Sunday, February 04, 2024
- Sunday, February 04, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
The Telegraph examines some statistics about the number of UNRWA workers killed in Gaza, and the timeframes. They are trying to imply that Israel was targeting UNRWA workers in the first weeks of the war when the bulk of them were killed.
Why would so many of the UNRWA deaths be military age males?
But while they report another anomalous statistic, they don't speculate as to the reasons.
The article says that there are 13,000 UNRWA workers in Gaza, of whom 59% are women. Yet among the UNRWA casualties, only 38% are women.
Moreover, as the article points out, the UNRWA deaths in the first weeks were evenly divided between the north and south parts of Gaza, even though Israel's general bombing campaign was far more concentrated in the north.
Either Israel was targeting UNRWA males - which seems highly unlikely, since there is nothing to gain from that.
Or Israel was targeting Hamas and other militants, and a high number of UNRWA males killed were moonlighting as Hamas operatives.
The Telegraph unwittingly supports that theory by saying that 148 out of the 150 UNRWA employees killed through mid-January were off-duty - it was after hours. It does not say how many of them were at their homes and how many were elsewhere - and I doubt that UNRWA would ever share that information.
Anyway you look at it, the difference between the 61 males expected to be killed if Israel was targeting all UNRWA workers, and the 93 males actually killed who were UNRWA workers, is statistically significant. Chances are that many of the UNWRA male casualties were in proximity with Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants - or were terrorists themselves.
Another possibility is that some of the UNRWA workers killed, including women, were human shields.
UNRWA told the Telegraph that Israel knows where UNRWA workers live and implied that any airstrikes on them were deliberate, but that is not how the IDF works. However, from the 2014 war we know that Hamas terrorists were found killed in the houses of families with different last names.
Top Hamas commander Ahmad Sahmoud was killed in 2014 in an airstrike along with 19 children of the Abu Jame' family. Why was he staying with so many young children?
Is it not possible that Hamas, knowing that UNRWA employees enjoyed some level of protection in previous wars, had some of their people use UNRWA homes as safe havens?