The Israeli file, offered to US officers on Friday, lists the names and positions of UNRWA staff and the accusations towards them.
The file said that Israeli intelligence officers had decided the actions of six of the boys inside Israel on October 7 from their telephones; Others had been monitored as they made telephone calls in Gaza, discussing, the Israelis say, their involvement within the Hamas assault.
Palestinians flee the Israeli floor offensive in Kahn Younis, Gaza Strip, late final week.Credit score: AP
Three others obtained textual content messages telling them to report back to assortment factors on Oct. 7, and one was informed to carry rocket-propelled grenades saved at his dwelling, in response to the submitting.
The Israelis described ten of the workers as members of Hamas, the militant group that managed Gaza on the time of the October 7 assault. One other is claimed to have ties to a different militant group, Islamic Jihad.
But seven of the suspects are additionally believed to be lecturers at UNRWA colleges, instructing college students topics reminiscent of arithmetic and Arabic. Two others labored on the colleges in different capacities. The remaining three had been described as a clerk, a social employee and the warehouse supervisor.
Essentially the most detailed allegations within the file involved a college counselor from Khan Younis, southern Gaza, who’s accused of working together with his son to kidnap a lady from Israel.
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A social employee from Nuseirat, in central Gaza, is accused of serving to carry the physique of a useless Israeli soldier to Gaza, distributing ammunition and coordinating automobiles on the day of the assault.
The Israeli accusations come towards the backdrop of many years of friction with UNRWA. Since 1949, the group has cared for the households of Palestinians who fled or had been pushed from their properties through the wars surrounding the institution of the State of Israel.
The group offers important help to greater than 5 million Palestinian refugees throughout the Center East, whose future and standing have by no means been resolved regardless of years of negotiations.
However for critics, together with many Israelis, the company is an impediment to resolving the battle. Its existence, they are saying, prevents Palestinian refugees from integrating into new communities and fuels their desires of sooner or later returning to what’s now Israel — a aim that Israel says it can by no means enable. And in Gaza, Israel argues, UNRWA has fallen underneath the affect of Hamas, a declare the group rejects.
This isn’t the primary time the US has lower off funding to the UN company. The Trump administration has suspended help as a part of its efforts to strain Palestinian leaders to cease demanding that refugees be allowed to return to Israel.
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However the present menace to its funding is taken into account essentially the most critical in historical past as a result of it comes at a time of disaster for Gaza.
Amid warnings of famine, the collapse of the healthcare system and the mass displacement of the Palestinian inhabitants, UNRWA’s work is taken into account extra necessary than ever. It helps coordinate the distribution of the aid provides – nevertheless meager – that arrive in southern Gaza every single day, and the faculties present shelter for greater than 1 million folks in Gaza, in response to company statistics.
The suspension of funding may very well be felt shortly. Not like different UN businesses, UNRWA doesn’t have a strategic monetary reserve. Guterres stated companies might need to be lowered from February.
This text initially appeared in The New York Occasions.