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, established in 2016, was created to bridge service gaps by providing vital support to complainants, victims, and children born as a result of sexual exploitation and abuse. The Fund’s governance is chaired by DMSPC, under USG Catherine Pollard, which also serves as the Implementing Office.
Its 2024 Annual Report echoed the Secretary-General’s optimism, claiming the “successful implementation and launch of 21 projects“, and emphasizing that “substantial resources are urgently needed to sustain support to victims”.
Its principal contributors listed in their own reports were:
United Kingdom – $1,117,000
United States – $620,000
Italy – $581,000
Norway – $393,000
Canada – $240,000
Japan – $200,000
Australia – $153,000
Bangladesh – $148,000
Germany – $120,000
India – $100,000
Nigeria – $100,000
Switzerland – $92,000 Total: $5,188,000
Nice figures. Glossy charts. Positive reporting.
The 2024 Annual Report reads like a success story, one slight problem, though: none of it was true.
The internal OIOS audit tells the opposite story: that the projects touted as successful in both the SG’s report and the Trust Fund’s annual report failed completely. The OIOS Report 2025/035, covering 1 January 2023 to 31 March 2025, detailed systemic failures:
No oversight or governance: No project steering committee was established to supervise implementation or review progress.
Arbitrary project locations: Sites were selected without predefined criteria, excluding major affected communities.
Copy-paste approach: The implementing partner simply replicated a vocational model used in another Mission, without any local context.
No due diligence: The partner was selected without comparative advantage analysis, and had no operational base in the country.
Missing curricula and unqualified trainers: For two of five courses, there were no curricula; the trainers’ qualifications were undocumented.
Certificates without competence: Beneficiaries who dropped out still received start-up kits and certificates.
Inflated costs and logistical chaos: Two of five MOUs omitted key delivery details, forcing MINUSCA to pay an additional $14,000 in transport.
Zero monitoring: Out of thirty-six progress reports, eleven contained no information while projects were ongoing.
Ignored recommendations: Repeated calls by oversight officers to fix basic deficiencies went unanswered.
The result, in OIOS’s own words, was that the projects “did not adequately meet the needs of victims” and failed to achieve any sustainable outcome. The contrast could not be starker:
OIOS found systemic failure, absence of oversight, and no measurable impact.
The Trust Fund celebrated completion and called for more funding.
The Secretary-General reported success, progress, and implementation.
So which version of the truth did the Fifth Committee receive?
At stake is not only the credibility of the Trust Fund, financed by Member States such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway, Canada, Japan, and others, but also the integrity of the United Nations reporting system itself.
How can the Secretary-General speak of successful victim-assistance projects when his own internal audit reports describe them as failed, mismanaged, and without impact?
While the Secretary-General urges Member States to establish a sustainable funding model for the Trust Fund, the very projects financed by it could not sustain a single beneficiary.
The victims trained to bake without ovens and farm without land are not merely metaphors for bureaucratic incompetence, they are living proof of an accountability system that exists only on paper. Who will then tell the Member States that the UN’s own victims are still waiting for assistance and that the only thing the Organization managed to generate was another report?
A while ago, my colleagueLucas Mendos criticized the commentators who called UN reports “useless,” pointing out how people often confuse low download numbers with low relevance. He rightly noted that most UN reports are technical in nature, written for specialized audiences, and should never be judged by clicks.
But that argument assumes one thing: that the right people actually read them.
So why aren’t Member States reading these reports?
How is it that in the same United Nations, the Secretary-General can deliver a glowing account of success while his own internal oversight body is documenting complete failure?
How can he stand before the General Assembly and ask for a more “sustainable model of funding” when the very projects he cites have collapsed under his watch?
And what are the Member States and ACABQ delegates doing about it? Why are they even paid if they cannot monitor how their own assessed contributions are spent, or whether the projects they fund are implemented as reported?
And what about the victims of sexual exploitation and abuse: the women and children the Organization vowed to protect and whose dignity it promised to restore?
What kind of dignity is this, when their names appear in reports as “beneficiaries” of projects that never worked, that left them exactly where they began?
The Trust Fund was created to support the victims of exploitation. Instead, it exposes a system that exploits even their suffering to sustain its own image.
And to the Fifth Committee delegates: read the reports. No one else will.
NB:a copy of this article will be sent to the Permanent Missions to the United Nations of each Member State listed among the contributors to the Trust Fund — so they may see how their funding was used, and what their reports did not say.
For months, UNRWA staff, mostly Palestinian teachers, mostly women, have been unlawfully deprived of their salaries after having fled the brutal genocide in Gaza.
But today, after we obtained and verified the UNDSS communiqué, we publish proof that the United Nations itself encouraged UN Palestinian staff to leave Gaza to a third country.
On 12 October 2023, the USG UNDSS (Department of Safety and Security) issued a binding UN communique to all UN staff in Gaza:
“UNSMS organizations will support, to the extent feasible, locally recruited personnel, who hold relevant documentation, to travel to a third country.”
The following day, 13 October at 03:27 hrs, the Designated Official sent a message to local staff:
“All staff to move with their own transportation south of Wadi Gaza, move to friends or family if you can or continue to KYTC; take supplies with you for several days.”
The UNRWA staff obeyed. They fled under bombardment, paying thousands in “coordination fees” up to USD 45,000 to cross Rafah, and continued working remotely from Egypt.
And yet, for following these very instructions, UNRWA cut off their salaries.
This is an unlawful inversion of authority: one UN hand ordering evacuation, the other punishing compliance. A betrayal of staff, a breach of duty of care, and a stain on the Organization’s legitimacy.
Read my full open letter to the Secretary-General below
I invite colleagues, journalists, and all who stand for justice to read, share, and expose this truth and demand accountability from the Commissioner-General of UNRWA.
This picture is published with the explicit consent of Nadia, the widow of Ahmad, an UNRWA staff member killed by Israel on 29 May 2025 on Al-Tina Street in Khan Younis, in front of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation parcels of death.
Ahmad was no stranger to service to Palestinian refugees. For 19 years, he worked as a psychosocial support officer in UNRWA’s Education Department, walking alongside the children of Gaza through their trauma. When the war erupted on 7 October 2023, Ahmad and Nadia were forced to flee their home more than 19 times, moving from the north to the south, governorate to governorate, under bombardment. Yet every day, Ahmad continued to report to duty. He never stopped serving.
In May 2025, while UNRWA salaries were suspended until 2 June, Ahmad went to check on the humanitarian parcels being distributed. He stopped to speak with a US army officer about the impossible conditions his people faced. Moments later, as he walked away, an Israeli sniper’s bullet pierced his chest. He was killed instantly.
His death reached Nadia not through the Agency he had served for nearly two decades, but through a photograph posted anonymously on Facebook. This is how she discovered her husband had been reduced to a martyr without a name.
Nadia is left with four children, stripped not only of a husband and father but of the family’s only income. Ahmad’s monthly salary was $1,200, their livelihood. When she reported her husband’s death to UNRWA management and sought the compensation to which she was entitled, the Agency offered no support; instead, it immediately cut off Ahmed’s salary, thereby exacerbating the family’s already meager financial situation and deepening her suffering and that of her children. And UNRWA’s position to her was blunt: no family of a staff member killed since 7 October 2023 has received compensation.
Under the UN Malicious Acts Insurance Policy (MAIP), every UN staff member killed in an act of war is entitled to compensation, which for an UNRWA national staff is approximately $123,000. This is not discretionary. It is a right enshrined in the UN rules. Every UN organization pays annual premiums to enroll its international and national staff in this policy.
Every UN organization, except UNRWA for its Palestinian staff.
UNRWA International staff are covered.
UNRWA Palestinian staff are Not.
This is systemic discrimination, sustained knowingly and purposefully by the Commissioner-General. It is an unlawful exclusion of more than 550 Palestinian families from the protections guaranteed by the UN Charter itself.
In addition, Ahmad’s Provident Fund savings, likely between $40,000 and $60,000 remain frozen. These funds belong to him and to his family. Nothing prevents the Agency from releasing them or, at the very least, continuing to pay his salary against the balance of his own savings until proper compensation is processed. This is a basic fiduciary obligation.
The Commissioner-General, Lazzarini, holds the authority to establish exceptional rules in response to exceptional circumstances. There is no circumstance more exceptional than Palestine today, only yesterday formally acknowledged by the United Nations as a genocide. Yet this authority has not been exercised to protect the very staff who continue to serve under fire, or the families of those who have been killed.
