From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
UNRWA says it routinely submits staff lists to Israel and got no objections
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleJacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
UNRWA has been providing Israel with a list of its employees in Gaza every year and did not receive any pushback from Jerusalem, which maintained in January that roughly ten percent of the agency’s members are tied to the Hamas terror group, a spokesperson says.
“Every year, UNRWA provides the lists of all its staff to host countries across the region. In the context of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, UNRWA submits the lists of its staff to the State of Israel as the occupying power,” Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, tells The Times of Israel.
“The last time UNRWA submitted that list was in May 2023. We have not received any response from the State of Israel on the list,” she adds.
UNRWA fired 12 of its employees in January after it received evidence from Israel that they participated in Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught. But Israel has since offered what it says is intelligence to stakeholders showing that some 1,200 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staffers have ties to Hamas.
A senior European diplomat tells The Times of Israel that Jerusalem is “cynically” making such allegations in order to force UNRWA’s dissolution after never taking issue with the employee lists it received from the agency in previous years.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman dismisses this account, telling The Times of Israel that the lists it received from UNRWA were partial, did not contain ID numbers necessary for vetting the employees and were sometimes sent a full year after staffers were already working for the agency.
Nonetheless, Israel identified Hamas activists on UNRWA’s payroll on several occasions. In 2012, Israel alerted UNRWA that one of its principals, Sohail al-Hindi, was a Hamas activist, but it took until after Hindi’s election to Hamas’s politburo in 2017 for UNRWA to fire him, according to the Foreign Ministry spokesman.
Israel has long accused UNRWA of perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by extending refugee status to millions of descendants of Palestinians who fled or were forced out of homes in today’s Israel at the time of the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, rather than limiting such a status only to the original refugees, as is the norm with most refugee populations worldwide.
Israel and other groups have also long argued that UNRWA school materials glorify terrorism and anti-Israel incitement.
The Times of Israel Community.