Chris Gunness, Former UNRWA Spokesman and Palestinian Groupie

Chris Gunness, the long-time spokesman for UNRWA, and for years a devoted Palestinian groupie, who left his well-paid position in 2018 with a very handsome retirement package, has been in the news this Christmas because of a nasty little song, a supposed “Christmas parody” (all in good fun, we are asked to believe), with the details here.

Former United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) spokesperson Chris Gunness launched a bizarre Twitter rant this week against Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Instead of peace on earth and goodwill toward men, Gunness unleashed scathing attacks on Israel for Christmas with parodies of a famous holiday songs and poems.

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In a post directed at Netanyahu, Gunness referred to the recent news that the International Criminal Court is considering investigating Israel for war crimes:

To Mr Netanyahu / You better watch out, you better not cry / You better not pout, I’m telling you why / The ICC is coming to town. / They know you’ve done some war crimes / They know you you’ve been corrupt / They know you’ve sanctioned settlements / You are absolutely f—d-

Gunness is supposed to have been a neutral civil servant, a dutiful functionary of UNRWA. If anyone ever believed that about him, then the bizarre, unfunny, tasteless and coarse “parody” of a Christmas song that he just offered up should disabuse him. Gunness has always been a pious fraud, a virulent anti-Israel apparatchik who worked with other Palestinian groupies and enablers at UNRWA. During his time as chief spokesman, UNRWA was already mired in scandals of every sort — nepotism, sexual harassment, financial finagling, appropriation of UNRWA funds for personal use, abuse of authority, and much more. The full dimensions of the scandal, which resulted in a raft of high-level resignations, including that of Pierre Krähenbühl, the head of UNRWA, are still being examined. The scandal came to light only after Gunness had left, but he had still been  working for UNWRA when the scandalous behavior of his colleagues was in full swing. We still do not know whether Chris Gunness was involved in any of this behavior, or merely flourished in such a decadent and grasping atmosphere. Even though he’s now retired, his years working for UNRWA  deserve to be investigated.

In a subsequently deleted post, Gunness — having produced his Christmas squib about Netanyahu — also made fun of Palestinian “collaborators” who were brutally executed by Hamas:

Twas the night before Christmas, / when all across The Strip / Not a Qasam Rocket crackled / under Israel’s tight grip / Collaborators twitched as they hung in the air / On the lamp posts that glistened in Palestine Square.

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How witty, to make fun of those twitching bodies hanging from lampposts.

Gunness for years has chosen to live with his husband not among his beloved Palestinians, but in Tel Aviv. Had he lived in Gaza or the Palestinian-ruled parts of the West Bank, he might well have been killed. In tolerant Tel Aviv, of course, he had no such worries. After all, it is in Tel Aviv that a Gay Pride Parade is held every year. Meanwhile, in Gaza and the West Bank, as in a number of Muslim countries, homosexuals have been executed for the crime of gay sex. Yet it is Tel Aviv, where he lives with his partner land no one bothers them, that Gunness professes to find morally deficient as part of the cruel colonial-settler state of Israe, while the Palestinians, who have been known to execute homosexuals like himself, receive all his sympathy.

In Chris Gunness’s case, the greatest scandal  – whatever other irregularities, sexual or financial peccadilloes, he may have been guilty of — are the lies he has repeatedly told about Israel. During the 2014 Gaza War, for example, he insisted that the IDF had prevented civilians from leaving certain buildings that were then struck by the IDF. His report was denounced by the IDF as “a flat-out complete and total lie.”

In 2014, during the Gaza War, Israel made repeated efforts, over two days, to warn civilians to stay well away from a school in Beit Hanoun from which Hamas was shooting missiles into Israel. Finally, having given plenty of warning for civilians to leave, Israel struck the school. Some civilians were casualties; apparently Hamas had kept them there as human hostages, but the IDF knew nothing of their presence. That did not prevent Chris Gunness from denouncing Israel, and to lie. The story is here. “Over the course of the day UNRWA tried 2 coodinate [sic] with the Israeli Army a window for civilians 2 leave & it was never granted,” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness tweeted, following the strike.

However, in an unusual move, multiple IDF sources rejected UNRWA’s claims and characterized them as outright falsehoods when reached by the Washington Free Beacon.

“For two days we were trying to move people out of that school in particular and the Beit Hanoun area in general,” said an IDF official who was involved in the interactions between the IDF, UNRWA, and International Red Cross (ICRC) leading up to the incident.

The official continued: “This morning we sought a cease-fire in the area and a humanitarian evacuation of civilians, but Hamas refused—because they wanted to keep civilians in the area to protect their fighters who were firing on the IDF,” the source said. The claim by Gunness and UNRWA that the IDF did not respond to their request to evacuate civilians, the source said, is “a flat-out complete and total lie.”

