Current and former UNRWA officials say that the agency has long taken seriously and investigated accusations of infiltration by Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007. The agency has variously responded to tips from Israel, the United States and its own networks. It was the kind of challenge, they said, that all aid groups operating in hostile environments faced, not unique to UNRWA, which has worked in the enclave for decades.
Rather than addressing such issues in a systematic process, they dealt with them in a piecemeal way mostly in private, working with officials at the United Nations in New York. Over the years, several people who had proven Hamas links were fired or left the agency, including after the 2014 investigation, current and former officials said.
Israel has long made a broader accusation: UNRWA didn’t go far enough to root out Hamas and was unwilling to clean up systematically. It has said UNRWA is a completely compromised organization that is too weak to protect against infiltration and needs to be replaced by a more neutral aid group.
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UNRWA’s leaders say the agency strives to ensure its 13,000 employees in Gaza uphold standards of neutrality, regularly training its staff to stay above politics and investigating those who do not. But they add that it is impossible for UNRWA — like any large organization that draws its staff from a cross-section of society — to track the private political allegiances of all its employees.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When the United Nations launched an investigation a decade ago into whether a handful of its employees in Gaza were members of Hamas, it was not long before a senior U.N. legal officer in the territory started receiving death threats.
Previously unreported episodes like this one, from October 2014, form part of the back story to the current crisis embroiling UNRWA, the U.N. relief group in Gaza now sheltering more than half of the enclave’s population.
UNRWA’s leaders say the agency strives to ensure its 13,000 employees in Gaza uphold standards of neutrality, regularly training its staff to stay above politics and investigating those who do not.
After passing under a major road, the tunnel eventually led to a subterranean communications hub, full of servers and computer hardware, that lay directly beneath UNRWA’s sprawling headquarters in the territory.
“You have to be very naïve to think that the UNRWA personnel did not know what was happening under their feet,” not least because the construction and maintenance of the tunnel would have required aboveground assistance, said Maj. Nir Dinar, a spokesman for the Israeli military who accompanied the journalists.
Israel’s ability to extend its invasion is partly reliant on a functional and independent aid operation for Gazan civilians, according to four officials involved in Israeli military planning.
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