For 53 days in the fall of 2023, Ditza Heiman was missing. For 48 of those days, the 84-year-old grandmother from Kibbutz Nir Oz was held not in a tunnel or a basement, but in the attic of a man employed by the United Nations to teach Gaza’s children. Last week, her daughter stood before that same organization’s Human Rights Council in Geneva and asked it a question it has spent three years failing to answer.
Ditza Heiman was one of the founders of Nir Oz, joining the kibbutz decades ago with her Nahal group — Israel’s pioneering youth corps that combined agricultural settlement with military service. She spent years as the kibbutz’s kindergarten teacher and caregiver, tending to its babies before later training as a social worker and serving the Eshkol Regional Council and the Be’er Sheva District Court. She is a mother of four, a grandmother of twelve, and a great-grandmother of five, widowed the year before October 7. On the morning of the attack, terrorists broke into her home while she shouted for help. They took her without her medications, without her glasses, and without regard for the wheelchair she relies on to walk. Hours later, her family called her phone and heard Arabic voices answer. Days after that, Hamas released a video of her being led into Gaza, alone and terrified.
She endured 53 days without medical care of any kind — 48 of them, according to her family, confined to the attic of an UNRWA teacher, given very little food and kept in what her son Gideon Heiman called conditions that “might challenge even the resilience of the young, both physically and mentally.” She was released in late November 2023 as part of a temporary ceasefire. Since then, she has worked for the release of the hostages who remained behind.
On September 15, at the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, her daughter Neta Heiman-Mina used her ninety seconds at the podium to name the man who held her mother. “An UNRWA teacher, Abed, kept her trapped in his attic in terrible conditions with very little food,” she said, speaking on behalf of UN Watch and the NGO Engineers of the World. “How could you place the education of Gaza’s next generation with someone involved in holding an elderly woman hostage?”
She did not stop there. “My mother wasn’t the only one,” Heiman-Mina told the council. “We know of other UNRWA employees connected to the massacre and kidnappings of October 7.” She pointed to Suhail al-Hindi, the former head of UNRWA’s teachers’ union in Gaza, representing some 8,000 educators, whom Israel has long accused of formal membership in Hamas. Her question for the delegates in the room was direct: why had the agency entrusted him with authority over thousands of the very teachers meant to shape Gaza’s next generation?
Her testimony landed one day after UN Watch published the report that gave her words their evidence. The organization’s “Report Card on UNRWA Reform” examined the agency’s progress on the 50 recommendations issued by the Colonna Report, the independent review commissioned by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in 2024 after donor nations discovered that UNRWA employees had taken part in the October 7 massacre and suspended $450 million in funding in response. UNRWA now claims to have completed 41 of the 50 recommendations. UN Watch’s investigation puts the real number at no more than 13.
UN Watch found that UNRWA’s primary tool for screening its own staff for terrorist ties remains the UN Security Council’s sanctions list — a list that does not include Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the two organizations most responsible for October 7. The agency marked its review of the Staff Union Charter as complete after circulating a draft the unions themselves never approved. One recommendation was formally closed as “not feasible” yet still counted toward the total. Education reforms were graded by whether new administrative procedures existed on paper, not by whether the curriculum in Gaza’s classrooms had actually changed. “UNRWA has graded its own homework and awarded itself high marks,” said UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer. “Issuing a policy is not the same as enforcing it. Drafting a plan is not the same as implementing it, and closing a recommendation does not mean that the underlying problem has been solved.”
UNRWA describes itself, in its own words, as an agency dedicated to the welfare and education of Palestinian children. What does the Bible say a nation, or a world body, owes the vulnerable when the people entrusted with their care turn out to be their captors instead of their protectors?
The Psalms answer without qualification: “He executes justice for the oppressed; He gives food to the hungry; the LORD sets the prisoners free” (Psalm 146:7). The verse places the freeing of captives alongside feeding the hungry and lifting the oppressed, not as an afterthought to justice but as one of its defining acts. On this foundation, the Sages ruled that pidyon shvuyim — the redemption of captives — takes precedence over nearly every other act of charity, because captivity gathers hunger, homelessness, and mortal danger into a single crisis that no other suffering fully replicates. An institution that inverts that principle, one whose own payroll included a man who created a captivity rather than ended one, has failed the single clearest test the Bible sets before anyone who claims to serve the defenseless.
Ditza Heiman is home in Israel today, spending her freedom, by her son’s account, working to secure the freedom of others who remain where she once was. Her daughter was given ninety seconds in Geneva to ask the United Nations how it justified funding the man who held her mother captive. The organization that employed him has had three years, fifty recommendations, and $450 million in donor trust to answer that question honestly. Ninety seconds asked it plainly. Three years of paperwork still has not.
