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October 8, 2004/Tishri 23 5765, Vol. 57, No. 6
Israel questions U.N. agency's motives
MICHAEL J. JORDAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - The battle between Israel and the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians intensified on several fronts this week.
First, Israel charged that Palestinians in Gaza used a U.N. ambulance to transport a rocket.
Then the U.N.'s top refugee official admitted that some of his staff are Hamas members.
A day later, the Israel Defense Forces chief of operations, Yisrael Ziv, said that Israel had arrested 13 Palestinians employed by the United Nations on suspicion of terrorism links.
Together, the developments provided more fodder to those who accuse UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, of turning a blind eye to terrorism in its midst.
Even as Israel climbed down a bit Oct. 5, saying it needed to further investigate whether the video image on which the latest charge was based actually depicted a rocket, critics of the United Nations asserted the developments show the agency's tolerance of terrorist activity within its refugee camps is tantamount to complicity.
UNRWA - which provides humanitarian assistance, education services and health care to 4.1 million Pale-stinians, 1.3 million of whom live in 59 UNRWA refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan - has long rejected the charge.
The agency's defenders respond that some of Israel's supporters are campaigning to discredit an institution that promotes the rights of Palestinian refugees.
Where Israel accuses, and sometimes arrests, UNRWA staffers for terrorist activities or abuse of U.N. facilities, the agency says that at most, such instances represent the work of a few bad apples.
"There may be individuals who do things, but it happens within a context that is not unsupportive of terrorist activities," says Harris O. Schoenberg, a longtime nongovernmental activist at the United Nations and the author of "Combating Terror-ism: The Role of the U.N."
"The U.N. is basically tilted to the Arab side, and within that context, UNRWA is one of the worst examples."
On Oct. 4, Israel's ambassa-dor to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, delivered to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan aerial footage purported to show a Palestinian loading a Kassam rocket into the back of a van clearly marked "U.N."
Gillerman called for a full U.N. investigation and the firing of UNRWA's commis-sioner-general, Peter Hansen.
After viewing the footage, the Gaza-based Hansen said the long, thin item carried by a man in the video was not a weapon but a folded up, portable stretcher.
He authorized a four-member U.N. team that was already headed to the region Oct. 5 to investigate the ambulance incident as well.
Annan also agreed to investigate. But in a news conference Oct. 4, his spokes-man said the U.N. chief "has no reason whatever to doubt Hansen's conclusions."
The IDF on Oct. 5 pulled the video from its Web site for further evaluation and re-leased a one-line statement: "The IDF is reviewing the analysis of the footage in which UNRWA vehicles are seen involved in suspicious activity in the combat zone in Gaza."
On Oct. 4, though, an Israeli U.N. official in-sisted to JTA "it shows them load-ing a weapon. We're calling for a serious investi-gation."
An UNRWA official described the incident to JTA as the latest in a series of "baseless" char-ges against the agency.
Earlier this year, Israel accused UNRWA of trans-porting injured terrorists in a U.N. ambulance; UNRWA responded that its driver was forced to do it at gunpoint.
"We've had good working relations with the govern-ment of Israel throughout the years, though there have been times when the relationship is strained, as it is now," says Maher Nasser, UNRWA's representative in New York.
"There is a level of frus-tration, where we expect the Israeli government to come to us if they have a video allegedly showing misuse of UNRWA vehicles, instead of going to the media and misinterpreting it in a way that's harmful to our operation and our repu-tation."
Israel pushes to reform the agency, not abolish it.
"UNRWA is a part of the U.N. and Israel is a member of the U.N.," says an Israeli U.N. official. "But we expect them to be objective and work for peace, not for terror, not shelter terrorists, or put bombs in their ambulances."
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