U.N. investigators cleared 10 employees of a Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza accused of taking part in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, but nine others were fired because of possible involvement, the United Nations said.
The investigators found evidence that the employees “may have been involved” in the attack, which set off the war in the Gaza Strip, the U.N. said. It said they had been fired “in the interests of the agency.”
The investigation’s conclusion appeared to bring to a close, for now at least, a controversy that began after Israel leveled the alarming accusations in January against the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. The allegations led dozens of donor nations to suspend hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the agency, threatening to hobble its aid operations in Gaza.
With 13,000 staff members in the embattled territory, UNRWA has been key to efforts to provide shelter, food and other basic services to Gazans during nine months of war that has displaced most of the territory’s 2.2 million people. Tens of thousands have been killed, according to Gaza’s health authorities.
In recent months, most donor nations have resumed funding for the agency, citing its critical role in delivering aid to desperate Gazans, as well as the results of a separate U.N. investigation into UNRWA’s adherence to U.N. neutrality rules that was released in April. But one of its biggest funders, the United States, has not done so. U.S. lawmakers in March blocked all donations for one year.
In a statement on Monday, the agency’s head, Philippe Lazzarini, acknowledged the investigators’ findings and said that the nine employees who were deemed to have possibly participated in the attack “cannot work for UNRWA.”
“I reiterate UNRWA’s condemnation of the 7 October attack in the strongest possible terms,” he said.
The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, dismissed the report as “a disgrace,” calling it “too little and too late.” In a post on social media, Mr. Erdan accused the investigators of ignoring evidence Israel had provided and called for the agency to be shut down.
Mr. Lazzarini said the agency’s priority was to “continue lifesaving and critical services” for Palestinian refugees in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East, “especially in the face of the ongoing war, the instability and risk of regional escalation.”
Israel initially accused 12 UNRWA workers of involvement in the Oct. 7 attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed. In later months, seven other cases were added.
The investigation found no evidence against one of those employees and insufficient evidence against nine others, the U.N. said on Monday.
The Israeli accusations came against the backdrop of decades of friction with UNRWA, which the United Nations General Assembly created in 1949 to care for those displaced in the war surrounding Israel’s creation. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were forced from their homes in what became Israel, and the agency grants refugee status to them and their descendants, who now number nearly six million.
Although it has no official role in resolving the refugees’ plight, Palestinians have long seen it as their protector, and as proof that world powers remain invested in their fate.
Many Israelis, however, argue that the agency perpetuates the conflict by encouraging the belief in a Palestinian “right of return” to what is now Israel. That, critics say, would amount to a demographic threat that would destroy the Jewish state.
In addition to its accusations against individual staff members, Israeli officials have charged that UNRWA in Gaza has been deeply infiltrated by members of Hamas and other militant groups, an allegation agency officials deny.
The investigation whose results were released on Monday did not examine that broader issue, only looking into the allegations of involvement by individual employees in the Oct. 7 attack.
The earlier investigation, whose results were released in April, found that UNRWA had strong protocols for ensuring its neutrality but made a range of recommendations for how it could do better.
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