Instead, Lazzarini chose to invoke “exceptional rules” to suspend the salaries of more than 500 Palestinian teachers who fled Gaza to Egypt in a desperate attempt to survive. He acted swiftly when it came to punishment, but stands idle when faced with the obligation to ensure dignity and justice for the families of the slain hiding behind vile bureaucratic walls. This selective application of authority reveals not only negligence but a grave breach of duty.
This is now a matter of the Commissioner-General Lazzarini’s willful breach of duty and abdication of his duty of care toward Palestinian staff, committed openly and brazenly in the midst of a genocide. Why is the Commissioner-General allowed to inflict more suffering on Palestinian staff than Israel itself?
Nadia gave me this picture to show the world what UNRWA will not say: Israel killed her husband, and the Organization he served abandoned her and her children to starve, under Lazzarini’s watch, while the Secretary-General looks away.
To speak for Nadia is to speak for the 550 families of UNRWA staff killed by Israel and betrayed by the Organization they served.
Open Letter To the Executive Directors of UN Women, UNICEF, and UNFPA
Nadine Kaddoura
Founder @CERTIORARIS and former UN Senior Staff
15 September 2025
To: Ms. Sima Bahous, Secretary-General of the United Nations
cc:
Deputy Secretary-General, Ms. Amina J. Mohammed
Ms. Catherine Russell, Executive Director, UNICEF
Ms. Diene Keita, Executive Director of UNFPA
Ms. Reem Alsalem UN Special Rapporteur, Violence Against Women and Girls
I am writing to alert you that 480 UNRWA women teachers have been unlawfully placed on special leave without pay after having fled under the bombs from Gaza to a safe haven outside the occupied palestinian territories, on their own.
In total, 584 staff have been affected, of which 480 are women.
480 women.
That means more than four out of every five staff punished by this measure are women. A shocking 82 per cent.
This level of disproportionate harm to women constitutes a glaring violation of women’s rights and requires immediate corrective measures and urgent redress, consistent with the mandates of your offices.
These women fled Gaza alone, with no support, under conditions of extreme hardship. Many had lost family members, seen their homes destroyed, and were left without access to basic healthcare or food to care for their children or themselves. Neither UNRWA nor any other agency offered them safe shelter, not even a tent.
Not even a tent.
With no protection, they had no choice but to seek safety and urgent medical care on their own.
They continued to work remotely from Egypt, fulfilling their duties despite everything. Yet the Commissioner-General decided unlawfully to place them on exceptional leave without pay for a full year.
The testimonies of these UNRWA women are unbearable. Some are now forced to clean homes in Egypt just to provide food to their children. Women in conflict and displacement, when stripped of income and social protection, face heightened risks of violence, including sexual violence and exploitation. Displacement, combined with economic insecurity, deepens their vulnerability. Women who cannot provide for their children are more easily coerced, more likely to be subjected to abuse in exchange for the bare necessities of survival. Refugee women denied access to jobs or financial services are left even more exposed, more susceptible to violence, abuse, and exploitation. Economic empowerment in such contexts is not simply about income. It is a tool of protection. The provision of salaries, support, and protection services is what now stands between these women and exploitation.
No explanation can soften what you will read next. I leave you to judge for yourself, in their own voices, below.
Testimony 1 – UNRWA Gaza Female Teacher
“After ten years of IVF, I finally had a baby but he was a child with special needs. When the bombing started, I ran with him to Egypt to keep him alive. My husband stayed behind to care for his parents. A few days later, they were all killed, my husband and his parents. Now it is just me and my baby. UNRWA cut my salary, and I cannot pay for kindergarten or for the care my child with special needs requires. I don’t know how I am supposed to manage.”
Testimony 2 – UNRWA Gaza Female Teacher
“My daughter was badly injured and had to go through more than seventeen operations. I brought her out of Gaza on a medical care option so she could be treated, but I had to leave my other children behind. They depend only on me and on my salary. Instead of helping me in this situation, UNRWA put me on unpaid leave for a whole year even though I kept working remotely with full dedication while caring for my daughter in hospital. How am I supposed to feed my other children in Gaza if I don’t even have my salary of 1,000 USD? What should I do? Tell me! What should I do?”
