While UNRWA’s mission is to “relieve” and “support” the Palestinians, it has been doing exactly the opposite. It has been keeping Palestinians in pens as refugees and obstructing them from integrating and from normalizing their lives, all while UNRWA seems to be funnelling international aid money to whitewashing the terrorist organization Hamas . . .
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2962/unrwa-the-palestinians-enemy – 3/21/2012
Tuesday’s incident was the third instance in which Palestinian armaments were found in UN facilities in the Gaza Strip. On July 22, the UN agency found rockets stockpiled in another school which “is situated between two other UNRWA schools that currently each accommodate 1,500 internally displaced persons.”
A week before that, UNRWA found some 20 rockets in a school under its auspices, also during a standard inspection.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/rockets-found-in-unrwa-school-for-third-time/ – 7/30/2014.
When there was talk of reforming the UNRWA by removing Hamas members from its ranks, the editor of a Hamas paper wrote that, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance,’ in its various forms.”
The official word from Hamas was that it and the UNRWA are the same thing. The UNRWA’s vast majority of locally sourced Gazans are part of Hamas.
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-unrwa-is-hamas/2014/08/07/ – 8/7/2014
How did those rockets, whatever the number, get into the UNRWA schools in the first place?
Is it not possible someone had a key and let themselves in?
That would be the better story.
Any other explanation would belie explicit complicity with Hamas, making UNRWA perhaps the largest publicly funded terror agency in history.
http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-strongly-condemns-placement-rockets-school – 7/17/2014.
http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-condemns-placement-rockets-second-time-one-its-schools – 7/22/2014.
http://af.reuters.com/article/egyptNews/idAFL6N0Q45TO20140729 – “U.N. says more rockets found at one of its Gaza schools” – 7/29/2014
Israel was denounced for destroying “homes and neighborhoods” and “civilian infrastructure.” But the fact that Israel had destroyed an extraordinary labyrinth of 32 terror tunnels deep underground – running for miles, jam packed with explosives, opening near Israeli towns, and built for the sole purpose of killing Jews – somehow just got left out.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/65178 – “The Continuing United Nations War Against the Jews” – 8/9/2014.
Also by Anne Bayefsky —
As the terrorist organization Hamas breaks yet another ceasefire, it operates with the firm belief that it will be protected on the international stage. That’s because the modern United Nations has become an instrument of war, just seven decades after it was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
But Gaza under Hamas is a place with only two basic industries: aid and terrorism. These are much entwined, and not solely because Hamas controls Unrwa’s staff unions in Gaza, where in 2012 a Hamas-affiliated slate swept 25 of 27 seats. In effect the U.N. group subsidizes Hamas. Among U.N. agencies in the Middle East, Unrwa is the largest employer, with a regular budget for 2014 of $731 million, and a total budget that, with emergency appeals, tops $1 billion.
The agency has roughly 30,000 staff on its payroll, almost all Palestinian. Some 12,500 work in Gaza, home to 1.2 million Unrwa-registered refugees, who account for about two-thirds of Gaza’s population. The U.N. agency’s welfare programs relieve Hamas of many of the costs of servicing the enclave it controls as its launchpad for terror.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/65157 – “The U.N. Handmaiden of Hamas” – 8/8/2014.
From search string “UNRWA, corruption” —
“Most Western donor countries have been reluctant, for obvious political reasons, to call the P.A. or the U.N. to account for the theft and waste of their taxpayers’ money in the morass of corruption and political extremism that is Palestinian politics,” Danby said.
http://www.jta.org/2009/02/26/news-opinion/world/aussie-lawmaker-unrwa-notoriously-corrupt – 2/26/2009.
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http://www.israelifrontline.com/2011/10/busted-60-years-of-unrwa-corruption.html – 10/24/2011 – Vimeo Video, 30 minutes.
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The demonstrators blocked Ain al-Hilweh’s main road with burning tires and dumpsters.
They waved banners that read: “No to UNRWA’s corrupt policy,” and “No to UNRWA’s conspiratorial policies.” Another placard said: “People want medical care and medication.”
