The Israeli Army has claimed that the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees employs more than 450 Hamas members, although it did not provide any evidence to support these accusations, and revealed audio recordings that supposedly correspond to telephone conversations of two Hamas employees. the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip, in which they talk about their participation in the attack by the Islamist group Hamas on October 7.
Philippe Lazzarini, the agency's director, responded at a news conference Monday night that he has "never been informed" or received any evidence of Israel's claims. Every year, he said, UNRWA provides Israel and the Palestinian Authority with a list of its staff "and I have never received the slightest concern about the staff we have been employing." The only allegation that was communicated to him verbally was about 12 UNRWA employees who allegedly participated in the October 7 attacks, he said, who were fired and against whom the UN has opened two investigations.
Additionally, in a statement, UNRWA accused Israel of detaining several of its employees and forcing them, through torture and ill-treatment, to give false confessions about links between the agency, Hamas and the October 7 attack on Israel. "These forced confessions as a result of torture are being used by Israeli authorities to further spread misinformation about the agency as part of attempts to dismantle UNRWA," the statement said. "This is putting our personnel in Gaza at risk and has serious implications on our operations in Gaza and around the region."
According to the Army, intelligence services determined that UNRWA "employs more than 450 members of terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip, primarily Hamas," and that these groups "routinely exploit international aid organizations for terrorist purposes."
For Army spokesman Daniel Hagari, the collaboration of UNRWA employees with Hamas is not an isolated event but a pattern. In a televised conference, Hagari stressed that the militias use funds that come from donations from the international community for humanitarian purposes "to commit crimes against humanity." Hagari noted that he will send the recordings, along with additional intelligence information, to the UN.
For his part, the Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, urged the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, in a message on the X social network, that Hamas be "recognised globally as a terrorist entity and that nations that support it be labeled as sponsors of terrorism. In his message, Katz reiterated that Israel wants to expel UNRWA from Gaza and not participate in caring for civilians in the Strip once the war is over.
On the other hand, the Israeli army indicated in a statement that "the Israel Defense Forces expose two recordings that incriminate two UNRWA professors who participated in the massacre." One of the audios supposedly corresponds to the voice of Yusef Zidan Suleiman al Hawajara, whom Israel identifies as an Arabic teacher at a UNRWA school in Deir al Balah, in the center of the Strip. In his conversation, he describes his entry into Israeli territory and, laughing, claims that he captured a woman The other audio would correspond to Mamduh Hasin Ahmed Alkali, identified as a UNRWA primary school teacher in Khan Yunis, a region in the south of the Palestinian enclave where Hamas has a stronghold. In his conversation he says that he is within Israeli territory.
In January, Israel accused UNRWA of having at least 12 employees who participated in the attack. The UN agency immediately terminated its contracts and opened an investigation, but even before obtaining the results, 18 countries announced the suspension of their funding to the UN agency, including some of its main donors such as the United States, Canada, Germany or Japan.
Lazzarini denounced yesterday that Israel never provided evidence to prove the involvement of said employees in the attacks. "No additional information was provided to me since that day," said the official, who acknowledged that he had to fire the defendants because urgent action was needed. All other figures subsequently offered by Israel have not been officially communicated to UNRWA, he insisted.
Lazzarini, speaking before the General Assembly for the first time since Israel's first accusations, also said that Israel seeks to "eliminate UNRWA's role as protector of the Palestinian people and (its role) as a witness to their drama."
Lazzarini also regretted that "despite the unfounded nature of the accusations," 16 countries have stopped funding the agency, which has meant a cut in its budget of $450 million. "UNRWA is facing a deliberate and concerted campaign to undermine its operations (which are mandated by the Assembly, he recalled), and ultimately end them," Lazzarini lamented.
Those campaigns include "flooding donors with disinformation designed to foster distrust and tarnish the image" of the agency, Lazzarini said, warning against Israel's plans to sideline UNRWA in designing a post-conflict Gaza. , since no other agency will be able to take charge of services such as health or education.
The Spanish ambassador to the UN, Héctor Gómez, played a relevant role in the special session of the Assembly, as he spoke on behalf of several European countries - Norway, Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia, Luxembourg and Malta - not only for express their support for the agency but to ask the European Commission to accelerate the delivery of 50 million on its part.
"We strongly support - said Gómez in his speech - the mandate of UNRWA, which remains as essential as before. We are very concerned about efforts to undermine (their role). They are the pillar of the humanitarian response so vital in Gaza, where other agencies They depend on it (and are) the beacon of hope for millions of children, women and men.
After his intervention, Lazzarini confirmed in a press conference that his agency has registered "hundreds" of cases of abuse, reported by Palestinians detained in Israeli centers.
Lazzarini said that these complaints are communicated through internal channels and that they are not intended to be made public, but when they were leaked yesterday to an American newspaper, he was forced to confirm that they exist and that they refer to those collected by his agents at the Kerem crossing. Shalom, Israel's only access point to the Gaza Strip from the south.
These are complaints filed by Palestinians who have just spent a period of detention of weeks or months in Israel, in many cases without due process: "The majority of them arrived completely traumatized by the torture," Lazzarini said in a press conference. .
Asked to describe some of the abuse, he noted that it involved "a wide repertoire of systematic humiliations," and cited cases of prisoners who were photographed naked, or victims of verbal or psychological abuse, threats of electrocution, sleep deprivation, use of dogs in an intimidating manner or the obligation to wear diapers to adults for several days.
UNRWA, which has some 30,000 employees, is the main provider of humanitarian aid in the devastated Gaza Strip, where five months of war have left more than 30,500 dead, 72,000 injured, 7,000 missing - 70% of them children and women. and more than two million displaced people surviving in an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.
