Last week, the IDF announced it had eliminated a Hamas Nukhba commander responsible for the massacre of Nova music festival goers hiding in a bomb shelter.
Seven times Mohammad Abu Itiwi and his men tossed a grenade into the shelter and each time it was heroically thrown back. On the eighth attempt, Itiwi succeeded in killing some of his unarmed prey.
His blood lust still unsatisfied, several more grenades were thrown in, the fuse time getting shorter until there was a second explosion.
Itiwi’s sadistic work left 16 dead. Others mutilated and dazed were driven off to Gaza in a truck.
Itiwi also worked for UNRWA, like many UNRWA staffers who either participated in 7 October or cheered on the result on social media. It’s impossible to say exactly how many but evidence suggests it is an uncomfortably large number.
Given that UNRWA staff are drawn from a population roughly half of which supports Hamas, this is unsurprising.
And yet, on Tuesday on the BBC, Martin Griffiths, until July the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said “no evidence was provided” by Israel about “complicity by some UNRWA staff” on 7 October.
First, that is quite simply factually incorrect. In August, the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) said it had fired nine UNRWA staffers for being complicit.
John Ware.
Second, the evidential threshold Griffiths appeared to be citing for a “conviction” – as he termed it – of active complicity was “court ready”, implying the evidence the UN required had to be beyond reasonable doubt.
If so, this was an unrealistically high threshold for assessing the scale of UNRWA’s neutrality problem in the face of so much published evidence in recent years of support for Hamas in the social media of UNRWA staff – many of them teachers.
UNRWA has wilfully ignored this evidence, most of it submitted by an organisation called UN Watch. Its stand is avowedly anti-UNRWA, but its evidence has been forensic and appears to be well supported.
Nor does the OIOS seem to have shown a willingness to investigate Israeli data indicating that 1,650 of UNRWA’s staff are members of Hamas with a further 485 who are members of Hamas or other Palestinian military factions.
This is surely reprehensible given that UNRWA had not enhanced its vetting of staff by screening them properly against national or regional terrorism lists – even though UNRWA acknowledged participation in Hamas would be a serious violation of regulations.
Griffiths also said the recent review of UNRWA’s neutrality compliance regime by the ex-French foreign minister Catherine Colonna concluded UNRWA was “much, much better on neutrality than almost any other UN agency”.
Except that some of the most blatant neutrality breaches in Gaza happened under that same pre-eminent neutrality compliance regime. Like the Hamas command and control centre complete with its computer server farm and living quarters built under UNRWA’s HQ about a decade ago.
Staff seem to have known this but a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” appears to have prevailed because in 2014, part of the HQ parking lot began to sink. “No one talked about what was causing the collapse,” a former UNRWA official told the Wall Street Journal, “but everyone knew.”
If that wasn’t enough of a clue, then what about UNRWA’s electricity bill? It must have been going through the roof because Hamas was getting its power directly from UNRWA’s grid. And computer server farms are hungry beasts.
Then there’s UNRWA’s 284 schools providing education to half of Gaza’s pupils. Yes, there had been improvements in textbooks, but not enough. Glorification of violence, antisemitic narratives, portraying Palestine violence as heroic, references to “Zionist occupation”, maps not showing Israel, dehumanising portrayals have still been present according to the German-based George Eckert Institution, respected by both the EU and UK as reliable scrutineers of Palestinian textbooks.
Staff seem to have known this but a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” appears to have prevailed because in 2014, part of the HQ parking lot began to sink. “No one talked about what was causing the collapse,” a former UNRWA official told the Wall Street Journal, “but everyone knew.
Just as obviously unjustifiable in terms of basic humanity (let alone an act of PR insanity) is Monday’s decision by a large majority of the Knesset to ban UNRWA within 90 days from operating in Israel or East Jerusalem, and also from having any contact with UNRWA.
UNRWA says this amounts to collective punishment of Palestinians because it handles the vast majority of aid distribution in Gaza together with Palestinian Red Crescent. Outlawing UNRWA will heavily curtail this since the agency relies on agreements with Israel to operate, particularly moving aid through checkpoints between Israel and Gaza.
However managerially incompetent and ideologically skewed UNRWA may be, surely the last thing Gazan civilians need is even more obstacles to getting vital aid. And the last thing Israel needs is yet deeper international isolation. Enough horrific scenes have emerged from Gaza even for Israel’s supporters to see it’s become a living hell. Israel’s closest ally, the US (State Department) has emphasised the government needs to do “much more” to facilitate aid into the strip.
Protesters are seen during a demonstration outside the Gaza City headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees.
Benjamin Netanyahu counters that Israel will work with international partners to ensure aid is sustained. Really? It’s not as if alternative ways of supplementing UNRWA haven’t already been sought these “many, many, many, many months” past says Griffiths. On this at least, he’s is surely right.
