When 84-year-old Ditza Heiman was released from Hamas captivity and ready to tell her story, she revealed that she was held in Gaza for 53 days under the watchful eye of a teacher from the United Nations agency in Gaza, UNRWA.
In August, UNRWA director Philippe Lazzarini was confronted by Ayelet Samerano, whose son was killed on Oct. 7: “As you can see in the video that is online, on Oct. 7 an UNRWA employee entered Israel and actively participated in the massacre, brutally murdering and kidnapping my boy’s body, with a United Nations car, into Gaza.”
It gets tiring to rehearse the many such stories—the nine staffers fired by the agency for participating in the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, the hundreds of agency employees who Israel claims were moonlighting with one of Gaza’s terrorist groups, the discovery that the head of the UNRWA teachers union was also Hamas’s top official in Lebanon, the agency’s sharing of facilities with Hamas command centers, the rockets stored in UNRWA schools and the Hamas tunnels underneath them.
Just reciting that partial list raises a question: Why on earth was UNRWA given free rein in Gaza for so long? Whatever the answer, those days are finally over. The Knesset passed legislation yesterday barring UNRWA from Israel and greatly limiting its work in Gaza and the West Bank (though not banning it from those territories completely).
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