#UNRWA / Philippe Lazzarini interview with Haaretz: “Israel did not provide us with evidence for suspicions against employees, we expect full cooperation”
Lazzarini says #Israel has not provided substantive evidence to back its accusations against UNRWA employees and dismissal of the organization's neutrality. He calls for full cooperation from Israel in investigating the claims.
Despite Israel not providing full intelligence report; Lazzarini says he fired 10 of them immediately based only on a verbal briefing from Israel's Foreign Ministry.
Israel did not raise any issues with the list of all UNRWA employees that is shared annually. The 12 suspected employees were included on the latest list from May 2023.
Lazzarini questions the claims that 10% of UNRWA Gaza staff are linked to Hamas, saying they have not received this information and don't know the source.
He argues UNRWA has limited ability to detect Hamas tunnels under its buildings in Gaza, as it lacks military expertise and mandate.
He denies claims of widespread diversion of UNRWA aid to Hamas, saying aid is distributed directly to families without intermediaries. He acknowledges he can't fully rule out some aid being taken and resold on black market.
@oatmeal@israel@palestine
People still believe the lies that Israel tells?
What idiots we are.
Why can’t we see? It’s so clear.
Another way to annihilate the Palestinian people is to deny aid to them. It can’t be denied that it is a brilliant strategy to throw this blanket accusation to put the whole institution’s reputation in doubt. They knew the idiot western countries would believe them, not the UNRWA.
It’s monstruous what we are allowing to happen.
@oatmeal@israel@palestine Hamas almost certainly steals aid, but the idea that UNRWA, like, hands it over to them is pretty absurd. Hamas probably takes it as a tithe/tax from households. And if anything they prefer money to whatever the U.N. gives out.
@ia42 loved the " 76 years of perpetualizing hereditary refugee status" ... it's also called occupation, btw, and we know who's refusing a two state solution, or any solution.
There's no problem with UNRWA. UNRWA didn't kill 30,000 Israelis, last time I checked. Also, let's not get started on Israel textboox and at which stage de-humanization of Palestinians (AKA "Arabs") starts in the Israeli education system.
@MisuseCase@oatmeal@israel@palestine Sure, a few thousand Hamas fighters, whom Israel cannot seem to find, emerge out in the open to carry off aid for a million people. Do they drive the trucks away (where to?) without being spotted by Israel? Do they carry thousands of tons of food off to a bunker by hand? How stupid do you think we are? So d’uh, of course the aid will also end up feeding fighters, but believing that that diversion is a contributing factor to the famine requires a mind-boggling level of innumeracy and inability to deal with order-of-magnitudes calculations…
@bifouba@oatmeal@israel@palestine No I don’t mean right now, I mean this was a thing going on for years before October. You know Gaza was getting aid/dependent on aid for a long time right?
Am I aware that for decades, starting before Hamas even existed, Israel purposefully and systematically destroyed and suffocated Gaza's economy, including its fishery, to force its population into aid dependence, imposed a flagrantly illegal siege where it applied a Mengele-like calibration of food imports to only just avoid starvation, and at various times arbitrarily banned things like asthma inhalers and other civilian necessities and sources of joy in acts of pure sadism, in a way that was characterised by those in the know as a “slow-motion genocide”?
Yes, I'm aware.
Not sure in what twisted way you think that supports your argument about “Hamas stealing aid" somehow being the right problem to focus on at the moment, though. But for the love of God, spare us the explanation.
@bifouba@oatmeal@israel@palestine Uh…I didn’t say Israel didn’t do those things also. I’m well past the point of overexplaining myself to people who yell at me for not sufficiently condemning Side B when I say something bad about Side A in a goddamn Toot, so yell all you want, I do not care about it.
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