In the Telegraph, Paul Nuki explores the unholy alliance between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Palestinian group Hamas amid revelations that UNRWA employees have been involved in supporting or participating in terrorist activities. Here’s an excerpt:
You don’t need to look far for links between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and Hamas.
On the day of the October 7th massacre, Sara A-Dirawi, an UNRWA teacher in Gaza, took to Facebook to publish a video clip of Hamas fighters shooting up Israeli cars. She added a verse from the Quran, suggesting the terrorists were on a mission from God: “For we will surely come to them with soldiers that they will be powerless to encounter, and we will surely expel them therefrom in humiliation, and they will be debased.”
This is not an isolated example. Ever since Hamas was elected to power in Gaza in 2006, the UN agency has been forced to work cheek by jowl with the terrorist group. As such, says Israel, a “mutual dependence” has grown up between them.
“The rule of the terrorist organisation over the Gaza Strip forces UNRWA to act under the authorisation and supervision of Hamas in a way that extends Hamas’s influence over the agency,” an Israeli official told the Telegraph.
This dynamic is evident in Hamas’s most senior appointments. For example, Suhail al-Hindi, who was elected to the Hamas Politburo in 2017 to sit alongside Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza and the author of the October 7th attack, was a headmaster at an UNRWA school and Chairman of the UNRWA Gaza Workers’ Union.
Hamas’s Economy Minister Jawad Abu Shamala, killed just three days after the October 7th massacre in an Israeli airstrike, had a similar pedigree. He “earmarked the funds for financing and directing terrorism inside and outside the Gaza Strip”, says the IDF, but previously worked as a teacher at an UNRWA school in Khan Yunis.
Political support is one thing, direct involvement in terrorism another.
Ten days ago, UNRWA’s leadership in Jordan announced that Israel had provided it with evidence that agency staff had been involved in the October 7th massacre.
According to a briefing given to the Telegraph by a senior Israeli official on Thursday, Israeli intelligence has established that at least 12 UNRWA employees are “associated with the infiltration attack”.
Of those, 10 were Hamas operatives and two belonged to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said the official. A total of six UNRWA employees “infiltrated into Israel as part of the attack”, and four were “involved in kidnapping Israelis”, two of which also infiltrated Israeli territory.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: It took the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women nearly eight weeks to condemn the appalling rape and sexual assault carried out by the terrorists on October 7th, as Camilla Tominey reminds us in a scathing piece for the Telegraph.
Stop Press 2: In the Telegraph, MP Mike Freer’s recent resignation over death threats resonates with Stephen Pollard’s own experience, underscoring the economic and personal toll of Islamist intimidation.
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Defund and dismantle the entire poisonous outfit. Here’s 10 myths about the corrupt terrorist-supporting UNRWA busted;
”Myth 1: UNRWA is a UN organization.
Well, technically it is, but in fact, UNRWA is a Palestinian outfit with Palestinian employees and Palestinian objectives. Of its 13,000 employees in Gaza, 99% are Palestinian, alongside a tiny number of international employees who cover for Palestinian corruption and Islamic radicalism. It is a Palestinian boondoggle.
Since most Palestinians in Gaza support Hamas, it stands to reason that many if not the majority of UNRWA employees are Hamas supporters too. According to Israeli intelligence, a full 10% of UNRWA Gaza staff are identifiable Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad activists; hundreds of others openly celebrated the October 7 rapes and murders; and 190 UNRWA employees are “hardened militants” – fighters and killers with unmistakable terrorist records.
Myth 2: UNRWA is a relief organization for Palestinians.
This has not been true for many years. UNRWA provides little food or humanitarian aid. The vast majority of its budget is devoted to Palestinian schools and hospitals, which is an anomaly without precedent anywhere else in the world.
There is no other UN organization that covers health and education costs for almost an entire population – in place of its local government. UNRWA runs the relevant institutions and pays the bills throughout Gaza, instead of Hamas having to provide health, education, and welfare for its own constituents. Hamas relies on UNRWA and its Western donors to operate core provinces of Gazan government, leaving Hamas scot-free to build terror attack tunnels and camp out in underground military bunkers for war against Israel.”
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-784774
“I have no doubt that the UN in general and WHO would be able to scale up whatever needs to be done.” In the event that the Jihadi-manufacturing organization is actually disbanded, there are alternatives. Enough with this fake perpetual ”refugee” nonsense!!
https://twitter.com/UNWatch/status/1753090596347003314
UNRWA employ thousands of people.
Israel accused just 12.
Of those apparently 2 are dead and 1 does not work for UNRWA.
The remaining 9 are allegations only.
Countries halting funds to UNRWA are complicit in war crimes.
“Confessions” taken by torture…
Israel says, the IDF says, Israeli intelligence says … all rather one-sided. On 7th October there was a massacre but there is no word of the twenty- to thirty-fold massacre that ensued and that continues to this day. There is no questioning the reason for either massacre.
Israel has an awkward history. According to the UN website https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/ – sorry but I plausibly considered the UN to be a neutral source – the Jews left Palestine, dispersing in the “Diaspora”, two thousand years ago. Most settled comfortably (more or less) around the world and it was not until the Zionist movement appeared at the end of the 19th century, that there was any claim for a restoration of the Jewish State. At first, any sufficiently large area was considered, including Argentina, Cyprus, East Africa and the Congo (!), but new leadership of the Zionist Organization demanded it should be Palestine.
In 1917, it was Palestinian or Arab people, whether Christian or Muslim, who compromised [sic] over 90 per cent of the population of Palestine, and who owned about 97 per cent of its land. But the goal of Zionism, with clear approval of the British administration responsible for the area after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, was to establish a Jewish State in Palestine, and the rights of the people of Palestine themselves received no attention in these plans.
What the political concept of a Jewish State in Palestine needed to give it reality was to transfer people to Palestine. And this is exactly what happened. In the 1920s, between 2,000 and 34,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine per year, peaking in 1925, and thus doubling the Jewish population – rising from below 10% to over 17%. A strict policy of what in today’s terms would be described as racial discrimination was maintained by the Zionist Organization in this rapid advance towards the “national home”. Only Jewish labour could service Jewish farms and settlements. And a number of Jewish organizations … were actively engaged in acquisition of land both for individual immigrant families as well as for the Yishuv or Jewish settlements.
Jewish settlement in Palestine increased radically during the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s, increasing to 630,000 in 1947, sharing the country with 1.3 million Arabs.
Over the years there were countless clashes between the two groups until the British washed their hands of the whole affair and handed over responsibility for the country to the UN. The website quotes historian Arnold J. Toynbee writing in 1968 of the period of British rule over Palestine:
“All through those 30 years, Britain (admitted) into Palestine, year by year, a quota of Jewish immigrants that varied according to the strength of the respective pressures of the Arabs and Jews at the time. These immigrants could not have come in if they had not been shielded by a British chevaux-de-frise. If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab state in 1918, Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab people’s own country. The reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world’s peace.”
General UN indecisiveness and inability to enforce resolutions resulted in today’s situation: a strong Israel with Palestinian Arabs essentially locked away in two areas of the country: Gaza and the West Bank.
The website quotes the great Zionist humanist, Ahad Ha’am, who in 1891 warned that the settlers must under no circumstances arouse the wrath of the natives … “Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands of the Diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in unrestricted freedom and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination …”.
That was in 1891 and in 2024 the Israelis drop 2,000lb bombs on their Palestinian neighbours.
It is very difficult to imagine how this conflict will ever end without a complete reappraisal by the Israelis of their attitude towards the Palestinians.
Amen CGW.
Down tickers be damned, you have the nub of it.
It’s a nasty wound on the world.
Only a two state solution along 1967 borders will heal it.
Even then Israel and the US and the UK should pay for the Palestinian state’s reconstruction after all this genocidal behaviour.
Otherwise one state, and that would end the dream of a Jewish ethnostate. Which I think the Zionists wouldn’t want.
Or global endless conflict.