In the wake of Hamas’s brutal attack against Israel, WPHF announced it would mobilize $10 million to support Palestinian women.
During U.N. Women’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, National Review will feature 15 women’s organizations that have either supported Hamas’s violence against Israeli women or remained silent on it.
The Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) is a financing arm of the United Nations that funds local women’s organizations worldwide. With an emphasis on preventing conflict and ending gender-based violence, WPHF has supported Palestinians across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for years.
“The impact of five decades of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem, and the over a decade long blockade of Gaza have thwarted state-building and development efforts and left more than 2.45 million Palestinians in dire need of humanitarian assistance,” WPHF says on its website. “Despite the horrendous impacts of the occupation on all Palestinians, women have been among the most disadvantaged populations by the current situation, as they face multiple layers of discrimination and vulnerability.”
In the wake of Hamas’s brutal attack against Israel, WPHF announced it would mobilize $10 million to support Palestinian women. The organization has made no similar appeals to help the women and children in Israel who were brutalized on October 7.
After “Palestinian armed groups in Gaza launched a violent attack on Israel,” the group said in October,
Israeli forces retaliated with an unprecedented level of air strikes on Gaza, killing over 8,805 Palestinians as of 1 November — over two-thirds of whom are women and children — and forcing more than 1.4 million people to flee . . . Around 1,400 civilian Israeli and foreign nationals have also been killed since 7 October, according to Israeli authorities.
Humanitarian aid for “Palestinian women first-responders and local civil society actors” is necessary, the organization said in an emergency funding appeal.
The grant money will go to “pre-identified local women’s organizations” in Gaza that have been selected by U.N. Women, the U.N.’s leading women’s advocacy branch that until last week had not acknowledged that Hamas disproportionately targeted Israeli women. The organization still has not condemned Hamas terrorism — the U.N. itself does not recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization, even though many of its member states do. Reports of sexual violence against Israeli women and children are “alarming,” U.N. Women said on Friday, but they warrant more “investigation.”
A number of countries contribute to WPHF: Germany, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Norway, and the United States. In 2023, the U.S. Agency for International Development earmarked $10 million for WPHF programs, and praised the organization for its support of “women-led organizations, organizations of persons with disabilities and LGBTQI+-led organizations.”
Private entities contribute, as well: Women Have Wings, the Clementine Fund, Ansara Family Fund, and The Denver Foundation were listed as WPHF top donors in 2022.
“Women Have Wings” is a program of the Soros-backed Tides Foundation. Soros funds other anti-Israel groups through his philanthropy, Open Society Foundations, including IfNotNow and Jewish Voices for Peace, which infiltrated the U.S. Capitol to protest in support of a cease-fire. The Tides Center also sponsors Arab Resource and Organizing Center, which led Washington state’s “Block the Boat” campaign to block a U.S. military ship from delivering aid to Israel. Tides also funds in part the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Hamas-affiliated anti-Israel group.
In 2021, Women Have Wings gave its hallmark award to Palestinian Manar Qaraqe (al-Manar), who founded the al-Manar Society for Culture and Creativity, which is listed as a WPHF partner organization. The center said on social media this month that it rejects “what the Israeli occupation is committing of crimes [sic] against the children of our people.” On October 18, the center said that it would close temporarily “in response to the Zionist aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip . . . in mourning the souls of our heroic martyrs.”
In its 2022 annual report, the WPHF listed its Palestinian partner organizations. One was the Roles For Social Change Association (ADWAR). In a letter, ADWAR recently urged women worldwide to heed a call from Palestinians: “Ending #GazaGenocide is a Feminist issue.”
“Since October 7, apartheid Israel has murdered over 9,500 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 2,500 women and close to 4,000 children,” the letter read. “Israel is carrying out what UN experts, 880 international scholars, including genocide experts, a former senior UN official, and an increasing number of states have described as an unfolding genocide against the 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip.”
WPHF also partners with Juzoor for Health and Social Development, a Palestinian organization that on its website repeats the Hamas propaganda line that Israel targets civilian buildings in airstrikes. In reality, Israel targets Hamas bases, which are sometimes in hospitals or schools. Juzoor also peddled the false claim that an Israeli airstrike killed 471 people at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. The hospital blast was actually the result of a misfired rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as confirmed by the Israeli Defense Forces and the U.S. government.
ADWA, formerly Union of Health Work Committees (UHWC) in the Gaza Strip, was listed as another WPHF partner in 2022. UHWC is affiliated with the Syria-based terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and it drafted a statement against Israel with other Palestinian civil organizations in 2021.
“The main task of our institutions and of Palestinian human rights defenders is to work towards an end to the occupation, the dismantling of the apartheid regime and towards the realization of our collective human rights to self-determination and the right of return,” the statement read.
WPHF also partnered with the Palestinian Centre for Peace and Democracy, which signed on to a letter that called a ceasefire in Gaza the world’s “collective responsibility.”
It is unclear how WPHF designates funding to its partner organizations. WPHF does not actively partner with women’s organizations in Israel.