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An official IDF statement released to the Free Beacon states that “the IDF authorized a humanitarian time window for evacuation between 10:00-14:00 IDT earlier today. Hamas prevented the civilians from leaving it and once again used their infrastructure and international symbols as human shields. In the course of the afternoon, several rockets launched by Hamas from within the Gaza Strip landed in the Beit Hanoun area.”

In other words, some of the rockets that landed at the school at Beit Hanoun came not from the IDF, but from Hamas itself, firing from deeper inside Gaza and, falling short of its target in Israel, hit the school by mistake.

“From initial inquiries done about the incident, during the intense fighting in the area, militants opened fire at IDF soldiers from the school area,” the statement says. “In order to eliminate the threat posed to their lives, they responded with fire toward the origins of the shooting.”

“The UNRWA claims that Israel prevented the safe evacuation of the school in Beit Hanoun are unfounded,” the statement concludes.

The IDF reiterated that it had given fair warning to any civilians that might still be in or near the school. There was no attempt by Israel to prevent their safe evacuation, as Chris Gunness said. Quite the reverse: the IDF did everything it could to encourage that evacuation. The claim by Gunness that the IDF did not respond to their request to evacuate civilians was “a flat out complete and total lie.”

Gunness has also been attacked not only by the IDF, but by victims of Palestinian terrorism, for his repeated attempts to blacken Israel’s name and defend the terrorists.

Although he’s no longer a representative of the international body, his comments when he was an UNRWA official were highly irregular for a former official who was supposed to be a neutral arbiter in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

His tweets have sparked outrage on the social media platform.

Author Kay Wilson, for example, the survivor of a 2010 Palestinian terrorist attack, condemned Gunness not only for his tweets but for his entire tenure at UNRWA, an organization now facing serious corruption allegations, posting on Twitter:

“Said @ChrisGunness who enabled terrorists to fire rockets on Israeli women, men and children by sheltering them in buildings, left his #UNWRA in squalor, helped himself to a massive salary & shameless faked tears on TV. If there’s an investigation, let’s hope he’s first.”

Wilson is referring to the fact that Gunness never objected to Hamas’s practice of firing on Israel from UNRWA schools. What made him angry was not Hamas using civilian structures as bases, but Israel’s attempts to defend itself by firing back at those dual-use bases.

While Israel tried to do everything to warn civilians away from the Beit Hanoun school, Hamas tried just as hard to keep them in place, for propaganda purposes hoping they would be among the casualties. It should also be noted that some of the rockets that landed at the school came not from the IDF, but had been fired by Hamas deeper inside Gaza, at Israel, but fell short of their intended target.

Then there are the repeated denials by Chris Gunness about Palestinian classroom incitements. The investigative journalist David Bedein produced a video: “The UNRWA Road to Terror: Palestinian Classroom Incitement,” showing young men who attend UNRWA schools voicing support for terrorism against Jews.

One UNRWA student named Arafat, from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, says in the video, “They teach us in school that Jews are fickle, bad people. I am ready to stab a Jew, and drive [a car] over them.”

Another UNRWA student from Kalandia says, “Stabbing and running over Jews brings dignity to the Palestinians. I’m going to run them over and stab them with knives.”

Nur Taha, an UNRWA student in Kalandia, commented, “With Allah’s help, I will fight for ISIS, the Islamic State.”

Gunness responded: “As with many of Bedein’s previous films, in this latest he takes non-UNRWA facilities and falsely claims they belong to UNRWA. He shows teachers claiming they are from UNRWA when in fact they are not, and he plays the same tricks with students, often misrepresenting what they say in slanted translations.”…

Wherever schools were identified in the video as UNRWA schools, they were in fact UNRWA Schools. There were no “false claims” made by David Bedein. The teachers who said they taught in those UNRWA schools did indeed do so, and Gunness was unable to name a single teacher who was misidentified as working for UNRWA. Most absurd of all, Gunness claims that the students were misrepresented in what they said because of “slanted translations,” but neither Gunness, nor anyone else from UNRWA, has been able to produce a single example of a translation from the Arabic that was not accurate.

While UNRWA’s biggest shots are still being investigated for every sort of scandalous personal behavior – financial and sexual – let’s hope investigators will also look into the case of Chris Gunness, and his long series of malevolent misrepresentations of the IDF’s behavior. He can’t be fired, or made to resign, because he already retired in 2018, when the getting was good. But a report on Chris Gunness, and how he performed his duties, would be one more way to clean out the Augean stables at UNRWA. You may be gone, Chris Gunness, but don’t worry – you are not forgotten.