07-Oct-19: How hard is it to produce 12 year old knife-attackers?

We don''t claim to be 100% sure but a social media post [here]
suggests this is the stabber described in our post.
The world-class treatment he's getting is courtesy of
Shaarei Zedek Medical Center and the government of Israel

With a current news item in mind, here's some insight into how the Palestinian Authority's policy of child weaponization works.

We wrote here a week and a half ago ["27-Sep-19: Weaponized Palestinian Arab children and more Arab-on-Israel stabbings"] about an on-duty female member of the Israel Police being injured in the course of a frenzied stabbing attack launched by a Palestinian Arab boy of thirteen. We were wrong: he was twelve. And it's evident he didn't intend to inflict mild trauma. He was very likely intent on killing.

The boy apppeared in court yesterday.

12-year-old indicted for Jerusalem attack in which officer was lightly injured | Boy charged with terror offenses for attempting to stab police officers in Old City last month; female officer was lightly hurt when barrier fell on her hand during scuffle | Times of Israel | 6 October 2019 | The Jerusalem district attorney on Sunday indicted a 12-year-old boy under terror laws for the attempted stabbing of a policewoman in Jerusalem’s Old City last month.
According to the indictment, on September 26, the day of the attack, the minor attended prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. At the conclusion of prayers, he allegedly walked up to a group of female officers at the Temple Mount’s Chain Gate, above the Western Wall area, pulled out a knife and attempted to stab the officers. During the ensuing scuffle, a female officer, age 34, was lightly injured when a security barrier fell on her hand. According to the indictment, a staff member of the Waqf, the Muslim trust that oversees the site, tried to catch the boy and keep the police from him.
The boy was overpowered at the scene and arrested.
The boy is accused of committing an act of terror in which he unlawfully attempted to injure a person with a knife for religious and national motive. Prosecutors asked that the boy remain detained until the end of legal proceedings.

There's no indication whether the Waqf worker who tried to prevent the police from taking the stabber into custody will face criminal or terror charges. If he's not, that's disturbing.

Here's some of the background that put the boy in the photo above into, first, an Israeli hospital bed and then Israel's juvenile criminal justice system where he's now fated to spend some of what should have been his best years.

First, let's understand the meaning of Waqf, an Arabic term defined [Wikipedia] as "confinement and prohibition" or causing a thing to stop or stand still. In the legal sense, it is said to mean the detention of a specific thing for purposes of "charity of poors [sic] or other good objects".

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan imposed a waqf on Jerusalem after the invasion by its British-led army, and the subsequent two-decade long massively-destructive conquest and occupation, of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the wake of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

After East Jerusalem was liberated in the course of the June 1967 Six-Day War, Israel - for pragmatic reasons related to its desire for neighborly relations and respect for Muslim sensibilities - allowed the waqf to re-assert its authority over the Temple Mount, which happens to be Judaism's holiest site.

Jordan's King Abdullah II "currently supplies all of the funding needed to operate the waqf." But as a recent analysis of changes in its structure shows, ["New Waqf Council Managing the Temple Mount", JCPA - Nadav Shragai, Lenny Ben-David | February 28, 2019], the Waqf is poised to do more harm:

The main, most dramatic change in the composition of the Waqf... was the joining of Sheikh Akram Sabri, currently chairman of the Supreme Muslim Council and former Mufti of Jerusalem. Sabri is now identified with the Muslim Brotherhood’s “the northern faction of the Islamic Movement” in Israel, and he follows the orders of Turkey and its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Some also believe that he is close to Hamas. At the beginning of the second intifada, Sabri identified with suicide bombings, and he is known for his extreme pronouncements against Israel... Other new members of the Jordanian Waqf, who Jordan agreed to allow into the new council after it was expanded from 11 members to 18 are mainly affiliated with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority... Until the establishment of the new Waqf, most of its members were pro-Jordanian. Its new composition expresses a united front [among] the Palestinian Authority, Fatah, and people like Sheikh Akram Sabri – and anyone who fears for Jordan’s future status on the Temple Mount. It is a joint coalition against the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

The weaponization of Palestinian Arab children by the kleptocratic/geriatric Mahmoud Abbas regime that rules them is the result of several concurrent strategies that have been implemented for years by now:

