Recently declassified documents by Israeli intelligence links United Nations workers with Middle East terrorist organizations, an Israeli journalist and social worker told Capitol Hill lawmakers Wednesday.

David Bedein, bureau chief of the Jerusalem-based Israel Resource News Agency, said he has evidence to show the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is involved in military activity that therefore disqualifies it from receiving U.S. funds.

“The UNRWA is directly involved in an educational system and a paramilitary system that encourages the right of return through all means, including violence. The UNRWA, instead of only being a service provider, has become a terror provider,” Bedein said.

In three years of the latest round of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, the United Nations agency responsible for the welfare of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza has not let up on its incitement of violence against the Jewish state, Bedein charged.

Maher Nasser, the UNRWA liaison at U.N. headquarters in New York, said similar charges brought by Bedein in the past have proven to be essentially baseless.

Nasser was unaware of the substance of the latest allegations, but he said: “The allegation that the UNRWA is complicit or any of its staff or installations have been compromised by terrorism are absolutely baseless and completely fabricated, or unsubstantiated by facts.”

Nasser said the agency, which is primarily based in four countries in the Near and Middle East, does its utmost to ensure the neutrality and impartiality of its installations and holds its staff to standards of international staff conduct.

“Whenever there have been any accusations about involvement or suspicious activities by anybody, the agency would take those seriously and investigate them,” Nasser said.

Bedein told CNSNews.com that he would present recently declassified Israeli intelligence documents linking 15 UNRWA officials with Hamas, which the U.S. State Department has listed as a terrorist organization, to staffers of the House International Relations Committee on Wednesday.

The Israeli government sent the information to the U.S. Congress as part of a General Accounting Office (GAO) report commissioned by Congress earlier this year, Bedein said.

Moreover, in a recent election for the UNRWA trade union, Hamas candidates received 85 percent of the vote, Bedein said, citing Hamas and Palestinian Authority publications.

Bedein said he would substantiate his claims with 300 pages of news reporting on the issue, in addition to research his organization conducted in the UNRWA camps.

US contributes a third of UNRWA budget

The UNRWA was created by the U.N. to provide relief, health and education services to Palestinians who lost their homes and means of livelihood during the Arab-Israeli wars following establishment of the state of Israel in 1949.

Today, the UNRWA is the major U.N. humanitarian agency in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. The agency employs 23,000 officials — the majority of whom are teachers responsible for 500,000 children — including 11,000 officials in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As the agency’s largest single donor, the United States last year contributed $109 million to the UNRWA’s annual budget of about $300 million. In August, the United States authorized an additional special allocation of $26 million to the agency.

The House International Relations Committee adopted an amendment by Vice Chairman Chris Smith (R-N.J.) to the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act that aims to eliminate anti-Semitic messages and references from UNRWA-sponsored education programs for Palestinian refugees.

“The UNRWA has a choice – it can either support peace or support terrorism, and its actions must correspond with its words,” Smith said in a release.

Tensions between the UNRWA and Israel have been high since soldiers shot and killed one of the agency’s British employees, Iain Hook, in November of last year during a gun battle with armed Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The Israelis said its soldiers mistook a cell phone Hook was using for a weapon. Nasser said Hook was one of eight UNRWA staff members killed in violence in the last three years; the others were Palestinians.

According to documents seized by the Israelis during a raid on the Protective Security Service headquarters in Gaza City, Palestinian Authority (PA) officials and institutions in the Gaza Strip are involved in stealing basic food supplies and medicine provided by the UNRWA.

The documents showed that PA officials sold food and medicine on the black market since 1996 and that food distributed by the UNRWA to residents of refugee camps in the Gaza Strip wound up in the hands of private merchants, who sold them on the black market.

A GAO spokeswoman told CNSNews.com that the congressional report, which was begun in mid-April, was completed and would be made public on October 31 or November 3.

Basically, the report will examine to what extent the State Department is complying with the relevant section of the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the United States from giving money to any agency engaged in military activity, and what procedures have been established to meet State Department standards for compliance, the spokeswoman said.

This piece ran on CNSNEWS.COM on October 2, 2003
www.cnsnews.com/ForeignBureaus/archive/200310/FOR20031002a.html

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR