The opening of the school year in Gaza this week was the most harrowing in living memory. Hundreds of psychologists were on hand at all 252 UNRWA schools to lead a week of counseling for 241,000 students. We began with a roll call to see who was alive or dead.Really? A roll call to see how many students in each class died?
The names of the children killed are no mystery. They were widely published. The school administration and teachers knew, before entering the classroom, whether there were any victims in their classes.
If UNRWA has hundreds of psychologists, and if they cared about the welfare of the traumatized kids, they would have done preparation ahead of time to talk to the classmates of the ones who were killed.
If there really were roll-calls throughout UNRWA's hundreds of schools, there can only be one purpose. They were done to teach the kids to hate.
There is no other explanation.
Let's look at some numbers. If 500 kids were killed, then perhaps 350 of them were school-aged. If UNRWA schools teach 241,000 students, then that is perhaps 1/3 of the school-age kids in Gaza. (About half of 1.7 million Gazans are children.)
Which means that about 100 of the children and teens killed in Gaza attended UNRWA schools, out of the 241,000.
If we assume 50 students per classroom, that is about 4800 classrooms, so the likelihood of a child having been killed in a random UNRWA classroom is about one out of a fifty.
Would you want to put your kids through a roll-call to see how many of their classmates were killed if the chances are that low? You would if you want to teach the next generation to hate.
Is that in UNRWA's mandate?
If UNRWA has hundreds of psychologists, they could have dispatched them to the specific schools that were affected, and they could deploy multiple therapists per classroom to help the healing process.
On the other hand, if there were really roll-calls in UNRWA schools, then UNRWA is not trying to heal traumatized kids - they are trying to traumatize them more!
If you believe Gunness' account here, then he has unwittingly proven how thoroughly sick the UNRWA mentality really is.
UPDATE: Another part of the article I had missed:
Behind these statistics are real lives each with a dignity and a destiny that must be nurtured and respected. Allow me to tell you about one of them – the nephew of my colleague, Kamal. A missile struck the house where he lived with his extended family. Four of his brother’s children were severely injured as they slept. Kamal’s eight-year-old nephew was wounded by shrapnel to the face. He was taken to hospital unconscious. The child awoke from his coma blind. We found a hospital in Amman to take the boy. But his mother was denied passage out and eventually his aunt accompanied the sightless boy from Gaza. Ten days later, his father was in the mosque about to pray. It was hit. The child found himself both sightless and fatherless.
Chris Gunness isn't mentioning the apparent reason why the IDF attacked that house. Kamal's brother and the child's father was Nidal Badran, an Al Qassam Brigades battalion commander, who was meeting with two other Hamas terrorists in the mosque - not getting ready to pray.
Everyone knows he was a terrorist - even PCHR admitted it at the time.
Gunness implies that Israel was randomly shooting rockets at houses. All the research I've done is showing quite the opposite. Gunness must know that the brother of his colleague was a Hamas terrorist, but to mention that takes away some of the pathos and therefore reduces the hate that Gunness wants to incite against Israelis.
(h/t Akiva Cohen)