Citing Video Evidence, Israel Accuses U.N. Agency of Cooperating with Hamas
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

UNITED NATIONS – The Security Council yesterday was asked to condemn Israel’s military incursions into a Gaza area used for launching deadly Qassam missiles, while a dispute escalated between Israel and a U.N. agency. Israel accused the agency, known as Unrwa, of cooperating with terrorists responsible for the Qassam shootings, based on a video released over the weekend that purportedly shows a Qassam missile being loaded into a U.N. ambulance.
The head of Unrwa, Peter Hansen, said that the grainy film shot from an Israeli army drone does not prove the vehicle was used for transferring rockets. And in an admission that astonished even U.N. officials in New York, he boasted that Unrwa has no problem employing Hamas terrorists.
Mr. Hansen claimed that rather than a missile, the U.N.-marked van was loaded with a stretcher. He then betrayed that his agency, which employs mostly Gaza residents, cooperates with terrorists.
“Oh, I am sure that there are Hamas members on the Unrwa payroll and I don’t see that as a crime,” Mr. Hansen told Canadian CBC television. “Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another.”
Israel’s U.N ambassador, Dan Gillerman, was called into Secretary-General Annan’s office for a half-hour meeting yesterday, in which Mr. Annan promised to send a team of four investigators to look into Unrwa’s activities, both Mr. Gillerman and U.N. spokesmen said.
“I don’t think it’s my job, as an ambassador, to hire or fire personnel of the U.N.,” Mr. Gillerman told reporters. Nevertheless, he noted that Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by many countries, including Canada, where the Hansen interview was broadcast. Mr. Hansen “for years has expressed anti-Israeli, biased, unrestrained positions and statements,” he told Israel Radio.
Mr. Annan’s spokesman, Fred Eckhardt, told reporters, “We don’t hire terrorists.” Staffers should “conduct themselves with appropriate practices and principles,” he said, and if they are involved in illegal activities the organization “would respond quickly by taking disciplinary and legal action.”
Mr. Hansen said yesterday that what was loaded on the van seemed too short and too light to be a Qassam. He found out about the missile’s measurement by a simple Google search, he told the newspaper Ha’aretz. But Israeli sources told The New York Sun that the released drone footage was only a fraction of what the army saw.
“As much as I admire Mr. Hansen’s ability to search through Google,” Mr. Gillerman told reporters, “I do think that the Israeli army and its intelligence have far more sophisticated ways of analyzing and looking at these films.” The army is convinced that the load was a weapon, he added.
At the Council, dozens of speakers lined up to condemn Israel’s weeklong “Operation Days of Repentance,” which began after a Qassam rockets killed two infants in the Israeli town of Sderot on September 29.
Despite the ongoing operation, which has left some 67 Palestinian Arabs dead, most of them terrorists, two more rockets were fired yesterday at Sderot, lightly wounding one person, the Associated Press reported. Israeli officials vowed the operation would continue as long as necessary.
Among Palestinian Arabs there is a growing debate about the tactics used by their leadership in the four-year uprising known as the intifada. “I think now that the intifada in its entirety was a mistake and it should not have continued, and in particular what is called the militarization of the intifada,” the former prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, told the Jordanian daily Al-Rai recently.
The Palestinian Arab U.N. observer, Nasser al Kidwa, however, told the Sun that the intifada was an act of self-defense. Earlier he told the Security Council of Israeli “war crimes” and “state terrorism.” An Arab-sponsored proposal for a resolution was circulated among Council members, demanding the “immediate cessation” of the Israeli operation.
Dutch Ambassador Dirk Jan van den Berg said the E.U., which he represents, “deplores disproportionate nature of the Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip.”
The U.S. ambassador, John Danforth, noted that the resolution does not refer to the Qassam attacks. As is, he told the Sun, the resolution is “problematic.” America is expected to veto the current proposal in a vote expected today.