Nine UNRWA staff to be fired over attack on Israel

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The United Nations aid agency in the Gaza Strip says nine of its employees “may have been involved in the armed attacks” of October 7.

A Palestinian man outside the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Gaza City protests cuts to aid on June 20, 2023. Credit: Anas-Mohammed/Shutterstock.

Nine staff members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees may have been involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and they will be dismissed, the United Nations says.

“For nine people, the evidence was sufficient to conclude that they may have been involved in the seventh of October attacks,” deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said

He was referring to findings of the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, which he said had completed its investigation into the alleged involvement of 19 UNRWA staff members in the attacks.

“OIOS made findings in relation to each of the 19 UNRWA staff members alleged to have been involved in the attacks,” he said.

“In one case, no evidence was obtained by OIOS to support the allegations of the staff member’s involvement while in nine other cases, the evidence obtained by OIOS was insufficient to support the staff member’s involvement,” he said.

Haq said all the nine individuals who the investigation concluded may have been involved were men.

He did not give details of what they may have done, but said:

“For us, any participation in the attacks is a tremendous betrayal of the sort of work that we are supposed to be doing on behalf of the Palestinian people.”

The United Nations launched the investigation after Israel charged that 12 UNRWA staff took part in the Hamas-led October 7 attacks which triggered the Gaza war.

Israel stepped up its accusations in March, saying more than 450 UNRWA staff were military operatives in Gazan militant groups.

UNRWA employs 32,000 people across its area of operations, 13,000 of them in the Gaza Strip.

UNWRA said in March that some employees released into Gaza from Israeli detention reported having been pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the October attacks.

Meanwhile, Israel returned the bodies of more than 80 Palestinians killed in its military offensive in the Gaza Strip as Israeli air strikes killed at least 18 more people on Monday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.

Yamen Abu Suleiman, the director of the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, said it was unclear whether the bodies had been dug up from cemeteries by the army during the ground offensive, or whether they were “detainees who had been tortured and killed”.

“The occupation provided us with no information about the names, or ages, or anything. This is a war crime, a crime against humanity,” Abu Suleiman said.

The bodies will be screened and examined in an attempt to determine the causes of death and in an attempt to identify them.

They will later be buried in a mass grave at a cemetery near Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

The 84 bodies arrived in more than 15 bags, each containing several bodies, Abu Suleiman added.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the return of the bodies.

In the past, Israel has said it returned bodies after checks they were not Israeli hostages who had been held by Hamas since the October 7 attack

In Jerusalem, the Israeli Hostages Families Forum asked why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would allow the handover of Palestinian bodies without a ceasefire deal with Hamas.

“Why are bodies being returned outside the framework of a comprehensive deal? Such an agreement could bring back living hostages for rehabilitation and the deceased for proper burial,” they said in a statement.

In southeast Khan Younis, residents said Israeli aerial and tank shelling continued overnight, including in areas for which Israel had issued evacuation orders, saying terrorists had been waging attacks from there.

An Israeli air strike killed eight Palestinians in a vehicle on the road near Khan Younis on Monday, medics said.

Overnight, the United Nations admitted that “the evidence was sufficient to conclude” that nine staff members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency “may have been involved in the seventh of October attacks,” resulting in their employment termination.

Zionist Federation of Australia President, Jeremy Leibler, said “with the United Nations own findings, it could not be clearer that UNRWA employees were involved in the barbaric slaughter and kidnapping of Jews on October 7.

While it’s important for aid to reach those in need, any funding that ultimately strengthens Hamas, as it has previously, will help to extend the war and the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.”

CEO of the ZFA, Alon Cassuto, added:  “The Australian Government lifted its pause on UNRWA funding in March with the stated goal of ensuring the integrity of UNRWA’s operations and helping to ‘rebuild confidence’; today’s revelations show there is still a very long way to go.”

Shadow Minister for Home Affairs Senator James Paterson told Luke Grant hosting the 2GB Ray Hadley program: “Every Australian should be deeply concerned about this, because for years, Israel has warned the world that UNRWA had been co-opted and infiltrated and taken over by terrorists and that funds to UNRWA had been siphoned off by Hamas.

We now know that even in UNRWA’s own estimation, they were employing nine terrorists who, on the 7th of October, participated in the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the end of the Holocaust. 1200 people were murdered and hundreds kidnapped and UNRWA employees participated in that. We warned this government about that, we asked them to stop their funding to UNWRA. They briefly paused it, but before the United Nations had finished their investigations, Penny Wong, in her wisdom as Foreign Minister, resumed funding for UNRWA. And now we know there’s a very real risk that Australian government funds have gone to employ terrorists who killed innocent Jews.

While the termination of the employment of the nine individuals was obviously the right move, the glaring issues of UNRWA remain,” AIJAC’s Executive Director Colin Rubenstein said.

“As we said back in March, Australia should never have gone back to our long-standing practice of handing over tens of millions of our taxpayer dollars to UNRWA annually with no strings attached.

“UNRWA is an organisation that continues to employ terrorists, to cooperate with Hamas, to incite violence and to educate towards a future of hatred and intolerance rather than peaceful coexistence – and it does so with our taxpayer dollars.

“It deliberately continues to exacerbate and perpetuate the Palestinian refugee problem, spanning multiple generations, by refusing to help resettle Palestinian families in permanent homes.

“This does not promote the Australian Government’s own stated vision of two states living in peace, but instead pushes such a goal even further away and makes it less likely.

“Funding for needy Palestinians is of course necessary, but it can and should be provided through alternative agencies to UNRWA, which has proven itself beyond rehabilitation.

1200 people were killed in Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel and 250 taken hostage.

Reuters