Arutz-7 reports:
The UN agency for Palestinian Arab “refugees,” UNRWA, has caused outrage by apparently giving rockets to Hamas.An EoZ reader wrote to UNRWA to ask them about this story. Their denial is not exactly satisfying:
On Thursday, UNRWA confirmed that 20 rockets had been found in one of its vacant schools in Gaza.
UNRWA staff said last week that they had “informed the relevant parties and successfully took all necessary measures for the removal of the objects.”
However, Channel 2 reports Sunday that - rather than destroying the rockets - UNRWA workers called Hamas to come remove them.
Of course we did not hand the rockets over to Hamas.Their denial is laughable.
The authorities who came and collected the weapons are under the direct authority of the government of national consensus which Hamas has left and which many in Hamas are openly hostile to. The key point is that the weapons were handed over to people who are not answerable to Hamas.
There is no real presence of the PA "technocratic" government in Gaza. Everything is under control of Hamas. Certainly there is no independent Palestinian Arab institution in Gaza with the ability or expertise to properly dispose of terrorist rockets. Whoever UNRWA handed the rockets to, no matter who, is almost certain to have in turn handed them to a terror group.
And that terror group might not have been Hamas. After all, the PA is dominated by Fatah, and Fatah groups have been firing rockets towards Israel non-stop since the beginning.
UNRWA's denial is so disingenuous as to border on the criminal.
Then again, UNRWA has a history of such attempts to cover their tracks while winking at terror groups. Last December I visited the Kerem Shalom crossing and spoke to the person who runs it. He told me that he knows, personally, the middlemen who transport cement and other items earmarked for "international projects" such as for UNRWA - and he knows for sure that some of it gets diverted to being purchased or given to Hamas, presumably for the terror tunnels that we are seeing in Gaza today. It isn't UNRWA officials who personally go to the crossing to get cement; they hire the same people who everyone else uses and who are on the take.
UNRWA doesn't care about the reality of how they enable terrorists to kill Israelis as long as they have deniability. And that is exactly what the letter above tells us, quite clearly.
(h/t Yerushalimey)