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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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It makes sense that Hamas members would be found working at the organization, as the org employs 13k Palestinians. This says nothing about UNRWA really, only about the nature of secretive political movements. Literally any organization that employs 13k in Palestine will have some of its members go on to collude with Hamas. A radicalization rate of 9 out of 13k is insignificant, and actually tells us they UNRWA does a good job vetting its employees. “0.007% of UNRWA were determined by the UN to be working with Hamas”is another way to put this. None of them in leadership position at UNRWA but just working as drivers or teachers. So this seems more like casus belli for cutting aid.

As far as I know there has not been any comprehensive examination of every single UNRWA employee, so we have no certain knowledge of how many of the rest of UNRWA employees, besides the 9 confirmed ones, are colluding with Hamas. Another way to think about it is that Israel Defence Forces claim that several hundred are terrorist operatives, and when Israel submitted evidence for 19 cases, the UN concluded that in 47% of the cases submitted there was clear evidence of the individuals being terrorists. So perhaps the true figure is 47% of the hundreds that IDF claims are terrorists, or 47% of the 10% that some sources claim have links to Hamas.

Your own source says that Israel claims that 19 (not 9) of the people who perpetrated the October 7 attacks were UNRWA employees. Nowhere does it claim that Israel claims that these were the only people in the UNRWA who are also Hamas members, or sympathetic to Hamas's goals.

Israel says Unrwa staff have colluded with Hamas in Gaza, and claimed 19 Unrwa workers took part in the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.

The UN investigated Israel’s claim and fired nine of those accused, but it said Israel had not provided evidence for broader allegations. Unrwa insists that dealings with Hamas are purely to enable the agency to do its job.

According to the UN, there’s only evidence to warrant the firing of nine UNRWA staff.