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Israel Wants UNRWA Out of Gaza

(JNS) David Isaac - Israel's Foreign Ministry has prepared a classified report calling for the removal of UNRWA from Gaza in the long-term, noting that the UN relief agency works against Israel's interests. Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), says UNRWA "should be dismantled. It was established because of pressure by the Arab world as a platform to leverage the interests of Arab leaders against the State of Israel using the Palestinian [refugee] issue." James G. Lindsay, an American civil servant who served as UNRWA's general counsel, has called for a close examination of its activities, saying it doesn't solve the Palestinian refugee problem, but rather perpetuates it. He noted that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which handles all the rest of the world's refugees, "does not consider someone a refugee who has acquired citizenship in another country....If you can't be a refugee under those definitions, then a very large number of UNRWA Palestinian refugees would not be refugees at all." Kobi Michael said, "The idea that we are still talking about Palestinian refugees is not reasonable. We're talking about fifth-generation refugees when actually they are not refugees at all." The worst aspect of UNRWA is that it's controlled by Hamas. "All the workers of UNRWA in the Gaza Strip - something like 13,000 - all of them are approved by Hamas." Michael said UNRWA is essentially Hamas' educational arm, which is funded by the international community, even though education isn't even part of UNRWA's mandate. That's one more service that Hamas doesn't need to provide, enabling it to pour more of its money into its military, he said.
2024-01-03 00:00:00
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