UN Staffer Holds Israeli Man Hostage in Gaza Attic for 50 Days, Report Claims, and Senator Blackburn Demands Answers

Senator Blackburn wants to know why a United Nations employee in Gaza reportedly kept an Israeli man hostage in his attic for 50 days. The man, who was recently released, had been abducted by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and, according to a report by Israel’s Channel 13, said that the UN staffer was a teacher employed by the global body’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.In addition, the freed hostage said that his captor was a father of 10 children and kept him in the attic with a minimum of food and no medical attention. According to the same report by Israeli journalist Almog Boker, another recently released Israeli captive said that a Gazan doctor was holding him hostage even as the doctor was treating children’s patients.Attempting to sift through these reports and assign responsibility is Senator Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, who this week sent a letter to the relief agency head, Philippe Lazzarini, and Washington’s envoy to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, demanding an investigation. In the letter of December 5, Ms. Blackburn noted that following the initial publication of Mr. Almog’s report, the relief agency demanded that the Israeli journalist “immediately delete the post.” “The United States will not be complicit in propping up Hamas’ terrorism, and this report further proves why deep change is necessary within Unrwa before we even consider providing another dollar to the agency,” Ms. Blackburn wrote, adding that “these allegations hardly come as a surprise given Unrwa’s history of antisemitism.”This is not the first time that the relief agency, arguably the biggest and most pointless self-perpetuating bureaucratic entity in the Middle East, has come under fire. In 2018, President Trump decided to cut funding of the organization — the year before, Washington had spent more than $350 million on an agency that the State Department later described as “irredeemably flawed.”President Biden reversed Mr. Trump’s decision, a move the former president sharply criticized. Mr. Trump previously stated that “When Biden took office, one of the first things he did was reverse this policy and ship $235 million American taxpayer dollars to the Palestinians — despite warnings from within his own government that this money would be used to fund Hamas’ terror campaigns.”There is mounting evidence that the UN’s agency tasked with providing “relief and human development” for more than five million “registered” Palestinian refugees is complicit in activities linked to terror emanating from Gaza. Over the weekend, to cite just one instance, Israeli troops operating in the northern section of the Gaza Strip found Hamas rockets under boxes inscribed with UNRWA labeling. While the prospect of a Gazan teacher whose salary is essentially paid by Washington holding an Israeli hostage may come as a shock to some, it is also not altogether surprising considering what such instructors are prone to “teach.” Even the European Parliament has called out Palestinian Arab textbooks, underwritten by the relief agency, for the “hateful” and antisemitic content they contain. Equally newsworthy are the relief agency’s attempts to silence the messenger. The day after Mr. Almog’s report surfaced, the agency asked for “an immediate clarification of the claims” and for the report to be deleted, even branding it as “defamation” — but failed to either address the allegations or make any concrete pledge to do so in the future.Yet in a statement on X, the agency appeared to dial back the defamation claim, stating only that the allegations “may amount to misinformation.” Mr. Lazzarini has so far stayed reliably on-message in social media about the reports that one of his men kept an Israeli civilian hostage by completely ignoring them. The scandal is erupting amid mounting backlash against the so-called international community’s deafening silence about Hamas terrorists’ sexual assaults on Israeli women and gender-based attacks during the October 7 attack on Israel. At a press conference yesterday, Prime Minister Netanyahu asked, “Where the hell are you?”During a campaign fundraiser at Boston on Tuesday, President Biden addressed the survivor and eyewitness accounts of what happened on October 7 and forcefully denounced the by now well-documented Hamas brutality against women.

UN Staffer Holds Israeli Man Hostage in Gaza Attic for 50 Days, Report Claims, and Senator Blackburn Demands Answers

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