• Large long-term monthly payments to prisoners and the families of dead terrorists by the Palestinian Authority, funded from a deficit budget that is replenished via foreign aid grants to the PA. These Pay-to-Slay payments as they are comminly termed grow with the seriousness of the terror offense. 
• Overt, explicit incitement to more acts of terror by the Palestinian Authority and by terror groups
• The recruiting and training of children to engage in conflict: Special mention to the United Nations UNRWA people responsible these past seven decades for nurturing, preserving, perpetuating and legitimizing the violent discontent of Palestinian Arab schookl children.
• The systematic glorification of Arab-on-Israeli violence throughout Palestinian Arab society
• The deliberate, ideology-driven abandonment of weaponized Palestinian Arab children by the numerous child-protection agencies that raise billions each year on the profoundly dishonest premise that, like DCI Palestine, they are "committed to securing a just and viable future for Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory".

With all these in place, getting to the results they want are not that challenging.

Israel attracts serious criticism for its treatment of child offenders. In large measure, this is dishonest, politically-spun and based on poorly understood data. For instance, as a respected human rights organization based in Israel reported in February 2018 [NGO Monitor] in an essay that contradicts some of what "everyone knows" about Israel's "failures":

• Some 90,000 children aged between 10 and 17 were arrested in England and Wales between April 2015 and March 2016, an average of about 7,500 per month. Adjust these numbers for population and you can make this highly relevant comparison - that minors are arrested in England and Wales (where armed conflict is not currently a major feature of life) 5.5 times more often than Palestinian Arab minors living in the so-called West Bank are.
• In data covering the years since since 2013 (a period of considerable Arab-on-Israeli violence and the massive Arab promotion of terror), the number of Palestinian Arab minors arrested annually in areas under Israeli control was between 800 and 1,000. 
• Of these arrested, how many were subjected to prosecution? About 450-505. Thus on average, in a population of roughly a million minors (quoting Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics data), fewer than 85 such minors are arrested each month and fewer than half of those are prosecuted.
• And this: International law and Article 66 of the Fourth Geneva Convention mandates that Israel must establish military courts as part of its obligation to “take all the measures in [its] power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.” Moreover, Israel's law and enforcement practices meet all the requirements of “due process,” the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article 68 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The rules of evidence applied by the Military Courts are the same as the rules of evidence applied in the Israeli domestic criminal justice system.

These are not points that the chorus of child-weaponizers and their foreign-government-funders, backers and advocates want us to know.

Nor do they advertise the single most important take-away we can think of: that, given Pal Arab society's massive ongoing investment, it is dead easy to weaponize pre-teen Palestinian Arab boys and girls and turn them into killers.

21-Aug-18: A global day of tribute to terror victims? Yes, we were a bit surprised too.

Image Source: The UN

A media release from the United Nations explains that it has decided that today, August 21, 2018, should be known as the International Day of Remembrance, and of Tribute to, the Victims of Terrorism.

Unless you're a diplomat accredited to the UN in New York City or one of the speakers in the multimedia presentation that is at the heart of the commemoration, you might not know.

We're not in those categories. So we knew nothing about the whole thing till we stumbled across a link this morning.

The goal, as explained by the UN Secretary General, is uplifting:

For the first time, we have gathered in one place the testimonials of individuals whose lives have been affected by terrorism, to hear first‑hand how this has impacted their lives, and what they have achieved.  I applaud the courage and resilience of everyone represented here.  I thank those who are with us here today and who are willing to speak out against terrorism, and I thank the thousands of others who stand up and speak out every day, everywhere. We are here for you and we are listening to you. Your voices matter.  Your courage in the face of adversity is a lesson inspiring us all. Commemorating the forthcoming International Day of Remembrance, and of Tribute to, the Victims of Terrorism on 21 August is an opportunity to recognize, honour and support victims and survivors, and to lift up the voices of those left behind. The United Nations stands in solidarity with you.

How to say this politely? As terror victims, the parents of a child murdered by an Islamist terrorist in the service of Hamas, our experience hasn't brought us to feel that the UN - or really anyone else in the world of major organizations - stands in solidarity with us.

Actually, quite the opposite. We're working hard to get the mastermind of the terror attack that took our Malki's life to be extradited from her cosy, well-funded comfortable life as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan's leading celebrity jihadist and brought to a federal court-house in the United States. So far, that process has been moving slowly as readers of our blog probably know.

