[Jerusalem Post] Herb Keinon and Tovah Lazaroff - The UN Relief and Works Agency is systematically providing political cover to Hamas, a senior Israeli government official said Tuesday, lashing out at UNRWA head Karen AbuZayd for passing a Hamas letter to U.S. Sen. John Kerry when he visited Gaza last Thursday. The senior Israeli official said, "That no one finds it strange that UNRWA, whose mandate is humanitarian, is the vehicle through which Hamas passes messages on to the U.S. just shows where UNRWA is at." Furthermore, the official said, UNRWA was lobbying around the world for governments to drop the international community's three preconditions to talking with Hamas - that it recognize Israel, disavow terrorism, and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements. It is not clear how this, or calls by UNRWA for an "independent international investigation" into alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza, fell within the organization's mandate, the official added.
2009-02-25 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive