World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is stoking a “disinformation campaign” that benefits Hamas, a senior Republican lawmaker argued amid a general critique of the United Nations posture toward Israel.
“Dr. Tedros has not, in any way, shape, or form, retracted his false statements,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) said Wednesday. “Nothing of the sort. [He] just goes on to the next disinformation campaign.”
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Smith denounced Tedros during a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing focused on anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, a panel discussion devoted chiefly to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Yet Tedros, a lightning rod during the pandemic for his early amplification of Chinese Communist claims that downplayed the danger of the novel coronavirus, drew fire once more from lawmakers and expert witnesses who accused him of misleading the public.
“He got his job by way of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping,” Smith said. “He was their candidate, and we saw that there was a great deal of disinformation if not outright lying when COVID broke out, as he did the work of the dictatorship in putting out a false narrative. So I am no great fan at all.”
Smith’s criticism was spurred by a broadside against Tedros from one of the expert witnesses on the panel.
“Since Oct. 7, the vast majority of statements by the WHO and its director have targeted Israel, expressly or by implication,” UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer testified. “Hamas is seldom mentioned. The same is true regarding statements by numerous other U.N. humanitarian agencies such as OCHA, WFP, UNDP, UNHCR, and of course UNRWA.”
Neuer anchored his criticism most specifically in Tedros’s haste in “condemn[ing] the attack on Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip” in mid-October. That strike was initially blamed on Israeli forces before strong pushback from Israeli and U.S. intelligence. In a subsequent press appearance, Tedros acknowledged that “there can be no justification for Hamas’s horrific attacks on Israel” and called for Hamas to release the hostages seized on Oct. 7. He also demanded an immediate “pause, and ideally an end to the conflict” while implying that Israel has committed war crimes.
“So far, WHO has verified 237 attacks on healthcare, including 218 in the occupied Palestinian territory and 19 in Israel," he said. “Attacks on healthcare are a violation of international humanitarian law. Fourteen out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are nonfunctional. However, functionality is affected by lack of food and clean water and the lack of fuel to power generators.”
President Joe Biden has attributed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital incident to Palestinian terrorists, citing “data I was shown by my Defense Department,” after Israeli officials said that a rocket launched from Gaza malfunctioned and landed at the hospital complex. Private-sector analysts have not been able to determine the cause of the blast, but U.S. officials have endorsed Israel’s claim that Hamas embeds military assets within civilian infrastructure in order to use human shields, which is a war crime.
“Dr. Tedros has posted numerous statements falsely implying that Israel targets hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” Neuer said. “The WHO director fails to tell the truth that Israel’s military tries very hard to avoid harming civilians, while Hamas’s strategy is to embed itself next to hospitals, homes, mosques, and schools in order to use Gaza civilians as human shields.”
Neuer suggested Tedros is emblematic of the United Nations system writ large, as he argued that U.N. rhetoric in criticism of Hamas has lacked “the vigor and prominence and energy” that they direct at Israel. And Smith sought to buttress that line of argument by putting a spotlight on a U.N. special rapporteur who argued that “in international law, self-defense is a term of art,” with a meaning that does not cover Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
“Use of force in [self-defense] is permissible solely to repel an armed attack by another State,” Francesca Albanese wrote on social media last week. “Threats from armed groups from within [occupied] territory give state the RIGHT TO PROTECT ITSELF, but not to wage war against the state from which the armed group emanates.”
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Smith judged that a “very, very horrible statement which she has made," punctuating his earlier rebuke of Tedros and other U.N. officials.
"These people need to be held to account when they make statements," the congressman said. "And for him to smear Israel and not retract it and, frankly, offer a fulsome apology, again, goes to his integrity."