Testimony 3 – UNRWA Gaza Female Teacher
“I fled Gaza with my three children, running from the hell we were living through. When UNRWA cut my salary, I had no choice but to leave my children at home alone while I went to clean apartments for strangers just to bring them something to eat. How can I call this survival? What kind of life is this for me and for my children? Where is my dignity?”
Testimony 4 – UNRWA Gaza Female Teacher
“I left Gaza with my husband so he could receive cancer treatment. Six weeks later, he died. Now my children are still in Gaza, with no one to provide for them. They are living in tents, searching for food, suffering from malnutrition, and needing urgent care. And I have no salary to provide for them. Tell me, how am I supposed to keep them alive from here?”
In addition to the inherent right to protection and dignity, this decision directly contravenes United Nations General Assembly Resolution 64/290 (2010) on the right to education in emergencies. That resolution, grounded in international human rights and humanitarian law, explicitly recognizes education as lifesaving and fundamental during armed conflict. It affirms that education plays a critical role in preventing abuses against affected populations, including sexual violence, exploitation, trafficking, and the worst forms of child labour.
Further, the Incheon Declaration (2015), endorsed by UNESCO, UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR, UN Women, and UNFPA, established the global Education 2030 Agenda. Paragraph 25 clearly affirms that “education in emergency contexts is immediately protective, providing life-saving knowledge and skills and psychosocial support to those affected by crisis.”It also stresses that education equips children, youth, and adults with the tools to withstand and prevent disaster, conflict, and disease.
Women who once taught children in Gaza now find themselves silenced, cut off from their salaries, and forced into conditions of exploitation simply to feed their families.
I leave you with the image of Ritaj, a young Gazan student, sitting among the rubble with her calculator and notebooks. She went out of her building to find connection and to sit for her exams, despite being displaced and having lost her home. Even in destruction, she carried with her the tools of learning, the last anchor she had.
This picture, besides being a testament to this girl’s courageous determination, is also the clearest proof that education in emergencies is life-saving, it is protective, and it is dignity itself. To strip women teachers of their salaries in this context is to sever the very lifeline that allows children like Ritaj to hold on to hope.
I ask you, as women leading entities with clear mandates to protect women and safeguard their rights, including the right to education and the rights of children, to take immediate corrective action.
Under your mandates, you hold a direct responsibility to these Gazan women and their children. Failure to intervene and redress this situation would constitute not only a breach of that responsibility but also a denial of the protection your offices are obliged to uphold.
I urge you to exert all necessary pressure to rescind this unlawful decision and to restore the rights and entitlements of the UNRWA women affected by this unlawful decision.
In the past year, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini has made himself directly complicit in stripping Palestinian staff of their rights, protection, and dignity.
Here is the record:
🔴 1. At the start of the Gaza war, he ordered international staff to evacuate UNRWA facilities and abandoned the Palestinian staff with nothing but a two-word text: “Good luck.” That message exists. We have the proof.
🔴 2. UN rules guarantee national staff relocation within the duty station and 30 days of DSA. In Gaza, the safe haven was Rafah. He excluded them, denying protection. As a result, hundreds were killed.
🔴 3. UN rules entitle all staff to death/disability compensation in acts of war. Each family should have received ~$123,000. Lazzarini willingly excluded Palestinian staff while fully covering internationals. He then handed grieving families $300. Not just a deliberate act of degradation, but a total disregard for Palestinian staff rights under UN rules.
🔴 4. Over 550 UNRWA staff have been killed by Israel. Their provident fund savings (between $50k–$100k each) remain blocked by UNRWA. Lazzarini hides behind “legal impediments” while surviving families barely struggle to survive.
🔴 5. Lazzarini instructed the suspension of salaries of 650 education staff who fled Gaza after their homes were bombed and their families slaughtered. This means over 5,000 dependents cut off from their only lifeline.
A few days ago, after Israel ordered the displacement of over one million Palestinians from Gaza City, the UN Spokesperson, reporting on OCHA’s tracking admitted they had monitored the movement of about 10,000 people to the south.
The Spokesperson also said that for the vast majority, leaving was “simply not possible,” with transportation costs exceeding $1,000. Lazzarini does not get to decide the fate of UNRWA national staff. This money is not his. It is the hard-earned savings of staff who gave more than 20 years of their lives to the Agency. He has no right to hold his own staff hostage when those funds could mean the difference between staying trapped under the killing machine or escaping with their children and saving their lives.
