UNRWA takes no responsibility for rocket launchers in shelters
The Board of Inquiry report concerning the strikes at UNRWA facilities during Operation Protective Edge fails to address that the agency’s officials turned a blind eye to Hamas militants' use of the facilities as weapon depots.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon published a summary report of the Board of Inquiry on April 27 concerning the strikes from facilities of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip during Operation Protective Edge in July-August 2014.
The full 207-page report is the outcome of the work carried out by the Gaza Board of Inquiry headed by retired Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert, a senior Dutch officer who served as commander of the UN forces in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and as the military adviser to the UN secretary-general. When Cammaert was assigned for the job in November 2014, Israel decided to cooperate with the Board of Inquiry and provide it with all the necessary information evincing that UNRWA facilities in Gaza were turned into Hamas weapons depots and even used to fire rockets at Israel.
The summary that the UN secretary-general published relates to the first installment of the Board of Inquiry investigation and addresses only the damage to UNRWA facilities. A letter from the UN secretary-general was appended to the summary, in which Ban writes: “I deplore the fact that at least 44 Palestinians were killed as a result of Israeli actions and at least 227 injured at United Nations premises being used as emergency shelters.” He expressed his dismay that “Palestinian militant groups would put United Nations schools at risk by using them to hide their arms.”
But the secretary-general’s dismay should have included not only the “militant groups” (Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades) that imperiled UN facilities, but also that UNRWA employees in Gaza probably knew that the agency’s facilities were being used to conceal Hamas weapons. Yet, they chose not to issue any warnings nor did they do anything about it. It would be inconceivable that the agency’s employees were unaware that rockets and mortars were being stashed there. Hamas militants would not have been able to conceal the weaponry cache inside UNRWA schools and storerooms without the agency’s employees seeing the activity or possibly even assisting.
