UN Women, Caving to Pressure, Condemns Hamas
News Story by Dawn Clancy | PassBlue
Bowing to weeks of mounting global pressure, UN Women released a statement “unequivocally” condemning “the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel” and calling “for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted.”
“We reiterate that all women, Israeli women, Palestinian women, as all others, are entitled to a life lived in safety and free from violence,” it said.
The statement, issued quietly on Friday night, came soon after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for the “numerous accounts of sexual violence” from the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 to be “vigorously investigated and prosecuted.”
Yet evidence of sexual violence by Hamas in its attack on Israel — which killed approximately 1,200 people — has not been confirmed beyond the publicly available proof the Israeli government has collected. Reporting on the issue by CNN, for example, has been debunked by Mondoweiss, a newsletter covering Palestine, Israel and the United States.
In his remarks, Guterres did not specifically call for a special investigation.
“Gender-based violence must be condemned,” Guterres said on Nov. 29. “Anytime. Anywhere.” He delivered his remarks at a ministerial-level Security Council meeting on Gaza and the implementation of Resolution 2712. The Malta-led text was the first to be approved by the Council — late last month — to focus on the need for a humanitarian pause to get more lifesaving aid into the Palestinian enclave.
A previous attempt by a Brazil-led resolution failed because of a veto by the U.S., which wanted the text to declare Hamas a terrorist organization, thereby possibly leading to sanctions by the Council, and to reiterate Israel’s right to self-defense. Yet the Malta text did neither, and the U.S. abstained in its vote.
Criticism of UN Women
Before UN Women’s statement, however, the agency — which is tasked with promoting gender equality worldwide — had been criticized for publishing and then deleting an Instagram post condemning Hamas, according to the Times of Israel.
The switch in UN Women’s messaging to condemning Hamas in a formal statement and echoing Guterres’s remarks to the Security Council suggests that the UN system — including UN Women — is being pressured to do so by powerful member states. These include the US, other major donors to the agency — Sweden is its top contributor — and certain civil society campaigns targeting UN Women for weeks.
The entity is led by Sima Bahous, a former ambassador of Jordan to the UN. She was appointed by Guterres to head UN Women in 2021.
Hamas’ Attack on Israel
Since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched its brutality on Israel from Gaza, taking more than 200 hostages in its killing spree, UN Women as an agency has been singled out in the UN system by Israel and by certain civil society organizations to declare Hamas a terrorist organization and condemn the group.
UN Women, the “global champion for gender equality,” as it says on its website, had been resisting the intensifying calls for direct condemnation of Hamas, according to sources familiar with the situation who asked for anonymity. Instead, Bahous made several public statements condemning the Hamas attacks on “civilians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories” and called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” in Gaza as well as the “unconditional release” of all Hamas hostages.
In remarks she made to the Security Council on Nov. 22, Bahous said “that every act of violence against women and girls, including sexual violence, is unequivocally condemned, and must be fully investigated with the utmost priority.”
Yet UN Women does not have the mandate to conduct such investigations. That role falls to the independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupation Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, which was established by the Human Rights Council in 2021. The commission announced on Nov. 29 that in addition to investigating war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas, it will focus on accusations of sexual violence committed by Hamas.
Request Sent to Israel to Investigate Criminal Allegations Unanswered
Navi Pillay, chair of the commission and a former UN high commissioner for human rights, told PassBlue that the commission is “cooperating closely” with UN Women and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. She said the commission has made “a call for submissions and sent yet another request to the Israeli authorities for access to investigate the allegations of crimes including sexual violence in Israel.” (An initial request was announced by Pillay on Oct. 24.)
A possible challenge for the commission, though, may be getting Israel to cooperate with a probe.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, quickly responded on X to the commission’s announcement, tweeting: “Israel has zero trust” in the “antisemitic Commission of Inquiry.”
He added, “Israel will not cooperate in any way with such a discriminatory and antisemitic body.”
When asked in a recent CNN interview why UN Women had resisted calls to label Hamas a terrorist organization, Sarah Hendricks, the agency’s deputy executive director, said that it wants “impartial, independent investigations into any serious allegations of gender-based or sexual violence” before making any decisions.
“I’m sorry, don’t give me that BS,” said Kayleigh McEnany, the Fox News co-host and a former White House press secretary in the Trump administration, to Hendricks’ remarks.
“What about when Russia invaded Ukraine? You [UN Women] were able to say rape, usually gang rape, sexual torture, nudity and other forms of abuse,” McEnany went on. And “you didn’t need an independent investigation. You only needed it when it was Jewish women being raped.”
U.S. Congress Calls for UN Women to Condemn Hamas
Recently, a bipartisan group of U.S. Congress members sent a letter to Bahous, urging UN Women “to publicly condemn Hamas,” who, they said, targeted Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 and aided “the destruction of the one and only Jewish State.”
“UN Women cannot expect to be viewed as an honest advocate for women’s rights if it continues to ignore Israeli women and women of other nationalities brutalized by Hamas terrorists on October 7,” it said.
Since the attack, the letter said, “Israeli authorities have publicly documented instances of sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women, including gang rape, genital mutilation, and necrophilia.” However, due to the volume of murdered Israelis and staff shortages, Israeli forensic teams, it added, “are limited in their ability to “systematically collect physical evidence of rape and sexual violence.”
