From the Liveblog of
Monday, January 29, 2024
Blinken says evidence some UNRWA staffers joined Hamas onslaught is ‘highly credible’
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the Israeli-supplied evidence alleging that roughly a dozen UNRWA staffers participated in Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught is “highly credible.”
“We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves. But they are highly, highly credible,” Blinken says during a press conference.
However, the secretary stresses that UNRWA plays an “indispensable” role in providing assistance to civilians in Gaza and that “no one else can play the role that UNRWA has been playing, certainly not in the near term.”
This highlights the “imperative” for UNRWA to carry out an immediate investigation and to address the allegations “as thoroughly as possible,” Blinken says.
Blinken says there is no reason that any US response to the deadly attack by Iran-backed militants on its troops in Jordan will impact US efforts to secure another hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.
He adds that “the world has not seen such a situation in the Middle East since 1973,” apparently referring to the tensions surrounding the Yom Kippur War.