We have not viewed it and don't know yet whether it's accessible online. But the multimedia presentation described in the UN's promotional materials reminds us of an opportunity we were given a few years ago to testify about what being victims of terror does to a person.

Arnold Roth was a guest of a European association of terror victims which undertook a project to record the experiences and thoughts of a couple of dozen assorted terror victims with very different outlooks. The film-making took place in Madrid, Spain, in March 2014. The timing coincided with major Spanish events commemorating what they call 11-M, referring to the events of March 11, 2004 when the catastrophic Islamist terror attack on Madrid's trains took place [see our blog post "8-May-14: Madrid moments"].

It wasn't, and still isn't, entirely clear what the eventual goal of the project was. It does appear that demonstrating 'resilience' against 'radicalisation' was involved. In some respects, it might still be a work in progress.

The 2014 project's English language portal is here, under the title "The Voices of the Survivors Against Radicalisation". (There's a fine summary video here.) As far as we know, not much marketing effort (and we're trying not to sound unkind to the good people involved in its making) was ever devoted to creating serious awareness. Or else we just missed it.

Since video presentations about being victims of terror are getting attention in New York City today, here in the clip below is what that project of four years ago did with Arnold Roth's testimony. It seems it was posted to YouTube about a year ago.



All the videos in that 2014 set were translated into a variety of languages. Not all the speakers spoke in English (most probably did not) and the intended audiences can choose from among Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, German and Italian sub-titled versions. Not a small undertaking.

While Arnold is comfortable speaking in public, and had a good idea of the points he wanted to convey - especially about how poorly terrorism is understand by commentators and politicians, and the sometimes disastrous ways terrorists are treated - the video doesn't quite deliver what he had in mind.

Once we saw the final product, we realized his aims were probably not a terrific match for what the sponsors of the project sought to achieve. For instance, he explicitly mentioned Hamas and Ahlam Tamimi - who plotted the assault on the Sbarro pizzeria - at several junctures for the obvious reason that they are central to the difficult times we have endured and they continue to play an embittering role in our lives today.

Those parts of the interview, however, did not survive the editing suite. This probably explains the slightly choppy nature of the final product and its abrupt changes of tone and subject matter.

If this momentous day, and the things it seeks to remember and to pay tribute to, got some attention where you live via the media or in other ways, we would be glad to hear about it.

17-Sep-17: Stopping terror?: Questions for Jordan's heir apparent

Jordan's crown prince and his parents [Image Source]

The Jordan Times, published in Amman and owned by a kingdom-controlled foundation,
reported this morning the not-entirely-stunning news that

His Majesty King Abdullah, accompanied by Her Majesty Queen Rania, on Friday left the Kingdom, heading to New York, where he will be leading the Jordanian delegation to the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly... Deputising for the King, HRH Crown Prince Hussein is scheduled to deliver Jordan’s speech before the General Assembly... In 2015, the Crown Prince became the youngest person ever to chair a Security Council meeting, when he called for measures to prevent the world’s youth from being lured into the dark world of extremism...  ["King to take part in UN meeting", September 16, 2017]

If you're a news reporter or editor, wouldn't you want to take the opportunity to get Jordan's ruler to clarify his view of terrorism in light of the free-pass and ongoing protection he has given to a mass-murdering Jordanian woman who was named to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list on March 14, 2017?

No mainstream media has tackled him on this. In view of his repeated public condemnations of terror, that's strange, disturbing and something that ought to be corrected.

If King Abdullah is out of reach, can we suggest putting a similar question to HRH Crown Prince Hussein who is going to deliver Jordan's speech to the UN General Assembly? There's much he could explain, but frankly it's the reference in the Jordan Times piece above that has us intrigued.

After all, a public official and next-in-line-to-the-Hashemite-throne who speaks publicly about "measures to prevent the world’s youth from being lured into the dark world of extremism" might be fair game for some timely questions about how to stop terror. He's young (now 23) and perhaps a little naive (just our impression). But editors ought to note he's already two years older than that other Jordanian, Ahlam Tamimi, was when she masterminded the massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria. And he has attracted some extravagant praise:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon praised Hussein's attendance at the session saying, "He is not yet 21 years old – but he is already a leader in the 21st century." [Source]

Young Hussein has already shown he is ready to address some especially pertinent questions. As of a year ago, more than 2,500 Jordanians were reported to have joined the ranks of foreign jihadist fighters in Syria. Three sons of sitting members of its parliament had been killed fighting "with ISIS or the al Qaeda affiliate Jebhat al Nusra, in Syria" [source]. It makes sense that terror should be be occupying the thoughts of decision-making Jordanians, i.e. the king and the crown prince.

