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Two days following reports of a network of Hamas tunnels hundreds of meters long running partly under the headquarters of the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees, known by its English acronym UNRWA, tensions between Israel and the agency are growing, to say the least.
Western countries are expressing their displeasure and are increasingly talking regarding diverting humanitarian aid for the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip to other agencies and organizations in the fifth month of the war between Israel and the Islamist movement.
At the same time, Israel has no interest in the agency being drained of blood already in the course of the conflict: no matter how much politicians talk regarding directly replacing one agency with another, the UN warns, such an attempt will cut off aid.
Office premises with steel safes
News of the discovery of the 700m long and 18m deep tunnels is seen by Israel as new evidence of Hamas’ exploitation of the main Palestinian aid agency. Both foreign and Israeli media reported on the facilities days following it was announced that 12 UNRWA staff were being investigated for their involvement in the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people. Israel claims the number of Hamas operatives is in the triple digits.
With a new law, the US will redirect aid to the Palestinians from the UN agency
As a result, at least 19 countries and institutions have frozen funding for UNRWA – including the United States, the largest donor. Not all followed the US – Spain, for example, increased its contribution – but the outflow of US aid will be a test for the 13,000-employee agency. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, warned that the agency should be allowed to continue its work while it investigates what happened.
The agency is expected to lose $65 million in revenue by the end of February.
Israeli intelligence names 190 UN staff as terrorists in Gaza
Based in Gaza City, UNRWA has provided health, education, social services, and distributed aid to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians for decades. According to the latest claims by the Israeli army, a Hamas data center is located directly below it. A Reuters reporter who went down with other journalists taken by the army, tells:
“The tunnel, which the military said was 700 meters long and 18 meters deep, sometimes split, revealing side rooms. There was an office space with steel safes that were opened and emptied. There was a tiled toilet. One large cell was filled with computer servers, another with industrial batteries.”
“Everything takes place from here. All the power for the tunnels you’ve gone through is fed from here,” says the lieutenant colonel, who gave only his first name, Ido. “This is one of the central intelligence commands. This place is one of the Hamas intelligence units, where they commanded most of the battle.”
The reporter specifies that the lack of mobile phones in the tunnel made it impossible to geolocate it under the UNRWA headquarters. Reporters were asked to place personal belongings in a bucket lowered by rope into a vertical hole on the headquarters grounds. The New York Times, whose reporters are also part of such a tour, talk of cables being invited into an office at UNRWA headquarters that lead to the movement’s tunnel complex.
Omnidirectional signals
The headquarters that Israel is talking regarding is located in Gaza City, in the northern part of the Strip. UNRWA insists it was not formally informed of the tunnel by Israeli authorities and cannot comment as it left the building on October 12, days following the war began.
The UN also commissioned an independent investigation into the Palestinian refugee agency
“UNRWA… has no military expertise and security experience, nor the capacity to undertake military inspections of what is or may be under its premises,” the statement said. “In the past, when a suspicious cavity was discovered near or under UNRWA premises, letters of protest were immediately sent to the parties to the conflict, including both the de facto authorities in Gaza (“Hamas” – ed.) and the Israeli authorities. “
“UNRWA did not know what was under its headquarters in Gaza”, wrote and later Philip Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, on X (formerly Twitter), and an agency official later saw in Tel Aviv’s words only an attempt to undermine its work. “Oh, you knew,” replied Israel’s Agency for the Coordination of Activities in the Occupied Territories and Gaza (COGAT). “It takes over 4 months to dig a tunnel.” Furthermore, the agency continues, Israel has invited UN representatives to see for themselves, and UNRWA chooses to “ignore the facts”. (The Israeli military did not specifically claim that UNRWA knew at the lowest level.)
While Israel and UNRWA exchanged remarks, however, the New York Times published previously undisclosed details regarding the agency’s work on previous investigations into the membership of Hamas officials. A decade ago, shortly following such an investigation began, a senior UNRWA legal officer began receiving threats on his life – anonymously, then in the form of a bouquet, finally – and a grenade. The employee was evacuated.
Several people with ties to Hamas have been fired over the years, but UNWRA, according to the same publication, has not developed a systematic approach to such cases, but “piecemeal” and in informal communication with the UN in New York. From Lazzarini’s comments to the same media, it is understood that, according to him, there is no way to exclude connections between specific officials and Hamas, given its central place in life in Gaza:
Our employees are part of the social fabric of Gaza and its ecosystem. And Hamas is part of the social fabric in Gaza.
Philip Lazzarini,
Commissioner-General of UNRWA
What Israel really wants
Tel Aviv believes that UNRWA has not done enough to investigate the cases and can no longer claim to be neutral. However, there is a certain difference between what Benjamin Netanyahu’s government says publicly and unofficially.
Israel officially claims the agency has been “breached by Hamas and must be replaced.” Hamas has denied working in civilian facilities.
Unofficially – and such signals have come to numerous international and regional media in the past two weeks – Tel Aviv is aware that now is not the time to weaken the agency.
This is not in Israel’s interest at a time when it is being criticized for causing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and when protests are taking place along the borders in an attempt to block the delivery of aid to the strip. Thousands living in refugee camps in the occupied West Bank, who rely on the agency for access to a host of services, would also be at risk.
In the West Bank alone, UNRWA serves over 870,000 people, manages 96 schools and 43 health facilities. A breakdown in their work would raise discontent in the West Bank, where tensions were rising even before the October 7 war.
Israel’s “war on two or three fronts”: will the West Bank also flare up?
No one else can do what UNRWA does. The claims need to be verified… let’s wait for the investigation to take place. At this time, people should continue to eat, continue to go to the doctor.
Josep Borrell,
high representative of the EU in foreign policy
Even if the claims are not just true, but only the tip of the iceberg and that UNRWA is “infiltrated” by the UN, this only creates new problems instead of solving the old ones.
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