And yes, many will come and attack, thinking that the Agency is bankrupt. That is simply not true, and they do not have the right information and that is part of the problem. Lazzarini and the Western-led management continue to hide the truth, and people believe what they say. This money sits in the savings of the Agency, built over more than 20 years, and it does not depend on donor or external funding. These are the life savings of Palestinian staff who gave decades of their lives in service.
No Commissioner-General has the right to steal them.
The problem is not UNRWA as an organization. The problem is a Western-led senior management, imposed and sustained through external political influence, that has become nothing less than an accomplice to Israel, advancing its strategy to dismantle the Agency and to strip Palestinian staff of their rights under international law.
The remedy is clear: UNRWA must be decolonized. Its governance must be returned to those it was created to serve, free from foreign control and political manipulation. Anything less perpetuates illegality, denies staff their rights, and turns the Agency into an instrument of oppression rather than protection. Decolonization is not optional. It is the only lawful path forward.
And one must ask: why are Arab senior officials not leading this Agency, while it remains in the hands of Western-led, U.S.-backed appointees?
What legitimacy can an Agency claim when its leadership is imposed from outside, serving foreign agendas instead of its own staff and the people of Palestine?
Answer that, before you speak of neutrality or reform. And to Lazzarini: stop evading your responsibilities. Do what is right, for once, by the very staff whose rights you have trampled.
Urgent Call for Action – Unlawful Withholding of Salaries from 625 UNRWA Palestinian Staff
“I am one of your UNRWA staff. I fled Gaza nine months pregnant, starving, my body breaking down from malnutrition and high blood pressure. Doctors warned me I might be cut open without anesthesia. I begged for help, sent my medical reports, and escaped in maternity clothes. The border closed behind me.
I borrowed money I did not have, just to pay the bribes they call coordination fees. I dragged my five children with me and left my husband behind. After the invasion of Rafah, he vanished. No voice, no trace. I am now alone with five children, the eldest only nine, the youngest barely one year old. Six months without pay. Six months begging, borrowing, breaking down. The bank wants its money. My children want their father. They want food. And I have nothing left to give. So tell me, what exactly are you waiting for? For me to burn myself alive in front of the world so you can finally see that your silence is sentencing me and my children to death?” — Testimony by Ola Ziada, English Second Language Teacher at UNRWA
“My house was destroyed. My mother, my wife, my four children all martyred. I alone was left breathing. I crawled from the north of Gaza to the south, running from death until I finally escaped the Strip. And what was my reward for surviving? My salary was cut. My lifeline taken. Tell me: what kind of justice is this? What kind of employer buries the dead in silence and punishes the survivor for daring to breathe?” — Testimony of an UNRWA Teacher in Gaza
“I gave UNRWA twenty years of my life as a teacher. And when I fled under the bombs with nothing, UNRWA decided to cut my salary.” — Testimony of an UNRWA Teacher in Gaza
Dear Mr. Secretary-General,
Six months ago, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, Mr. Philippe Lazzarini, chose to use his so-called “discretionary power” to punish 625 Palestinian staff members in the education sector. Six hundred and twenty-five teachers and educators, people who escaped from the Israeli war machine in Gaza, who fled after their homes were flattened, who buried their families, were cut off from their salaries as if their survival itself were a crime.
The 625 UNRWA staff are not faceless employees.
TheyAreTeachers: men and women who spent their lives in classrooms, carrying books and chalk, not weapons. They shaped entire generations of Palestinian refugees. If there is anything sacred in this world, it is the legacy of teaching. And yet, their reward for decades of service has been punishment and outright abandonment.
The former Commissioner-General, Pierre Krahenbühl, guided by his lawyers, invented Rule 105.3: an illegal clause that gave him the power to throw staff onto the street without pay whenever he wished. He created it but never dared to use it.
But Mr. Lazzarini did. He pulled it out of the drawer and wielded it as a weapon. With a single stroke, he turned a dormant clause into a blunt instrument of collective punishment against the very people who kept this agency alive.
Mr. Lazzarini already showed his true face when he ordered the evacuation of international staff at the outbreak of war, abandoning Palestinian staff to bombs, bullets, and starvation, without protection, without directives, without support. And when some of those staff somehow crawled out of Gaza alive, the Commissioner-General decided to impose on them further punishment by cutting their salaries outright, leaving them, their babies, their mothers, and their families to fend for themselves, while he continues to collect his lavish salary, presiding over their suffering with cold indifference.
