UN decries spokesman in PM’s office for calling UNRWA chief ‘a Jew-killing enabler’

UNITED NATIONS – The United Nations says comments by a spokesman in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office about the head of the UN agency helping Palestinian refugees are “reprehensible” and threatening.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric is responding to comments made by spokesman David Mencer who called Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the agency known as UNRWA, “one of the bad guys, a terrorist sympathizer, a Jew-killing enabler, a liar.”

Mencer issued the denunciations of Lazzarini after saying that Israeli forces have retrieved “millions of documents and captured enemy material” exposing the involvement of UNRWA employees in Hamas’ attacks on October 7 in southern Israel.

He said the documents also showed “the deep and systemic infiltration by those terror organizations, Hamas, but also Palestinian Islamic Jihad into the ranks of UNRWA.”

The UN’s Dujarric says “there have not been a million documents handed over to the secretary-general,” Antonio Guterres, and a letter sent to him with about a hundred names was immediately sent to the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the watchdog known as OIOS.

Mencer’s “inflammatory language” to describe Lazzarini “in an environment that’s already extremely volatile is reprehensible and downright dangerous because it puts at risk senior UN officials whose only focus is on helping civilians in Gaza and to alleviate their suffering,” Dujarric says.