Israeli parliament votes to label Hamas-linked UNRWA
a terror organization
Israel’s vote is based on solid evidence about UNRWA. The organization was fully infiltrated. It was long ago discovered to be promoting antisemitic textbooks in school curricula, as well as material that incited violence.
UNRWA employees participated in Hamas’ savage attack on Israeli citizens on October 7, and continued to aid Hamas afterward.
Last month, a lawsuit was filed in New York federal court on behalf of more than 100 Israeli victims of the October 7 attack. The lawsuit states that “UNRWA facilitated construction of Hamas command and control centers, attack tunnels and underground bunkers under UNRWA headquarters, UNRWA schools, medical clinics, and offices.”
Israeli parliament votes to label UN relief agency a terror organisation
Reuters, July 22, 2024:
JERUSALEM, July 22 (Reuters) – The Israeli parliament gave preliminary approval on Monday to a bill that declares the main United Nations relief organization for Palestinians a terrorist organisation and proposes to sever relations with the body.
The vote against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) is the latest step in a Israeli push against the agency, which Israeli leaders have accused of collaborating with the Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza.
The bill was approved in a first reading and will be returned to the foreign affairs and defence committee for further deliberation, the Knesset information service said.The bill’s sponsor, Yulia Malinovsky, was quoted as describing UNRWA as a “fifth column within Israel”.UNRWA provides education, health and aid to millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. It has long had tense relations with Israel but relations have deteriorated sharply since the start of the war in Gaza and Israel has called repeatedly for UNRWA to be disbanded.….
UNRWA provides education, health and aid > Antisemitic indoctrination is included in the education program. Health provides absurdly unrealistic numbers of deaths of Gazans. Aid includes providing space for terrorists to set up operations centers and access to terror tunnels, as well as financial aid.
=============================================================================================
Britain’s UNRWA disgrace
The new Labour government is helping fund terrorism and incitement
Britain has resumed funding the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), the body that provides education, health care and other humanitarian assistance in Gaza.
In January, the Foreign Office paused British funding after allegations surfaced that UNRWA staff were implicated in the barbaric October 7 pogrom in southern Israel perpetrated by Palestinian Arabs from Gaza.
Last week, however, the new Labour Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, told the House of Commons that Britain had been “reassured,” following an “independent review,” that “UNRWA is ensuring they meet the highest standards of neutrality and strengthening its procedures, including on vetting”. Accordingly, the UK will provide the agency with £21 million in new funds.
This was hardly a surprise. I wrote here about the disgraceful endorsement of UNWRA by the British ambassador to the UN, Dame Barbara Woodward, when earlier this month UNWRA held out its begging bowl once again to donor nations. Despite the consequent predictability, resuming funding remains an act of sickening moral bankruptcy and hostility to Israel.
UNRWA, an institutionalised weapon of war against the existence of Israel through its unique designation of the Palestinians as “refugees” which makes them stateless in perpetuity, has been outed since October 7 as an organisation linked to terrorism.
In January, as I wrote here, the monitoring group UN Watch showed that more than 3,000 UNRWA staff and teachers celebrated the pogrom and praised the murderers and rapists as “heroes”. Their comments included calls to execute Israeli hostages, expressions of joy and support for jihad, and cheers for video footage of the atrocities with messages such as “just wait, sons of Jews”.
At the end of January, the Wall Street Journal published an article, citing Israeli intelligence, revealing that at least 12 UNRWA employees directly participated in the 14 October 7th Hamas pogrom; that 1,200 UNRWA Gaza employees were Hamas and PIJ operatives; and that another 6,000 had close relatives who were affiliated with those terrorist groups.
At the beginning of this month, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that UNRWA was employing 100 terrorist operatives belonging to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It sent UNWRA their names and asked it to terminate their employment immediately.
Israel says that some 10 percent of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza have ties to terror, and that its educational facilities consistently glorify terrorism and incite hatred of Israel. Its educational curricula refer to the Jewish state as the the “enemy,” teach mathematics by counting “martyred” terrorists, and use phrases like “Jihad is one of the doors to Paradise” in grammar lessons.