My point is there is a valid debate for the Knesset to have about UNRWA’s future – and whether its history, constitution and ethos is compatible with the long-term reconstruction and stabilisation of Gaza, eventually co-existing peacefully alongside the world’s only Jewish state, however illusory that may seem right now. But to go further at this point in the war by summarily cutting off UNRWA’s legs when so many Palestinians are literally on their knees is unconscionable.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty to debate about UNRWA’s future, or even whether it should have one at all, starting with the fact that the agency has helped sustain the Israel-Palestine conflict by dignifying the delusional “River to the sea” ambition of many Palestinians to achieve this, if only by demography.
UNRWA emphasises it was “established (in 1949) to provide assistance pending the implementation” of UN Resolution 194 in which “the Right of Return is enshrined…”
UNRWA diploma found in vehicle of Hamas terrorists who took part in October 7 massacre. Pic: IMPACT-se
Griffiths resurrected this on Tuesday by stressing that closing down UNRWA would be the “new way to end the aspirations of the Palestinian people” because UNRWA “is the precise companion created to support the right to return in the future of the Palestinian people towards a two-state solution.”
How helpful to achieving peace is the continual indoctrination of the idea that Palestinians have an inviolate right of return to Israel when everyone knows the demography if taken to its logical conclusion?
It scarcely strikes the neutral posture that UNRWA insist it so rigorously observes, like so much of UNRWA management’s politically charged language.
Palestinians are the world’s only fifth generation refugees retaining that status from descendants who, yes, were refugees in 1949 (albeit from the failed attempt by five Arab armies to kill off the fledgling Jewish state, then in defiance of the UN) but who are long since dead.
Just last March, UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini referred to UNRWA bearing “witness” to the “plight” of Palestinians, noting there was still no “fair and lasting political solution … 75 years after the Nakba.”
Griffiths also spoke about how UNRWA keeps a “register of those Palestinian refugees and their descendants who have a right to return to what is modern day Israel. UNRWA looks after nearly six million Palestinian refugees, of whom about a third are in refugee camps and don’t have settled status.”
Yet a good chunk of those six million are not refugees in any meaningful sense. Palestinians are the world’s only fifth generation refugees retaining that status from descendants who, yes, were refugees in 1949 (albeit from the failed attempt by five Arab armies to kill off the fledgling Jewish state, then in defiance of the UN) but who are long since dead.
The vast majority of Jordan’s 2.4m UNRWA “refugees” are also Jordanian citizens, having been born and raised in Jordan. These oxymoronically named “citizen-refugees” have never been displaced by war. Nor do many of them live in “camps” – which have long since ceased to be camps, having evolved into permanent structures. And many have successful careers. Yet UNRWA still provides governmental services for them. Why?
The net effect of UNRWA’s Palestinian advocacy down the decades is reinforcement for the ideology that the UN is as responsible for today’s fifth generation of Palestinian “refugees” just as much as back in 1948. Remember Hamas Politburo member Mousa Abu Marzook’s chilling rebuke to Gazan civilians who wanted to be allowed to shelter from the fighting in the tunnels. The tunnels were for fighters, not civilians he said.
“These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels. Everybody knows that 75% of the people in the Gaza Strip are refugees, and it is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them .” Despite having been the de facto government of Gaza for almost 20 years, Hamas evidently regarded the nuts and bolts of government to be UNRWA’s responsibility. A few days later, Marzook’s Hamas Politburo colleague Khalil al-Hayya, repeated the sentiment: “Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such.”
Another matter for legitimate debate is why UNRWA insists on paying its 13000 Gaza staff in US dollars which requires them to turn to Hamas-affiliated moneychangers to receive the local currency (Israeli shekels) they need to be able to make purchases. Hamas takes a 15-25% cut of all money changed. Thus, for years UNRWA has indirectly generated millions of dollars of additional income for Hamas which presumably helped build up its military wing to almost half the size of the British army prior to October 7.
For all these reasons (and several others too lengthy to list), it’s easy to see why Knesset members believe that October 7 has moved the UNRWA debate on from whether it is capable of reform, to whether it should continue to exist at all.
On the one hand, Catherine Colonna evidently believes UNRWA can be reformed despite the fact that, as UNRWA’s former senior counsel John Lindsay says “the obvious nature of many of the 50 recommendations points to scandalous mismanagement at UNRWA over many decades.”
And on the other, members of the Knesset evidently fear UNRWA’s continuation will facilitate the return of Hamas and its dominance and perpetuate the cycle of violence.
Two truths surely emerge from Israel’s latest PR car crash: any decision to dissolve UNRWA clearly should not happen cold turkey while the war endures. The priority is lifesaving aid – and as much, and as quickly as possible. Like it or not Israel, for the moment, UNRWA is the main vehicle for distributing assistance.
The other is this: as a point of principle, it cannot be right for the UN to continue to be associated with an agency that has grown to become as much a part of the problem as a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The status quo cannot prevail.
