UN Challenges Israel on UNRWA Terror Link Claims

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Israel is holding 25 U.N. employees in the Palestinian West Bank or Gaza but has not charged any with a crime or even told the United Nations (news - web sites) of their detention, U.N. officials said on Wednesday.

The officials spoke a day after an Israeli officer in Jerusalem said Israel had arrested 13 employees of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and planned to indict them for "suspected links to terrorism."

Israel linked the U.N. employees to "terrorism" shortly after backing away from an accusation that Palestinian militants transported a rocket to be fired at Israel in an UNRWA ambulance in Gaza.

Israel had based its missile allegations on fuzzy video images taken from a military drone; UNRWA insisted the film showed an ambulance driver carrying a stretcher.

Israel is now detaining one person in Gaza and 24 in the West Bank, U.N. chief spokesman Fred Eckhard told reporters, adding that the individual in Gaza had been held for over two years and was still awaiting trial.

He said he was speaking on the issue because of reports that UNRWA staff "may have been detained by Israeli authorities for their involvement in terror activities."

While UNRWA quickly requests information about any staff member it finds has been detained, Israel had rarely provided any information, he said.

Nor had UNRWA officials been allowed access to the detainees, said Maher Nasser, an UNRWA aide in New York.

While Israel initially gave the impression the UNRWA staffers had all been detained recently, it later said it was talking about detentions made since the start of a four-year-old Palestinian uprising.

Israeli charges that UNRWA staff were involved in terrorism "complicate our work and endanger our staff," Nasser said. "They keep being drummed up in the media. But when the time comes to pull the rabbit out of the hat, there is no rabbit."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) has dispatched a team to Jerusalem to look into the allegations that a U.N. ambulance driver was filmed putting a Qassam rocket into his vehicle.

Israeli U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman charged on Monday that the United Nations was being "cynically used by murderers to transport Qassam rockets in U.N. vehicles."

UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen, in response, called it "appalling" that Israel "would put out such deliberately inciteful, false and malicious propaganda" while its armed forces were pursuing a military offensive in the same place where UNRWA ambulances were carrying out their work.

New York Post editorial - October 5, 2004

THE U.N.'S TERROR PROBLEM

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/31306.htm

October 5, 2004 -- Israel is up in arms — and rightly so: The head of the key United Nations agency dealing with the Palestinians has admitted that his organization employs members of the terrorist group Hamas.
Worse yet, he says he has no problem with that.

There's more. Israeli officials have released an alarming videotape that shows terrorists using an official United Nations vehicle to transport Qassam rockets. (The video was shot from an unmanned Israeli drone over the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza.)

The same terror-friendly U.N. official — Peter Hansen, the director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — insists the tape only shows a stretcher, not a rocket, being loaded into the truck.

(PLO leader Yasser Arafat has chimed in on the dispute with the incredible claim that the easily hidden and transported Qassam missiles, which have become a weapon of choice for groups like Hamas, cause no casualties and "only make noise.")

But Israeli officials are standing by their accusation and demanding a full investigation — and Hansen's immediate firing.

Yesterday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched a formal probe. (Meanwhile, the Security Council got set for a special meeting to condemn Israel for its latest military response in Gaza — as always, with not a word about the murderous Palestinian terrorism that preceded it.)

Canada, a major financial backer of UNRWA, is asking for a "clarification" from the United Nations. Washington, another big donor, should go even further and suspend its payments.

The video is damning enough — though it's hardly surprising in light of the United Nations' long and sorry history of one-sided bias against Israel.

Back in October 2000, recall, the United Nations sought to hide a videotape showing the aftermath of three Israeli soldiers being kidnaped along the Lebanese border by terrorists from Hezbollah. Pressed by Israel, the world body finally admitted the tape existed — but refused to release it until the faces of all the terrorists were first obscured.

That was necessary, the United Nations said, in order to protect its own strict "neutrality."

In fact, the U.N. won't even admit that such groups engage in terrorism against Israel.

Which is why UNRWA's Hansen says of the presence of Hamas members on his payroll: "I don't see that as a crime." Hamas, he says, "is a political organization . . . and we do not do political vetting."

All he demands of his staff, says Hansen, "is that they behave in accordance with U.N. standards." And we all know what those standards are.

Israel's U.N. ambassador, Dan Gillerman, has written the secretary-general to charge that "instead of serving the interests of peace, the U.N. enlists in Gaza . . . on the side of terrorists."

And this is the organization without whose support John Kerry would refuse to take action to protect America's security.

Thanks, to you for the heads up and NIN!

IDF video from unmanned drone shows terrorists using UN Ambulance to transport Qassem rockets

Over the past days, IDF forces have been operating in order to stop the firing of Qassam rockets onto Israeli towns. An IDF UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) took photographs of a group of Palestinian terrorists clearly seen loading Qassam rockets into a vehicle labeled "UN". The photographs were taken on October 1st in Jabaliya.

Sequence of Events:

1. Four terrorists approach the vehicle	2. Group splitting up	3. Two terrorists walk towards the vehicle

4. Qassam rockets loaded into the vehicle	5. Terrorists enter the vehicle and drive away

View Video Here

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