The United Nation's International Children's Fund is spearheading a campaign to include the Israel Defense Forces on a U.N. blacklist of "grave violators of children's rights," that includes terrorist groups like the Islamic State group and Boko Haram, this according to a new report by the NGO Monitor watchdog group.
The report, which according to Fox News, was presented to senior U.N. officials in recent weeks, illustrates how a working group of UNICEF, composed mainly of radical organizations involved in the campaign to delegitimize Israel, play a central role in blacklist efforts and even receive funding from UNICEF as well as a number of governments that sponsor the foundation.
The NGO Monitor report further shows how UNICEF opted to ignore violations of children's rights by Palestinian organizations in the Gaza Strip, when it admitted "the working group was not in a position to document cases of child recruitment and use of children in armed conflict owing to a number of factors, including security and protection risks related to collecting comprehensive and detailed information."
The anti-Israel organizations behind the UNICEF working group have in recent years published false and misleading reports on the IDF's arrest and purported abuse of Palestinian minors involved in attacks which were later entered into a UNICEF database, lending them legitimacy.
A number of these organizations, including the Defense for Children International- Palestine, have ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has been recognized as a terrorist organization by Israel, Canada, the EU and the U.S.
In response to a query from NGO Monitor, UNICEF Palestine did not deny that the organization had ties to terrorist groups.
"UNICEF has a clear policy that it does not fund … organizations which are listed as terrorist organizations by the United Nations."
Among those organizations excluded from the world body's terrorist list are Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Other organizations involved in efforts to include the IDF in the U.N. blacklist actively promote the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Through its Ecumenical Accompaniment Program, the World Council of Churches has been known to send BDS activists to Israel on tourist visas to collect data for the UNICEF database.
According to an executive summary of the NGO Monitor report, "This political agenda is a primary facet of UNICEF's activities relating to Israel, completely inconsistent with its mandate of 'child protection" and from its guidelines for neutrality and impartiality.'" The summary further states that UNICEF's reporting on Israel is "qualitatively different and more extreme than its reporting on other Middle East countries."
In a statement to Fox News, a UNICEF spokesperson said, "The monitoring and reporting process is led by a working group, which brings together U.N. agencies and international, Israeli and Palestinian NGOs. These organizations are selected based on their ability to regularly provide accurate, reliable, impartial and objective data on children affected by armed conflict."
The spokesperson said that UNICEF "follows a stringent verification process whereby data collected and shared by members is triangulated" and that "information which is judged inaccurate or biased is not accepted."
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