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Backgrounders –
http://www.meforum.org/3404/reforming-unrwa – Fall 2012.
http://israelseen.com/2014/07/21/michael-shine-unrwa-for-palestinian-refugees-corruption-of-the-recipients/ – 7/21/2014. “The shame is that the refugees have suffered far more at the hands of their Arab brethren than they ever would have been by Israel. We can’t turn back the clock to tell them that they would have been better off staying where they were in 1948, what is for sure is that they would have been, and deep down, many of them know it! They have been lied to, stolen from and killed by their own Arab Muslim brothers and cousins, and now the only place and people which they can find to blame are Israel and the Jews. I cry for the mothers and children in Gaza, hurt as a direct result of the actions of those that they chose to represent them, but my sympathy is for the people and soldiers of Israel who are forced, once again, to defend the land of Israel against indiscriminate rocket attacks on innocent civilians.”
I seldom, perhaps never, have used the “N” word (here related to German history, not the history of America’s southern states) in discourse and on this post, despite the rueful cuteness of the title, do no use it lightly. However, UNRWA appears to have melded with Arab pan-nationalist willpower and vitriol to hold captive as useful weapons the descendants of the refugees of 1948.
More than that, with rocket stores appearing repeatedly in UNRWA facilities in the course of recent hostilities, with tons of building supplies diverted to the construction of tunnels packed with explosives and weapons intended for an assault on Israel, with Hamas firing on, from within, or around UNRWA facilities, and with unknown members directly employed as “Palestinians” — I’m not going to use that made-up empty invention of a term anymore: I will call them “Gazans”, those refugees long settled in Gaza — it seems entirely appropriate to embed the “N” word in “UNRWA”.
The growing wealth of Hamas’s leadership has led to increased resentment of the terrorist organization that governs Gaza. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2011 that Gazans “tell stories of Hamas officials who used to drive modest cars now sporting luxury vehicles, and … complain the government is reaching into their pockets in every way it can.” The Ynet report notes that in contrast to the leadership of Hamas, a World Bank report ranks “the Gaza Strip … third in the Arab region in terms of poverty, ranking above only Sudan and Yemen.”
The irony is that Hamas reportedly gained popularity, in part, due to its reputation for honesty as opposed to its rival Fatah, which is known for corruption.
http://www.thetower.org/0707-while-gazans-suffer-in-poverty-leaders-of-hamas-live-in-luxury/ – 7/15/2014.
Sources in the Gaza Strip said on Thursday that Taha was executed because Hamas feared he might implicate some of its leaders in many corruption scandals. “The man knew too much about the senior leaders of Hamas,” said a veteran journalist living in Gaza City who had close ties with Taha. “Hamas leaders used to take him with them on their visits to different countries.”
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4588/ayman-taha – 8/8/2014.
Despite the often-heard statement that the Gaza Strip is “densely populated” – a point repeatedly used to explain why Hamas fires rockets from busy civilian areas – the reality is that there are indeed parts of Gaza that are thinly populated.
Built on the abuse and exploitation of Gazans en masse, it appears the “solidarity movement” in Gaza has turned out another business enterprise fit to mafia-styled “men of honor” who appear at the moment (of need) to be absent from Gaza and suffering deeply with the worry of husbanding their millions to billions of looted dollars.
What kind of persons do that to those they have purported to represent?
What kind of global organizations supports that kind of person?
I should think the “N” word suits both perfectly.
Addendum
“Rather than falsely accusing Israel,” the letter continued, “one might have expected that as the executive head of the UN, you would have admitted responsibility of the UN for such abuse of its facilities, and instituted a thorough inquiry as to how and why UNRWA facilities were placed at the disposal of the Hamas terror organization, how and why the UN officials responsible for such facilities permitted this situation to occur, and why those rockets and other weapons that were discovered in such facilities were transferred to Hamas, for their continued use against Israel’s citizens.
“In permitting the storage of weapons, and in transferring such weapons into the hands of Hamas,” the letter asserted, “the UN has in fact permitted itself to become accessory to the commission of war crimes.”
http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/20841/unrwa-aiding-terrorism/#MxaSrOKRGtDwAy43.99 – 8/31/2014.
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