But since he is evidently on the side of those seeking a solution, HRH might explain how Tamimi, a woman terrorist who happily confesses (time and time and time again) to the murders by bombing of fifteen innocent people and the maiming and wounding of 130 more, can be treated so well by the Hashemite royal house that she and her family publicly thanked them.

Tapping into widespread support among Jordan's majority-Palestinian-Arab population, the Tamimi clan also called on King Abdullah II "along with his government to provide protection and stability" for the proud jihadist murderer and her convicted-murderer husband. From watching closely, we are convinced the "protection and stability" are indeed being delivered. Is this really how you prevent the world’s youth - or even Jordan's - from being lured into the dark world of extremism and murderous, cruel terrorism?

There's nothing especially shocking in any of this except for how the brazen hypocrisy on terror against Israelis gets repeatedly air-brushed out of all mainstream media coverage of King Abdullah's court.

UPDATE September 18, 2017:  In case reporters, journalists, editors or bloggers care to press the young prince on some terror-related matters, allow us to give a hand by pointing you to some questions - ignored of course and unanswered - that we posed to Jordan's current foreign minister who once not so long ago served as the editor of the same Jordan Times that we quoted at  the top. (No one ought to be surprised at the echo-chamber nature of Jordan's power elite.) They're here: "26-Jul-17: We listened carefully to Jordan's foreign minister and we have 10 questions".

13-Jun-17: We think we now have a deeper understanding of the human rights industry

The UN official previously known as His Highness Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein

When it comes to politicians, being the parents of a child murdered in the name of a political ideology can make a person, trust us, something of a cynic.

We're more sensitive now to how public figures like to get up on their soap-boxes and preach to others about what they ought to be doing. When they do, our strong inclination is to take a look behind the scenes and see whether the values of the speaker match the high rhetoric of the speechifying.

Take the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein as an example.

Once Jordan's ambassador to the UN and to the United States, he was appointed by acclamation to the HCR role by all 193 members of the UN General Assembly in June 2014, amidst flattering compliments and expressions of unbridled optimism. We have seen it described as a unanimous appointment but even if some people had their doubts, no one spoke out against.

He happens also to be a member of Jordan's royal family - a prince, in fact - as well as the pretender (an actual title) to the throne of Iraq. (Arab kingdoms tend to be both more complex and less complex than most people realize.)

Mr Ra'ad al-Hussein is busy this month as the notorious United Nations Human Rights Council over which he presides meets for its latest three-week-long gathering in Geneva. The HRC is made up of "47 States responsible for the promotion and protection of all human rights around the globe".

Sounds worthy, of course. But the reality tends towards the shabby. As one report noted in March 2017:

According to the U.N.'s top human rights body, Israel is the worst human rights violator in the world today. That’s the result of the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council which wrapped up in Geneva on Friday by adopting five times more resolutions condemning Israel than any other country on earth... The Bush administration refused to join the Council when it was created in 2006. On March 31, 2009, President Obama – fully aware of its entrenched anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias – made jumping on board one of his very first foreign policy moves. Moreover, in an unscrupulous attempt to control his successor, the former President obtained yet another three-year term for the United States on the Council that began on January 1, 2017... The Council plays a leading role in the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state by the United Nations. In its history, the Council has condemned Israel more often than any other of the 192 UN states. Comparative totals after this session’s pogrom tell the story:  Israel – 78 resolutions and decisions, Syria – 29, North Korea – 9, and Iran – 6.  As for Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, there’s nothing at all.

Lately, some member states have noticed. The British, for instance:

The UK has put the United Nations Human Rights Council "on notice" over what it called its "disproportionate focus on Israel". On the final day of the council's 34th session the UK mission to the UN said it would vote against all resolutions about Israel's conduct in the occupied Syrian and Palestinian territories if things did not change... [Independent UK, March 25, 2017]

The Americans have too:

