24
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The UN agency that aids Palestinians fired several workers and is investigating charges of their involvement in the 7 October attacks
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- Title
- U.N. to Investigate Claim That Employees Participated in Oct. 7 Attack
- Published
- Jan 26 2024
- Word count
- 1222 words
Just for context, it's very hard to work in a country without working at least in some part with the overarching "government body". I worked in Syria during the conflict in 2015-16, and while we were an American 501c3, we worked with the official government office that oversaw the sites we were focused on protecting. And by and large the folks that we worked with, and funded, from the government were just trying their best to do their job and help us.
This is where "x" supports "y" become muddy. Technically, I directly supported Assad's regime during the height of the Syrian civil war. But my actions were to ensure that some of the common property, owned and appreciated by all Syrians, made it through the conflict. I can imagine similar things happening with UNWRA within Gaza.
I also think it's frustrating that when the report concerning Netanyahu funneling Qatari dollars into Gaza and to Hamas popped up it was deflected with "well how can you distribute funds without working with the local government" is now somehow not a via explanation for UNWRA. Anyway, my 2 cents.
I think this is different from your situation and more related to the fact that UNWRA is the largest employer in Gaza, so it's naturally going to have many people who sympathize with the local powers. I'm surprised that there were only 12 employees identified by the US.
Considering how swift and relatively strong the reaction was not only from the US but also for example Finland, I'm thinking that the evidence that was so far privately presented by Israel might have shown something worse than that.
edit: Italy stopped funding as well
This is not a mild thing. UNRWA is a major factor in Gaza and if they were involved in any substantial way with the Oct 7 attacks it's going to be really really ugly.
I think it's unlikely there was coordinated involvement, and more that people who worked for them were involved. UNWRA is the largest employer in Gaza with 13,000 employees. If I'm crunching the numbers right, that's a little over 1% of the adult population who works for them. It would be weird if there wasn't at least some chance overlap.
That said, it's an incredibly bad look given the many existing allegations of doctors and employees at the hospitals turning a blind eye to captives, etc.
Edit: also, it highlights what a basket case Gaza was even before this conflict. For the UN aid agency to be the largest employer, and if I recall, was receiving 500 trucks of aid per day before the fighting started. Very sad.
Yeah the government of Gaza is Hamas. Any aid work that can have any meaningful kind of impact is going to need to work with Hamas by necessity. This means they’re almost surely going to be penetrated with Hamas sympathizers if not agents.
Unavoidable with this sort of thing I’m afraid.
The US cut off aid to UNRWA due to 12 employees out of 13,000. So it's both huge and pretty much inevitable. But aid being cut off from its largest donors could have a major effect given all the services they provide to Gazans. As the article notes, they act as a shadow government due to all the services that would normally be provided by a real government.
The phrasing made it sound very temporary.
Hopefully there isn't any indication of systemic or coordinated participation, and the aid funding will resume.
Out of 13.000 employees, 12 has been suspected of being, to some unspecified degree, involved with the Oct 7 attack. From there, we leap to UNRWA surely being a terrorist organization in disguise. This theory is voiced by the Israelic government which pretty much think everything is an antisemetic conspiracy.
On this weak foundation, the US has temporary cut funding to UNRWA, which provide lifesaving aid to 2 million people in risk of starvation. This should be the real story.
It's my understanding it was already fairly well known that aid agencies were known to be helping hamas well before the October 7th massacre
The Peace Corps spreading "peace" as usual.
The peace corps is a US government program while UNWRA is a UN program.
Apart from the fact that the peace corps isn't mentioned in this article, what are you trying to imply, here?