A school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency hid a map depicting what it referred to as “historic Palestine” — a territory that encompasses Israel — on the occasion of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s visit to the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.
The map, draped with a white sheet, was visible in photos of Ban’s press conference at the UNRWA institution, the Times of Israel reported.
Photo: Ynet
UNRWA has previously come under criticism for the ties it maintains with Hamas, which rules Gaza. UNRWA’s spokesman Chris Gunness spoke last October at an event for Interpal, a UK-based organization that was designated a terrorist entity by the U.S. for financing Hamas. Several weeks earlier, a number of UNRWA staff members were fired for posting Facebook statuses inciting violence against Israelis. Hamas rockets were also found in UNRWA schools on three separate occasions during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014.
During his visit to Gaza, Ban said that Israel’s restriction on imports — which is designed to prevent Hamas from acquiring weapons to fire at Israeli civilians — “suffocates its people, stifles its economy and impedes reconstruction efforts.” Notably, Israel and Egypt’s blockade on Gaza was imposed in June 2007, following Hamas’ takeover of the territory and violent expulsion of Fatah. Last month, Israeli authorities uncovered a shipment of four tons of ammonium chloride, which could have resulted in the production of hundreds of long-range rockets, due to the blockade. While Israel has transferred more than 50,000 truckloads of goods to Gaza since January, lagging reconstruction efforts have been attributed to Hamas’ diversion of materials ear-marked for civilian use to build its underground network of tunnels, which the Washington Post reported costs millions to build and maintain.
“Building supplies flow regularly into Gaza,” Dan Feferman wrote in The Tower Magazine in April. “But according to declassified intelligence reports, these supplies are routinely stolen by Hamas in order to serve the group’s terrorist purposes. Hamas smuggles in cement, diverts from construction and humanitarian donations, and even raids civilian construction sites in order to rebuild its tunnels. Estimates are that one tunnel can cost a million dollars to build and uses around 50,000 tons of concrete. Close to a million tons of concrete were poured into the terror tunnels before 2014.”
The UN has been frequently accused of systemic bias against the Jewish state. UNESCO passed a resolution on Jerusalem in April that referred to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in the Jewish faith, only as al-Aqsa Mosque/al-Haram al-Sharif. The same resolution placed the Western Wall in quotation marks and described other Jewish holy sites in Israel as “so-called.” Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., and Omer Barlev, a member of Knesset from the opposition Zionist Union Party, appealed Ban in an op-ed on Tuesday “to call [on] the incoming Secretary General to engage with the Israeli people, set a timetable to eliminate the bias and discrimination that has poisoned the relationship and restore faith in this most valuable of international bodies.” Oren and Barlev pointed out that of the 128 country-specific condemnations put forward by the UN Human Rights Council, more than half – 67 – have targeted Israel, indicative of a fixation on the Jewish state.
“The United Nations, once a beacon of hope in the dark days following the conflagration of World War II and the Holocaust, has been overrun by repressive regimes that violate human rights and consistently undermine international security,” Ron Prosor, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the UN, wrote in The Huffington Post on Monday. “It is clear that the inmates have taken over the asylum and the warden has been glad to give them the keys.” Prosor also noted that, while all other countries’ human rights abuses are covered by the UNHRC’s Agenda Item 4, Israel is the only country singled out for criticism with its own Agenda Item (number 7).
[Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90]