Washington has long argued that the Geneva forum unfairly focuses on Israel's alleged violations of human rights, including war crimes against Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The United States "remains deeply troubled by the Council’s consistent unfair and unbalanced focus on one democratic country, Israel", Erin Barclay, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, told the U.N. Human Rights Council. Barclay said that no other nation had a whole agenda item devoted to it and that "this obsession with Israel" threatened the council's credibility... "In order for this Council to have any credibility, let alone success, it must move away from its unbalanced and unproductive positions," Barclay said. "As we consider our future engagements, my government will be considering the Council's actions with an eye toward reform to more fully achieve the Council's mission to protect and promote human rights." The United States is currently an elected member of the 47-state Geneva forum where its three-year term ends in 2019... ["U.S. seeks end to U.N. rights council's 'obsession' with Israel", Reuters, March 1, 2017]

That was in March. What's changed since then? Not that much. Here's a report from just 6 days ago:

…In a speech opening a three-week session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein observed the 50th anniversary of when he "first heard the sound of war" as a boy in Amman, Jordan. He said Palestinians were now marking "a half-century of deep suffering under an occupation imposed by military force" and marked by "systematic" violations of international law. Israelis also deserve freedom from violence, Zeid said, adding: "Maintain the occupation and for both peoples there will only be a prolongation of immense pain..." ["End of Israeli occupation would benefit both sides: UN right chief", Reuters, June 7, 2017]

And this from yesterday:

“The High Commissioner notes the repeated failure to comply with the calls for accountability made by the entire human rights system and urges Israel to conduct prompt, impartial and independent investigations of all alleged violations of international human rights law and all allegations of international crimes,” the report said. Zeid's report also noted “the State of Palestine's non-compliance with the calls for accountability and urges the State of Palestine to conduct prompt, impartial and independent investigations of all alleged violations of international human rights law and all allegations of international crimes.” The report looked set to ignite further debate at the U.N. Human Rights Council, where the United States said last week it was reviewing its membership due to what it calls a “chronic anti-Israel bias.” ["Israel, Palestinians have failed to prosecute war crimes: U.N.", Reuters, June 12, 2017]

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein first got our attention in April 2017. It was one of those cases we described above - a public figure lecturing others, in this case the authorities in Jordan where Prince Zeid (his other name) is (as we mentioned a few paragraphs up) a member of the royal Hashemite family.

We emailed a cluster of his senior staff people - this is the unedited full text:

April 4, 2017

Re: Extraditing Ahlam Tamimi 

We were pleased to see the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, speak forthrightly [link] four days ago about how states must (a) honor their treaty obligations, (b) act on legitimate arrest warrants and (c) respect the great importance of the global struggle for justice and against impunity.

Prince Zeid was addressing the failure of his own homeland, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in relation to a notorious fugitive from justice, the president of Sudan, who ought to have been arrested when he came to Jordan. 

We are the parents of Malki Roth who was murdered in 2001 in the horrific Hamas attack on women and children in a pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem. Malki was 15. Fourteen other people were killed and 130 terribly injured. 

The mastermind of the attack is a Jordanian woman. She was eventually arrested and confessed to all the charges. She was convicted on 15 counts of murder and was sentenced to multiple life terms. Her sentence was drastically commuted eight years later in the 2011 deal Israel made with the Hamas terrorist organization to secure the release of an Israeli captive. She has lived free in Jordan since then, proudly taking "credit" for the murders and basking in the status of celebrity. 

Our daughter was a US citizen. Under US law relating to acts of terror, her killer must face justice in the US. The US formally requested some time ago that she be extradited by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. But Jordan has refused. The woman, Ahlam Tamimi, is subject to a US arrest warrant and appears on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list. 

We are respectfully asking that the High Commissioner speak as clearly and forcefully to the King and government of his homeland, Jordan, about Tamimi as he did four days ago in that other matter. We ask him to tell Jordan that, in relation to Tamimi, it must (a) honor its treaty obligations, (b) act on legitimate arrest warrants and (c) respect the great importance of the global struggle for justice and against impunity.

We appreciate you conveying this to the High Commissioner.

Sincerely
Frimet and Arnold Roth
Jerusalem, Israel

What happened next? Nothing. So we wrote to the same people a second time on April 6, 2017:

In case this slipped by. An acknowledgement of receipt would be appreciated. 

Then again:

Third try - sorry to note that we have no acknowledgement from any of you. In our view, the issue we have raised is a serious one, and the sort that ought to be addressed by the High Commissioner's office. With great respect to your roles and responsibilities, unless we have something from you today, we will assume no response is going to come and proceed accordingly.  