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Calls for UN Women to Condemn Hamas
The loudest calls for UN Women to condemn Hamas have come from Erdan himself, who, in the same Security Council meeting on Nov. 22 that Bahous participated in, he accused her, as she sat across from him at the horseshoe-shaped table, of “intentionally” refusing to “thoroughly” brief the Council on the “barbaric acts” of rape and torture “perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli women and girls.” Erdan referred to all omissions of Hamas crimes as proof of a “burning hatred for Israel.”
Erdan has also lashed out on X, accusing UN Women of not caring about “raped, mutilated, tortured, or murdered Israeli women” and that it “has lost every shred of moral credibility and has forfeited its right to exist.”
After UN Women’s Dec. 1 message hit social media, Erdan tweeted: “It took 2 months (!) for UNWOMEN to remember to loosely condemn Hamas’ sexual violence on October 7th. In every other massacre in which such heinous sexual crimes were committed, UNWOMEN issued an immediate and harsh condemnation.”
He added, “This so-called condemnation is yet another moral stain on the UN and its organizations.”
Although Erdan said that UN Women issued an “immediate and harsh condemnation” after other instances of massacres in the world, PassBlue found no evidence of this language. UN Women, for example, never condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but it did call for “acts of sexual violence” to be investigated, just as it did regarding the allegations against Hamas.
Criticism for Bahous, Head of UN Women
In a statement released on Feb. 27, 2022, five days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Bahous expressed “grave concern” about the escalation in violence, noted how the violence puts “women and girls in particular at increased risk of sexual and gender-based violence” and reiterated the UN secretary-general’s call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.
“UN Women does not have too many friends, actually,” said Hibaaq Osman, a former colleague of Bahous and the founder of Karama, a nongovernmental organization. Based in Cairo, its mission is “to end all types of violence against women in the Arab region and South Sudan” and to ensure that all women can “participate fully in the decision-making processes that affect them.”
“UN Women is the entity that basically spoke for all of us [women], and, you know, put a woman front and center and many people of course didn’t like that,” Osman said in an interview with PassBlue by phone on Nov. 29. “So they’re coming out of nowhere to basically . . . reduce it to total nothing.”
She added: “But I tell you, honest to God, I think there’s a lot of racism that’s going on against Sima because she’s an Arab woman and she’s a woman of color. You know, and it’s reprehensible and destructive.”
UN Women Accused of Ignoring Israeli Women
Last week, Stéphane Dujarric, the UN spokesperson, was asked at a press briefing about Guterres response to Erdan’s criticisms. Dujarric replied, “We’re not interested in getting into a tit-for-tat with the ambassador or any ambassador.”
In a follow-up, another reporter asked Dujarric if the UN felt pressured by Israel to use specific language when making statements about the war in Gaza. Dujarric said: “The Secretary-General is confident and at ease with the terminology that he’s using, which is a terminology that he chooses to use.”
Other high-level Israeli officials, including Ambassador Amir Weissbrod, Israel’s deputy director general for UN and international organizations division, have chimed in on X about UN Women. In a recent post, he referred to it as “systematically” ignoring Israeli women and called for Bahous to resign.
In Weissbrod’s comment section on X, one follower described Bahous as “being full of crap.” Another called her “unscrupulous”; and another ominously wrote, “We will find ways to remove her,” without providing details.
PassBlue asked UN Women spokespeople by email whether Bahous has received death threats, but they did not respond.
Grassroots Campaigns Accuse UN Women of Bias
Beyond the halls of UN headquarters, global grassroots campaigns such as #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew — a group highly critical of UN Women’s “one-sided” response to the Oct. 7 attacks — was established, according to its website, to “be the voice of all Israeli women who were brutally raped, abused, burned, beheaded and murdered,” by Hamas and ignored by UN Women.
“We targeted UN Women as a sub-organization of the UN,” Noa Matz, the campaign’s strategist and advocate, said in a recent interview with i24, an Israeli news channel.
“As an organization that is globally protesting and defending women’s rights all over the world, you would expect they [UN Women] would support Israeli women that were victims of Hamas, as they do for the women in Gaza.”
“Unfortunately, this is not the case,” Matz said.
“I don’t expect Hamas terrorists, Hamas animals” to obey international law, she added. “But I do expect UN Women to take a stand when women are being vandalized.”
#MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew Project
In a LinkedIn post, Matz described the #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew project as “making” UN Women “release a statement condemning Hamas’ human rights violations, violence against women and girls, rape and sexual assault.”
The group’s pressure campaign has included an online petition, which on X has attracted ample support from Israeli embassies as well as the Israeli government’s foreign ministry. More recently, the group rented brightly lit video billboards in Times Square, labeling UN Women’s silence as “UNJustified, UNbelievable and UNforgivable.”
On Instagram, the #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew initiative has also criticized UN Women’s 16 days of activism against gender-based violence — an international campaign that began on Nov. 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and ends on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day. The initiative — promoted in orange colors across the world — is advertised on social media platforms using the hashtag #noexcuse for gender-based violence.
“The UN Women organization is calling all women to unite against any violence against all women and girls,” an Instagram post reads. “Unless, of course, you’re a Jew.”
