This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Casey Babb, October 31, 2025
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) last week announced yet another non-binding advisory opinion on Israel’s legal obligations to allow the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to operate in the “Occupied Palestinian Territory” (that is, Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem). Israel dismissed the opinion, highlighting the repeated political manipulation of the advisory process and the UN’s continuing failure to recognize the terrorist infiltration of UNRWA. Israel continues to allow and facilitate huge quantities of aid into Gaza — and was not found to have broken its obligations. This is what matters, not UN politicking.
The United Nations General Assembly is chaotic at the best of times, but in December of last year, it reached a new low — showing its true colours as an organization obsessed with vilifying Israel. Country representatives chastised Israel’s then ongoing war against Hamas, expressing opposition to Israel banning UNRWA operations in its jurisdiction. To the UN, it didn’t matter that at least nine (in the UN’s count) of the agency’s employees participated in the horrendous October 7 attacks against Israel. Nor did it matter that UNRWA continued to employ hundreds of Hamas members who used UNRWA facilities to shield their terror activities. If only that were the end of it.
The assembly, which has long been vehemently biased against Israel, also requested an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding Israel’s obligations concerning the UN’s presence and activities in the Palestinian territories. Ten months later, this non-binding advisory opinion was returned last week by the ICJ, and the court opined, without any substantiation, “that the information before it is not sufficient to establish UNRWA’s lack of neutrality” and that Israel is under an obligation to work with UNRWA.
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Casey Babb is Director of The Promised Land program at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an international fellow with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, and an advisor to Secure Canada, and Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism, in Toronto.
