UNRWA deceives donors over Colonna reform compliance, report finds

In 2025, the largest three donors to UNRWA were the EU with almost $100 million, Germany with $60 million and the UK with $27 million.

By JNS

As the U.N. Relief and Works Agency seeks to restore its funding slashed in the aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, a report published on Thursday concludes that UNRWA has failed to implement the major reforms recommended in the 2024 Colonna Report.

“UNRWA has failed to meaningfully implement many of the Colonna Report’s key recommendations—particularly those addressing educational neutrality, hate speech, and antisemitism—despite repeatedly reporting substantial progress,” the Israeli-based nonprofit Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) said in a statement.

The Colonna Report is a review of the U.N. relief agency led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, commissioned by the U.N. secretary-general, following the involvement of UNRWA staff in the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel’s northwestern Negev.

The report from 2024 issued 50 recommendations, and IMPACT-se was one of the only NGOs invited to testify before Colonna and her committee.

This week, at the UNRWA Pledging Conference at U.N. Headquarters in New York, leading donor governments cited the agency’s supposed implementation of the Colonna recommendations as justification for continued financial support and confidence in the agency, according to IMPACT-se.

In 2025, the largest three donors to UNRWA were the EU with almost $100 million, Germany with $60 million and the UK with $27 million.

Germany and Britain in particular included specific amounts for the implementation of Colonna’s recommendations, IMPACT-se said.

However, IMPACT-se’s report documents how UNRWA unilaterally revised its reporting methodology, lowering the required threshold for recommendations to be classified as “completed,” leading to a substantially accelerated rate of implementation.

Moreover, UNRWA continued to request international funding for recommendations it says it has already completed.

“The international community committed itself to ensuring that the failures identified by the Colonna Report would be addressed through meaningful institutional reform,” Marcus Sheff, the CEO of IMPACT-se, said in a statement.

“Two years later, our analysis demonstrates that UNRWA has chosen token compliance instead of delivering the substantive changes the review demanded. At a time when many governments continue to fund the agency on the basis of its reported implementation of the Colonna recommendations, the gap between UNRWA’s claims and actual verifiable reform should be a red flag for every donor,” he added.

For example, recommendation 35 of the Colonna Report requires UNRWA to cease using educational materials containing incitement to violence and antisemitic content.

IMPACT-se has nevertheless found continued use of such materials in UNRWA classrooms, including textbooks glorifying violence and armed struggle.

Among these are an eighth-grade Arabic language textbook, teaching 14-year-olds reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary through a story that lionizes suicide bombers wearing “explosive belts”; praises Palestinians’ daggers slashing Israelis’ throats; and explicitly calls students “to not forget” the image of burned Israelis—accompanied by an illustration of an Israeli soldier shot dead by a Palestinian gunman, reinforcing the lesson’s glorification of lethal violence.