This looks like an admission of guilt after months of denial: "The UN said on Monday that nine staff working for its Palestine refugee agency UNRWA will be sacked because they may have been involved in the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks against Israel," a statement posted Monday to the UN's online press release section stated.
UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq confirmed that all nine will be terminated following an investigation of official allegations initially lodged by Israel that UNWRA staff had been involved in the terror attacks which killed about 1,200 people near the border with Gaza, and which resulted in 251 Israelis and foreigners taken hostage.
Already most countries have withdrawn funding from the UN agency - known according to its full name as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East - due to the Israeli allegations, which said that at least a dozen local Palestinian staff members took part in the attack. In total the UN said it investigated 19.
This major development is a significant reversal from the agency's stance in March, when it claimed some its employees had been pressure by Israeli security services in to making false confessions while in detention. Controversy exploded in America as well, given the outsized funding of the UN agency from Washington (and US taxpayers).
At one point in the controversy Israeli officials had claimed that a whopping 450 UNWRA staff had been involved in terrorist organizations. In total the UNRWA is known to employ 13,000 people in Gaza.
UN agencies tend to employ most people at their local country staff offices, but much fewer at their regional offices, and on up to their diplomatically credentialed staff, which is a much smaller circle of highly vetted people.
Haq's statement did not disclose what their exact involvement in the Oct.7 may have been, or whether it was a matter of operational foreknowledge. "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," he said.
The Israel Defense Forces on Monday reacted to the new report of the employees' mass firing, saying it shows the UNRWA has hit a "new low".
Back in January, Israel provided to The Wall Street Journal an intelligence dossier which was said to have identified the 12 local UN staff with connections to Oct.7. Included among the intelligence findings were...
Six United Nations Relief and Works Agency workers were part of the wave of Palestinian militants who killed 1,200 people in the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust, according to the intelligence dossier.
Two helped kidnap Israelis. Two others were tracked to sites where scores of Israeli civilians were shot and killed. Others coordinated logistics for the assault, including procuring weapons.
Of the 12 Unrwa employees with links to the attacks, seven were primary or secondary school teachers, including two math teachers, two Arabic language teachers and one primary school teacher.
The report described that in some cases individual UNRWA workers had actually taken part in the cross-border raids of Oct.7 - while another, a female math teacher, was found to possess a photograph of a female Israeli hostage on her phone. In one instance, a Palestinian social worker absconded with the body of a deceased Israeli soldier.
However, Monday's UN press release withheld any and all details of what the group is suspected of, or what information has been confirmed or proven.
