2024-03-04 19:18:46
Israel recalls its ambassador to the UN. Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on Monday evening on the online service Relations between Israel and the UN have already deteriorated since the start of the Gaza war.
At the end of October, Ambassador Erdan called on UN Secretary General António Guterres to resign. The trigger was a speech by Guterres in which he strongly condemned the Hamas attack on Israel, but at the same time said that the attacks by the radical Islamic Palestinian organization “did not occur in a vacuum.”
On Monday, Erdan backed up Israel’s terror allegations against the UN relief agency for Palestine refugees UNRWA before the United Nations General Assembly in New York. During his speech on Monday, the diplomat showed a video purporting to show a UNRWA worker in Israel on October 7th. In the clipping Erdan held up on a tablet, two people could be seen lifting a seemingly lifeless body into a vehicle.
The diplomat said one of the men was a person who worked as a social worker for the UN agency. “UN employees are kidnapping Israeli children!” Erdan exclaimed. Of the 13,000 UNRWA employees in the Gaza Strip, hundreds are “active terrorists” and twelve percent are members of Hamas or the group “Islamic Jihad in Palestine,” Erdan continued. “UNRWA has proven to be a key part of Hamas’ terror machine.” The information could not initially be independently verified.
Military spokesman Daniel Hagari accused UNRWA of employing over 450 fighters from Hamas and other extremist groups. “Over 450. This is not just a coincidence. This is systematic,” he explains in Israel. This information and other intelligence information were passed on to international partners, including the United Nations.
Several Western countries have frozen their payments to UNRWA because of the allegations, including its two largest donors, the United States and Germany. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called the allegations credible in the past and promised comprehensive investigation. Collaboration with several employees was immediately terminated.
According to dpa information, the Israeli authorities provided the UN with twelve names and geodata from telephones from October 7th in January. These were checked by the United Nations and supported the suspicion. Around 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel.
UNRWA has been specifically looking after the needs of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East for decades and operates, among other things, educational and health facilities. In total, more than 30,000 people work for the organization, around 13,000 in the Gaza Strip alone. There, UNRWA is currently seen as having no alternative to providing humanitarian care to more than two million civilians who are suffering from the consequences of the Gaza war.
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