The United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) considered this Wednesday “very important” an independent investigation into Israeli allegations that it is “harboring terrorists” in the Gaza Strip, a spokeswoman for the body said in Amman.
Major donors including the US, UK, Germany and Japan announced they were suspending their aid to UNRWA after Israel accused 12 of its employees of involvement in the October 7 attack carried out by the military wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement. Hamas.
“We have 33,000 staff (…), it is extremely important for us to conduct an independent investigation into the individual cases reported by Israel,” Tamara Alrifai, a UNRWA spokeswoman, told AFP.
“We received statements from the Israeli government about 12 names in Gaza, we checked those names against our records of 13,000 employees in Gaza and were able to match eight of those names,” he added.
UNRWA announced that it had dismissed most of the staff members identified.
On Tuesday, Israel’s government accused the UN agency of being “fundamentally compromised” and said it was allowing Hamas to “use its infrastructure” to wage war and “hide terrorists.”
Israeli executive spokesman Eilon Levy went further, asserting that the agency is “massively recruiting terrorists” among its 13,000 employees in the Gaza Strip. ‘
However, he provided no evidence regarding these new allegations, which AFP was also unable to verify.
An UNRWA spokesperson noted that “so far, 15 countries have announced a freeze on their contributions to UNRWA,” warning that “if they maintain their decision, the consequences will be catastrophic for the people of Gaza.”
In this Palestinian territory, completely surrounded by Israel and where a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions is expected, entire neighborhoods have been destroyed by Israeli bombing, forcing about 1.8 million of the 2.4 million people to flee their regions and concentrate in the south of the strip. at the UN.
“It will be a disaster (…) because the humanitarian situation in Gaza is already catastrophic, where the war continues, where population displacement continues. [de população]where people are mainly in UNRWA shelters, where they receive UNRWA flour to bake bread, where they receive medical care from UNRWA,” Tamara Alrifai emphasized.
However, the spokeswoman noted that UNRWA, which is responsible for providing assistance to about two million people in the Gaza Strip, has received “assurances of support” in recent days from donors who have suspended their funding.
Netanyahu’s government is the most religious and ultra-nationalist in the country’s history and has made settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank a priority since taking power in late 2022.
The ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007, was sparked by the Islamist movement’s October 7 attack on Israeli territory.
According to Israel’s latest official tally, 1,140 people were killed that day, most of them civilians, but also about 400 soldiers. Some 240 civilians and military personnel were abducted, with Israel reporting that 127 remain in the Gaza Strip.
In response, Israel, which has vowed to destroy the Palestinian Islamist movement, has since bombed the Gaza Strip, where at least 26,400 people – mostly women, children and teenagers – have already been killed, according to the local Hamas-led government. – and more than 64 thousand wounded, also mostly civilians.
The Israeli offensive also destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure and forced about two million people to flee their homes, almost all of the 2.3 million residents of the enclave controlled by Hamas since 2007.
The population of the Gaza Strip is also facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis due to the collapse of hospitals, outbreaks of epidemics and shortages of drinking water, food, medicine and electricity.
Since October 7, at least 365 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army and in settler attacks in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territories occupied by the Jewish State, in addition to 5,600 arrests and more than three thousand injuries.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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