A few days later, this nice reply arrived:

Dear Ms and Mr Roth,
Thank you for your message and sorry for the delay in acknowledgement - I can assure you that all messages received by this office are taken seriously, with only one problem being that there are too many of them from across the world, with many serious crisis and violations still ongoing, and too few people and resources to handle all of them.
Your message is of course well received, including by the Executive Office of the High Commissioner (where I belong) and the MENA section of the Office. It will be given proper attention - I can assure in this - and you will receive a response upon due consideration.
With full understanding and sincere sympathy for your loss.
Kind regards,
Anton Nikiforov
Human Rights Officer
EDM
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

We waited until April 12, 2017 - a month and a half later - and sent this:

Dear Mr Nokiforev,
Consistent with your OHCHR's slogan, we sincerely support the idea of "Stand up for someone’s rights today" [that's the business slogan that appears on the OHCHR's website]. We hope today will be the day the High Commissioner conveys to Jordan the message we outlined in our letter to the Office of the High Commissioner of April 4. As you know, it has still gotten no response.
Sincerely,
Frimet and Arnold Roth
Jerusalem, Israel
(Grieving parents of Malki Roth) 

The kind Human Rights Officer didn't have an actual answer but replied nonetheless, and promptly - in fact the same day:

Dear Ms and Mr Roth,
Thank you for your support to our campaign worldwide. Your message is acknowledged and my response to you still stands. There is really no need to send reminders, all messages are taken seriously but they require proper consideration among many, many tasks and urgencies with inadequate resources to handle them all at the same time.
Sincerely,
Anton Nikiforov 

We felt sorry for the OHCHR whose annual budget for 2017 is US $253 million and which is beset with "many, many tasks and urgencies with inadequate resources to handle them". So we sat patiently and then sent this on May 28, a month and a half later, with copies to the same senior OHCHR people whom we had originally approached on April 4 and who were all otherwise engaged:

Dear Mr Nokiforev,
Six weeks after your last memo assuring us that we are not overlooked or forgotten, we think we are now privileged to have a fuller understanding of what OHCHR means by the word "someone" in your slogan "Stand up for someone’s rights today".
We again express the sincere hope that eventually, the High Commissioner will convey to Jordan the message we outlined in our letter to him of April 4 even though it has gotten no response.
But perhaps you or your colleagues copied on this email will acknowledge that OHCHR's silence until now speaks eloquently for itself.
We see ourselves free to now air this issue in public places.
Sincerely,
Frimet and Arnold Roth
Jerusalem, Israel
(Grieving parents of Malki Roth) 

No response so far from any of them. Those "urgencies" and the "many, many tasks" - which happily did not get in the way of the prince chastising his Jordanian friends over the matter of the Sudanese butcher all the way back on March 31, 2017 - seem to still be keeping the OHCHR team pre-occupied.

The bright side is we think we have a better gasp now of how the human rights industry sorts out its priorities. Bringing the murderers of Israeli children to justice does not rank all that high up, it turns out. We're very surprised by that.

If we're wrong, we hope Prince Zeid (in case he's reading this) or one of his staff people will still get back to us. But to be really frank, we're not holding our breaths.

26-Feb-17: Hamas' new Gaza leadership, and what it says about educating towards a desperately worse future

What UNRWA hath wrought in Jerusalem: From a documentary film made by the Center for Near East Policy Research [Click YouTube to view it now]

(UPDATE: After reading this post, you may be interested in this follow-up piece of ours: "27-Feb-17: UNRWA is shocked, shocked, to discover...")

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Nowi przywódcy Hamasu w Gazie i co to oznacza dla edukacji ku coraz gorszej przyszłości") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

One of the ugliest dimensions of the conflict between the Arabs and Israel is the tight, bear-hug relationship that exists between the oddest of United Nations agencies - UNRWA - and the Islamist terrorist group Hamas. There's fresh and disturbing evidence today for those willing to look, as opposed to those who systematically look away, preferring not to know.

The United Nations has a major stake in taking care of the world's refugees. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is based in Geneva and has won two Nobel Peace Prizes (1954 and 1981). Its origins were not so auspicious. It began life as a creature of UN General Assembly Resolution 319 (IV) in December 1949 with a mandate to operate for three years. That was later broadened by additional UNGA resolutions until today. Its mission is

to provide, on a non-political and humanitarian basis, international protection to refugees and to seek permanent solutions for them... [source]

A person would have to be especially mean to object to goals like those. Giving support on a humanitarian, non-political basis - what could be more appropriate? Providing them with protection, and especially for their children - the most helpless of the helpless - is often the thing that fragile, dispossessed people most lack. And seeking a solution? Well - obviously.

