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22 Kislev 5763 - November 27, 2002 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Allegations that UN Agency Tolerates Terrorism
by Yated Neeman Staff

The Israeli army said its soldiers fired on the walled UN compound inside the refugee camp killing British senior manager Ian Hook, because Palestinian gunmen were shooting at them from inside and Hook's cellphone appeared to them to be a grenade. The United Nations vigorously denied that Palestinian gunmen shot from their building.

Nonetheless, the gate to the UN girls' school in the Jenin refugee camp is plastered with posters hailing suicide bombers. The UN compound down the street has graffiti on its outer wall signed by the militant group Hamas warning that "When they kill a martyr, we will kill 100 Jews."

The UN agency helping Palestinian refugees has provided education and health care to Palestinians for over 50 years since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Paul McCann, a UN spokesman, said the compound is sealed by an 2.5-meter-tall (8-foot) cement block wall topped with another 2 meters (6 feet) of fencing, and closed to anyone without UN permission.

"No, no, no, it was impossible for any Palestinian gunman to get in there," said Tawfiq Mohammad Farhad, 75, whose three- story home is directly across the street from the UN compound. However he says Israeli soldiers used his home to fire onto the UN compound and street as they hunted for a wanted militant.

Israeli officials say Friday's firefight was another instance in which Palestinian militants had used UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency, as a cover to attack Israelis. The refugee camps themselves, such as the one in Jenin, are run by UNRWA and they are centers of terrorist activity.

Raanan Gissin, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said he does not accuse UNRWA of direct collaboration with Palestinian militants, but said UNRWA could do more to "raise its voice" to oppose armed groups from operating in the camps.

"What you find today in Jenin is a litany of the history of the use, misuse and abuse of camps by armed groups," he said. Israel has called Jenin the hotbed of Palestinian militant activity.

UNRWA was created in 1949 to provide relief until a political settlement was found. Since none has yet been reached, the agency today offers education, health care and other services to 3.9 million Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.

In the territories alone, UNRWA operates about 260 schools and about 50 primary health care facilities, serving more than 1.5 million registered refugees and employing about 10,000 Palestinians.

UNRWA says it is not its mandate to go after militants, saying security in refugee camps has always been the responsibility of either Israel or the Palestinian Authority.

"The camps are not UNRWA camps ... it's not like we administer the camps," McCann said. "We have a humanitarian responsibility for people who live in the camps."

Similarly, the teachers, doctors and nurses who work for UNRWA can't be expected to act as informants - they are Palestinians, just like their neighbors, and that's not their job, he said.

Jewish groups and American legislators earlier launched a campaign to reform UNRWA and change its mandate, claiming that its schools tolerated a climate of terrorism that no UN agency would allow.

"UNRWA has been transformed into a shield for terrorism," said Avi Beker, secretary general of the World Jewish Congress. "UNRWA has been used, but at the same time, under the watchful eyes of UNRWA officials, these things are happening."

U.S. Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia said earlier this year that if terrorism was thriving under UNRWA's eye, the United States should withhold funding - which amounts to about one-third of the agency's annual budget of about US$310 million.

 

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