Canadian diplomat Lynn Hastings, whose official title is “United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” was forced last December after the Foreign Ministry had decided not to extend her visa in the country, something the ministry does very rarely in cases of hostile high ranking UN officials (presumably because there’ll be none left – DI). The ministry explained that Hastings “acts unilaterally on behalf of the Palestinians and is consistently biased against Israel.”
In 2022, Hastings issued a statement that was nothing short of a blood libel: “The UN has recorded unprecedented levels of settler violence against Palestinians this year, underlining the fact that illegal Israeli settlers had ethnically cleansed some 1,100 civilians from 28 villages in the West Bank.”
The UN responded to Israeli criticisms by affirming their belief in Hasting’s “professionalism.” Of course, they did – blood libels against Israel are practically part of her job description.
Now, Hastings is appealing to the UN Security Council to permit her to establish an office in Gaza, saying she wants to help bring humanitarian aid from the border crossings and disseminate it to the suffering civilians.
If you can’t keep an office in Jerusalem, open a new one in Gaza.
Last December 10, on the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hastings issued a special statement saying, “In Gaza, the response from Israel has been disproportionate. The air strikes against civilians and civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, and UN facilities and the repeated displacement of the civilian population cannot be justified.”
Mind you, she issued that statement after it had been established that Hamas was using all these fine institutions as military bases from which it launched the attack on innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, and continued to fire thousands of rockets on Israeli cities.
On January 23, she reposted an OCHAPT (United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Palestine) announcement: “We finally managed to access Shifa Hospital. The recurrent denial of access of humanitarian teams to northern Gaza is preventing the needed scale-up of life-saving operations.”
As if the world was not aware that Shifa Hospital served as one of the Hamas headquarters in northern Gaza, one of a network of hospitals, all with the same dual function.
Finally: here’s Hastings reporting on the situation in Gaza without being there:
