Israel accuses 190 UNRWA staff of being ‘hardened’ militants

FILE PHOTO: A truck, marked with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) logo, crosses into Egypt from Gaza, at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, during a temporary truce between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah, Egypt, November 27, 2023. Israel accused 190 UN Palestinian aid agency staff of having doubled as Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh/File Photo/File Photo

JERUSALEM/GENEVA — An Israeli intelligence dossier that prompted a cascade of countries to halt funds for a UN Palestinian aid agency includes allegations that some staff took part in abductions and killings during the Oct. 7, 2023, raid that sparked the Gaza war.

The six-page dossier, seen by Reuters, alleges that some 190 UNRWA employees, including teachers, have doubled as Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants. It has names and pictures for 11 of them.

The United Nations has not formally received a copy of the dossier, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Monday.

The Palestinians have accused Israel of falsifying information to tarnish UNRWA, which said it has fired some staffers and is investigating the allegations.

The dossier said one of the 11 is a school counselor who helped his son abduct a woman during the Hamas infiltration in which Israel said 1,200 people were killed and 253 kidnapped.

Another UNRWA staff, a social worker, is accused of unspecified involvement in the transfer to Gaza of a slain Israeli soldier’s corpse and of coordinating the movements of pick-up trucks used by the raiders and of weapons supplies.

A third Palestinian in the dossier is accused of taking part in a rampage in the Israeli border village Beeri, one-tenth of whose residents were killed. A fourth is accused of participating in an attack on Reim, a site of both an army base that was overrun and a rave where more than 360 revelers died.

READ: What is UNRWA, Gaza’s main aid provider, accused of militant links?

Foreign Minister Israel Katz said UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini should go. “UNRWA employees participated in the massacre of October 7,” he said. “Lazzarini should draw conclusions and resign.”

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh accused Israel of a “premeditated political attack” on the agency, which it has long criticized, and called for restoration of aid funds.

The dossier was shown to Reuters by a source who could not be identified by name or nationality. The source said that it had been compiled by Israeli intelligence and shared with the United States, which on Friday suspended funding for UNRWA.

An Israeli official told Reuters the 190 mentioned in the dossier were “hardened fighters, killers,” whereas overall, some 10 percent of UNRWA staff were believed to have more general affiliation with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The agency employs 13,000 people in Gaza. More than 10 countries, including major donors the United States and Germany, have halted their funding to the agency.

Stoppage of fund support was a huge problem for an agency that more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians look to for day-to-day assistance and which has already been hard-stretched by Israel’s war on Hamas in the enclave.

UNRWA said Monday it would be unable to continue operations in Gaza and across the region beyond the end of February if funding were not resumed.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is due to meet with major UNRWA donors in New York on Tuesday, Dujarric said.

Guterres spoke on Monday with the leaders of Jordan and Egypt and also met with the head of UN internal investigations to ensure that an inquiry into the Israeli accusations “will be done swiftly and as efficiently as possible,” Dujarric said.