UNRWA says it has completed 41 of 50 recommended reforms. The watchdog’s September 14 report puts the number at no more than 13.
The disagreement turns on what qualifies as completion. A proposal can describe a solution. A pilot can test one. Neither necessarily establishes that the promised safeguards are operating.
What happened after the paperwork?
According to UN Watch, UNRWA classified some recommendations as complete after drafting proposals or developing pilot projects, even though implementation remained pending.
One recommendation was reportedly closed after the agency determined it could not be implemented.
That leaves donors with a question the completion figure alone cannot answer: which changes are actually in place?
The distinction matters because neutrality safeguards are supposed to affect conduct. Their value depends on what happens after a policy is adopted, including whether breaches are detected and addressed.
A screening list with consequential omissions
Staff screening is another focus of the assessment.
UN Watch says UNRWA’s principal sanctions checks rely on a UN Security Council list that includes neither Hamas nor Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Checking that list therefore does not, by itself, establish whether an employee belongs to either organization.
The concern is not simply whether a screening procedure exists. It is whether the procedure can identify the affiliations at the center of the controversy.
The personnel figures require careful reading
The report cites a June referral by USAID’s inspector general involving 108 current or former UNRWA personnel for possible suspension or debarment over alleged links to October 7 or Hamas’s military wing.
UNRWA subsequently dismissed 70 Gaza employees following a security assessment. The agency maintained that those dismissals did not validate the allegations against them.
These are different actions, and the figures should not be added together or treated as interchangeable. A referral is not a conviction. Nor does dismissal alone prove the underlying allegation.
For UN Watch, however, the cases raise a further question about the effectiveness of the agency’s safeguards: what were its internal checks identifying before outside scrutiny intervened?
Educational reform has to reach the classroom
The watchdog also challenges UNRWA’s claims of educational reform, citing continuing reports of antisemitism and glorification of terrorism in the Palestinian Authority curriculum used in its schools.
Here, too, the argument concerns the distance between administrative activity and results.
A review process may be useful. So may teacher training. But evaluating those measures requires examining the material children encounter and whether objectionable content has actually been addressed.
UN Watch argues that procedural changes do not, on their own, settle that question.
What donors are being asked to verify
The watchdog is urging donor governments to demand independent evidence before accepting UNRWA’s completion figures.
That would shift scrutiny from how many recommendations have been closed to whether the resulting safeguards work: how staff are screened, what pupils are taught and how neutrality violations are handled.
The dispute between 41 and 13 is therefore more than a competing tally. It concerns what donors are being asked to accept as evidence.
A completed policy is something an agency can produce. A functioning safeguard is something it must demonstrate.