We have not forgotten and we will not stop demanding accountability for Mr. Lazzarini’s refusal to pay death compensation under the Malicious Acts Insurance Policy (MAIP) for more than 550 UNRWA staff killed by Israel. That crime will not be buried, and we will return to it in a separate letter. In the meantime, the families of UNRWA’s martyred staff remain abandoned. Each of them has Provident Fund savings ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 of their own money yet not a single dollar has been released. Mr. Lazzarini hides behind invented “legal impediments” to rob the dead of their dignity and the living of their survival.
But there was apparently no “legal impediment” when he chose to dig up and weaponize Rule 105.3: a rule that trampled every humanitarian principle by depriving 625 Palestinian staff, and more than 5,000 of their family members, of their meager salaries. With one stroke of his pen, he condemned them to hunger, sickness, and despair, all while he shields himself behind empty legal jargon and continues to draw his own lavish pay.
Mr. Lazzarini goes from one TV news channel to another, preaching about Israel blocking aid while he himself is blocking and inflicting more suffering on his own staff. What moral authority does UNRWA claim when it starves its own staff, its teachers, of the most basic right to a salary?
While Gaza’s people are subjected to forced famine and genocide, Mr. Lazzarini adds to their torment, driving sickness and death into the lives of the very staff who carried this agency for decades.
Mr. Secretary-General,
You cannot wash your hands of this. The bloodless cruelty of this policy flows upwards, and your silence makes you complicit.
There is no excuse that justifies withholding the salaries of 625 Palestinian staff. You have the power, today, to reverse this unlawful and unjust decision.
Every day you allow this to continue, you stand shoulder to shoulder with Lazzarini in the deliberate starvation and humiliation of Palestinian teachers and their families. You are complicit in their suffering and you will bear responsibility for whatever further consequences befall them.
All titles, salaries, and privileges can be stripped away. What cannot be taken from you is the moral courage to act when it matters most, unless you choose not to use it.
“You only truly possess that which you cannot lose in a shipwreck.” — Abu Hamed al-Ghazali
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.
“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.
Mr. Guy Bernard Ryder, USG for Policy and Head of the UN80 Taskforce
cc: Mr. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations
Ms. Elinor Hammarskjold, USG for Office of Legal Affairs
Ms. Catherine Pollard, USG for Management
Mr. Courtenay Rattray, Chef de Cabinet
Mr. Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the Secretary-General
Subject: UN80 Early Separation Agreements – Legal Objections and Breach of the Principles of the Administration of Justice
Dear Mr. Ryder,
I write to register a formal objection to the UN80 Taskforce’s deployment of “early separation” agreements containing waiver clauses of sweeping breadth. Such provisions are inconsistent with binding jurisprudence, violate the Organization’s own regulatory framework, and are incompatible with the fundamental principles of the administration of justice as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.
As USGs and ASGs shield themselves behind UN80 to settle personal or political scores and effect separations under the guise of budget cuts and restructuring, the Office of Human Resources has advanced further. In a calculated effort to insulate the administration from future litigation and to avoid paying higher awards before the United Nations Dispute Tribunal (UNDT) and United Nations Appeals Tribunal (UNAT), OHR has initiated the use of “agreed terminations” and “early separation packages,” thereby inducing staff to separate voluntarily in lieu of seeking judicial review.
While ostensibly framed as a matter of choice, in practice these agreements operate as legal entrapment. Staff are invited, under the pretext of “budgetary necessity”, to sign away vested rights, including those relating to pending complaints and ongoing litigation.
It is manifest that the present targets are not incidental redundancies but include staff engaged in active disputes, harassment claims, or proceedings seeking accountability from senior officials. I am personnnaly aware of several ongoing cases.
The construct is deliberate: frame the separation as “voluntary” while embedding a waiver clause of such sweeping breadth that it extinguishes all present and future claims, thereby foreclosing judicial recourse and insulating the Organization from liability for misconduct, however egregious.
This provision appears verbatim in the UN80 agreement:
“I agree to withdraw all claims and appeals I may have pending against the Organization, and I will make no further claims or appeals against the Organization arising from my terms of appointment or separation from service with the Organization. In addition, I acknowledge that as at the date of this agreed termination, I have no further claims against the Organization;”
Binding Jurisprudence
Just a few days ago, on 11 August 2025, the United Nations Dispute Tribunal issued a landmark judgment, Melbiksis v. Secretary-General of the United Nations (UNDT/2025/053), the first of what is likely to be a series, in which UNHCR invoked a materially identical “no-sue” clause to bar receivability. The Tribunal held:
“Accordingly, the Tribunal finds that the Applicant’s three misconduct reports are not covered by the settlement agreement, including its no-sue clause. The Tribunal notes that if a no-sue clause of a settlement agreement was to be extended to cover all future misconduct reports of a releasor (in the present case, the Applicant) concerning a releasee (UNHCR), the risk would be that any rejection of a misconduct report regarding, even very serious, disciplinary offences could subsequently be shielded entirely from judicial review.
Creating such a culture of impunity defies the fundamental principle of access to justice and would not be in the best interest of the Organization.”
A culture of impunity. This is precisely what UN80 is institutionalizing.
The Organization’s pattern of abuse of such clauses was further confirmed earlier in 2023 in Shahwan v. Commissioner-General of UNRWA (UNRWA/DT/2023/018/Corr.01). UNRWA, in particular, is well known for its systemic and recurrent misuse of unlawful non-disclosure agreements and separation terms to suppress claims and shield officials from accountability. In that case, the Tribunal ruled:
“The agreed conditions at stake (sections 12 and 13 Separation Agreement) were therefore obviously violating the standards enshrined in the Standards of Conduct.
All individuals involved in the negotiations and consequent conclusion of the conditions in question should have been aware that the agreed conditions were not in compliance with the regulatory framework of UNRWA and the UN.
The Tribunal finds that there is a hierarchy among the obligations in question. The Tribunal finds that, in general, obligations deriving from the UN Charter, the Standards of Conduct and UNRWA Regulations and Rules prevail over obligations deriving from agreements concluded by the Agency with an individual staff member.
The Tribunal thus holds that the conditions in such an agreement that are not in compliance with the regulatory framework of UNRWA and UN values and principles cannot be enforced before and by this Tribunal.”
Applicable Legal Principle
The principle emerging from the above jurisprudence is unequivocal: no private agreement, however artfully drafted or coercively negotiated, can lawfully displace obligations arising under the Charter of the United Nations, the Standards of Conduct, or the Organization’s internal regulatory framework. Any clause purporting to do so is ultra vires, null, and unenforceable.
Signing such an agreement constitutes an express waiver of rights guaranteed under the Charter:
“We the peoples of the United Nations determined to … reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, … and to establish conditions under which justice … can be maintained.”
In light of binding jurisprudence confirming that such waiver clauses are ultra vires, null, and unenforceable, on what legal basis does the UN80 Taskforce , under your authority is promoting their use? What justification exists for requiring staff to execute instruments that, on their face, contravene established rulings of the United Nations Dispute Tribunal?
Why should staff repose confidence in the Secretary-General, the UN80 Taskforce, or the senior officials directing this initiative, when the clauses in question have already been judicially determined to be incompatible with the Organization’s regulatory framework and the fundamental principles of the administration of justice?
Demand for Immediate Remedial Action
I call upon you, the Secretary-General, and the Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs to:
• Immediately cease and desist from the use of such waiver clauses in all UN80 separation agreements, with effect from the date of this correspondence.
• Provide a formal, written undertaking that no staff member shall be required, induced, or coerced, directly or indirectly, to execute any instrument purporting to waive or extinguish rights which the United Nations Dispute Tribunal has expressly determined to be protected under the Organization’s regulatory framework.
• Initiate a comprehensive legal review of all ongoing separations being negotiated under such terms to determine their compliance with the Charter of the United Nations, the Standards of Conduct, and binding Tribunal jurisprudence, and to take corrective measures where non-compliance is established.
The administration of justice constitutes a binding legal obligation under the Charter and applicable jurisprudence; it is not subject to discretion or convenience. The continuation of this practice will further erode staff trust, compromise the integrity of the Organization’s internal justice system, and place the Secretary-General in breach of his duty to uphold and defend the Charter.
Respectfully,
Nadine Kaddoura Founder CERTIORARIS; and; former United Nations senior staff