The IDF has found countless Hamas terror centres situated beneath or adjoining UNRWA schools, hospitals and other facilities. A couple of weeks ago, the IDF reported finding a Hamas war room in UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City with a huge quantity of weapons including tactical drones, rockets, machine guns, mortars, explosives and grenades.
It also found a Hamas command and control centre located in a school and medical clinic with mortars, machine guns, grenades and Hamas intelligence documents hidden alongside equipment and UNRWA uniforms.
Yesterday, the Israeli Knesset gave preliminary approval to three bills declaring UNWRA a terrorist organisation, aiming to get it shut it down.
In response to the discovery of the 12 UNWRA pogromists, 18 top donor states to UNRWA suspended their funding. After Israel provided the agency with information alleging that several of its employees had participated in the Hamas pogrom, UNRWA’s Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini fired them.
In February the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, responded to the revelations by announcing the appointment of an “independent review” into UNRWA by Catherine Colonna, the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs.
This, though, was a fix. UN Watch detailed Colonna’s conflicts of interest and bias in favour of UNRWA; it pointed out that her aim was not to get to the bottom of the allegations but, in her own words, to “enable donors, the largest among them, but in fact everyone, to regain confidence, when they have lost it or when they have doubts, in the way UNRWA operates”.
In other words, this was a cynical snow job. Nevertheless, when UNRWA opened its latest fundraising campaign at the United Nations in New York, delegates from around the world signed a proclamation that the agency’s work was “indispensable” for Gaza, and many countries undertook to provide hundreds of millions more in funding. Now Britain has followed suit.
This morning’s Times of London (£) carries an article by Neta Heiman Mina — a member of Israel’s “peace movement” — whose 84 year-old mother, Ditza, was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during the October 7 pogrom and taken into Gaza. After she was released in the last hostage deal, Ditza revealed that her Hamas abductors had handed her over to a middle-aged Gaza resident called Abed. Mina writes:
Abed had kept my mother locked in a dark room of his home, with little food and no access to medication for almost two months. He told my mother that he was a teacher at a school run by UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees)…
It emerged that my mother was not the only hostage who had been kidnapped or held captive by UNRWA employees, but the ties between UNRWA and Hamas go much deeper than kidnappings alone…
Beyond the weapons, rocket launchers, tunnels, dead hostages and server farms found in and underneath their facilities, and octogenarians held captive by their employees, UNRWA has been funnelling significant sums of cash straight from donors to Hamas for years.
The money laundering works like this: UNRWA insists on distributing cash aid to Gazans in US dollars, a currency they have to convert to shekels in order to use locally. In the West Bank, Jordan and other countries, UNRWA distributes cash aid in the local currency. Hamas, controlling the only licensed money changers in Gaza, charges Gazans a 10 to 20 per cent commission to convert their dollars to shekels. For more than a decade, over a billion dollars in cash from donations has been diverted into Hamas’s coffers.
In New York, diplomats and world leaders like Secretary General António Guterres only decried the delegitimisation of UNRWA as a partner to Hamas, and urged further donations with no end in sight. There was no attempt to counter the money laundering. No path to countering Hamas’s systematic desecration of UNRWA’s neutrality. No resolution to have UNRWA work to promote a sustainable peace between Palestinians and Israelis. By funding UNRWA as it is, we will only meet the same problems in the next generation.
At the start of the next school year, Abed will go back to teaching in his UNRWA classroom while Hamas restocks its storage cupboards with guns. Printed with the UN seal, the textbooks he will teach from contain tasks like writing out the sentence “I will nourish the homeland with my blood”, and learning early mathematics by counting martyrs from past wars.
Last week Anneliese Dodds, Britain’s ineffable Minister of State for Development and Minister of State for Women and Equalities, tweeted on X:
Today this government acted to alleviate the suffering of civilians in Gaza. Lifting the pause on funding to UNRWA will save lives.
The only thing it will save will be UNRWA, and more lives will be lost as a result.
Britain’s Labour government is helping fund terrorism and murderous incitement.
==========================================================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment