The UN’s Hidden Jerusalem Office Raises Serious Questions

The UN Commission of Inquiry recently declared, “Israel continues to commit genocide…by deliberately targeting Palestinian children.”¹ Around the same time, one of the commission’s members, Chris Sidoti, reiterated his demand that anyone who served in any arm of the Israeli military in Gaza after October 7 be treated as a criminal suspect for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide.² The practical consequence is obvious: Israeli soldiers, reservists, dual citizens, and even people in non-combat roles could face foreign investigations, legal harassment, or arrest campaigns when they travel abroad.

The Commission of Inquiry operates within the UN Human Rights Council system and is hosted by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). According to the website of the “UN in Palestine,” OHCHR has an office for the “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The website claims that these offices are based in Ramallah, Gaza, “East Jerusalem,” and Hebron.³

As a general rule, when the UN claims to have an office in “East Jerusalem,” what they actually mean is that they have an office in the city of Jerusalem, located in an area under full Israeli sovereignty since 1967. These offices are predominantly over the 1949 Armistice Line (often also referred to as “The Green Line.”⁴) that separated the Israeli and Jordanian forces.

Of all of the different UN bodies, the OHCHR is probably the most biased against Israel. Its reports constantly vilify Israel and consistently accuse Israel of the most serious of offenses. Accordingly, the existence of an office of the OHCHR in sovereign Israel, as opposed to in Ramallah, Hebron, or even Gaza, is of great concern.

Thus, if the office actually exists, it would demand immediate action from Israel’s government to enforce its closure.

Naturally, a UN office in sovereign Israel should have an address, phone number, and other contact details. In other words, there should be a basic way for the public to verify where the office is located and what it does.

However, locating what now appears to be the secret UN office has proven more difficult than one would expect.

As noted, the OHCHR claims the East Jerusalem field office exists, but does not list an address. The UN Palestine contact page lists OHCHR’s Ramallah and Gaza phone numbers, along with a general email address. It lists street addresses for other UN agencies in “East Jerusalem,” but not for OHCHR’s field office.⁵

An email sent by the JCFA to Ajith Sunghay, the Head of the OHCHR Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, at his publicly listed email address, has remained unanswered. A similar email to the general OHCHR oPt email address has also received no response.

Multiple calls to the phone numbers listed on the websites for the Ramallah and Gaza offices were left unanswered, from both American and Israeli phone numbers at different times of day.

Calls to the Office of the UN Deputy Special Coordinator, Resident Coordinator, and Humanitarian Coordinator, which is listed as overseeing the UN agencies operating in Palestine, were similarly not answered.

The person who answered the JCFA call to the OHCHR headquarters in Switzerland replied “No, I can’t tell you,” when asked if he could provide the address or accurate contact information for the East Jerusalem office. Notably, the answer was not that the person did not know, but rather that he was not willing to provide the information.

When asked during an in-person visit, a representative of the UN’s OCHA⁶ (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) office in Jerusalem, similarly replied that he was unable to provide additional information.⁷

While the UN publicly states that OHCHR has an “East Jerusalem” field office, that office has no public address, no contact details, and does not appear on Google Maps, and all UN representatives contacted or questioned about the office’s physical presence refuse to answer. Needless to say, there is no mention of the UN staffer who runs that office.

This would be concerning enough if OHCHR were simply a quiet humanitarian agency. But it is not. OHCHR oPt functions as an anti-Israel propaganda outlet, manufacturing legal and diplomatic ammunition used against Israel around the world.

One of the clearest examples came after the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion in Gaza.

In October 2023, shortly after the blast, UN experts using the OHCHR platform expressed outrage over what they called the deadly strike at the hospital, saying it killed “more than 470 civilians” and linking the incident to Israeli crimes against humanity.⁸ That claim immediately helped shape the global narrative. Israel was blamed, mobs erupted, world leaders reacted, and the damage was done before the facts were even known.

Then the lie was exposed.

As the world now knows, Israel did not attack the Al-Ahli hospital. Rather, the damage caused to the hospital on October 17, 2023, was the result of a missile fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which misfired and landed in the parking lot of the hospital, killing a few dozen people.⁹

However, until the truth came out, the Hamas narrative, megaphoned by the OHCHR so-called “experts,” had already traveled around the world with the prestige of the UN human rights system behind it.

Leveling baseless claims against Israel was not a one-time mishap, but rather the consistent modus operandi of the OHCHR. OHCHR does not merely “report.” It brands allegations against Israel with the authority of the United Nations, often before the facts are established, and those allegations are then used by governments, media outlets, NGOs, international legal bodies, and Israel’s enemies as if they are neutral, almost God-given truth.

Human rights agencies are important. Real human rights work matters. There is, however, a difference between protecting human rights and running a secretive UN operation that produces propaganda used by terrorists, hostile governments, and anti-Israel activists to attack the Jewish state.

And then there is the money.

OHCHR oPt’s 2026 funding appeal asks for $7 million to continue and expand its work.¹⁰ That is not pocket change. If a UN office is asking for millions of dollars to operate in this arena, the public should at least be able to find the building, call a working phone number, or get a basic answer about where its East Jerusalem office is located.

The UN is supposed to help people. It is supposed to provide services, respond to needs, and be accessible to the communities it claims to serve. It is required to be neutral. The exact location of its offices should never be a secret. Except, of course, when it comes to UN activity against Israel, apparently.

While claiming to operate in Jerusalem, numerous emails, phone calls, website searches, and even an in-person visit to UN offices, to discover the exact physical location of the OHCHR office, revealed nothing. No address or any way to reach someone who could answer basic questions about the organization.

If a multi-million-dollar UN human rights operation cannot even answer its phones or tell the public where its own field office is, then it is failing at the most basic level of transparency and accountability.

If this is an ordinary UN human rights field office, why is its location so difficult to verify? Why can other UN offices in East Jerusalem publish addresses, while this one cannot? Why should an office operating from inside Israel’s capital, and producing material used to accuse Israel of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and genocide, be hidden from public scrutiny?

OHCHR says it has an East Jerusalem field office, receives millions of dollars for its work, and yet basic information about that office is unavailable, unanswered, or apparently withheld.

If this “field office” is not actually an office in the ordinary sense, then OHCHR should explain what it is, why it describes it that way, and what exactly donors are paying for. If it is a real office, then the public deserves to know why a UN body operating inside Israel’s capital is keeping its location hidden.

Clearly, no secret UN site should be allowed to operate in Israel. If the office does not exist, one must question what exactly the OHCHR is doing with all the money it claims to need, and what exactly the OHCHR is hiding.

The question is simple: If OHCHR has an office in Jerusalem, where is it?

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Notes