Which brings us to the Palestinian Arabs who, uniquely among all people of the world classified as refugees, are not served at all by UNHCR.

Is this a screaming injustice? No. That's because they, and only they, among all the world's unhappy people with a deep grievance, have a "refugee" agency all their own. And, as we noted in an earlier blog post ["14-Aug-16: Who actually cares that foreign aid is diverted from needy Gazans to terror? Not who most people think"], what an agency it is. Just to highlight some key points:

• The odd distinction: UNHCR deals with all the world's refugees except for those addressed by UNRWA. UNHCR has by far the larger work load but a staff (of about 9,700) that's only about one third the size of UNRWA's.
• The astounding disparity in resoources: "UNHCR has one staff member for every 5,500 refugees and other persons of concern. UNRWA has one staff person for every 182 people registered by UNRWA." [Source, March 2015]
• The sheer vastness of the UNRWA payroll: UNRWA's latest headcount was "over 30,000... most of them Palestine refugees and a small number of international staff, in two headquarter offices (Gaza and Amman), five field offices (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and West Bank), and in four Representative/Liaison Offices (New York, Geneva, Brussels and Cairo)" ["Working at UNRWA" - accessed this morning]. It's an open secret that many, probably most, of those on the UNRWA payroll do essentially nothing. It's a welfare scheme designed to subsidize Palestinian Arab indolence and lack of productivity - on the West's nickle. Until this decade, almost no Arab money ever arrived at UNRWA.
• Calculated opacity: Almost all other U.N. agencies report to an executive board, allowing at least some chance of functional oversight. UNRWA reports directly to the entire 193-member General Assembly, where responsibility is broadly dispersed and easily avoided. According to a paper in 2010 by the agency's own chief of legal affairs, Lance Bartholomeusz, UNRWA enjoys the added flexibility of having no clearly defined mission: "its mandate is not conveniently stated in one place and must be derived from all other relevant resolutions and requests."
• Perpetual non-motion: Thus unencumbered, UNRWA has ensured its own survival by transforming itself into the patron of Palestinian grievance, conferring refugee status down the generations... ["The U.N. Handmaiden of Hamas", Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal, August 07, 2014] 

Beyond all the anomalies and the waste, corruption and inefficiency in this truly grotesque picture, there's also the matter of the identity of interests shared by (a) UNRWA and (b) the Islamist terrrorists of Hamas. This again is something about which we have written in numerous past blog posts. See for instance "30-Jul-14: Is Europe's uncritical funding connected with Hamas' ongoing terrorism?" and the references there to UNRWA's official spokesperson, the unlovely Chris Gunness, who

frequently echoes Hamas messaging in the mainstream media, and European officials then amplify his talking points in their capitals. His Twitter account and interviews are replete with indictments of Israeli actions in Gaza, but his condemnations of Hamas rocketing of Israeli civilians are muted, if they are issued at all.

Gunness comes in for well-deserved excoriation in an important 2014 review by researcher David Bedein in the Jerusalem Post analyzing what UNRWA's schools actually impart to the Gazan Arab children who suffer the misfortune of falling into their clutches:

UNRWA’s 30,000 employees make no pretense of neutrality. UNRWA employees are organized in professional unions without any affinity to organizations that advocate peace. In Gaza, the UNRWA workers union and the UNRWA teachers union have elected Hamas in successive elections to lead their unions since 1999, with 93 percent voting for Hamas in the 2012 elections. A mantra that [UNRWA spokesperson Chris] Gunness repeats frequently, most recently on Fox News, is that “there is no evidence that Hamas terrorists are on the payroll of the UN.” However, the European Parliament funded a study that documented Hamas takeover of the UNRWA unions in March 2009... ["One for the Gunness Book of Records: The myth of an UNRWA policy of peace that does not exist", Jerusalem Post, December 25, 2014]

Now for some new revelations, courtesy of a bulletin issued this past Thursday by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center in Tel Aviv.

It refers to elections recently held for the Hamas politbureau, Hamas' peak institution in the Gaza Strip. We wrote ["13-Feb-17: Another Shalit Deal milestone: Four terms of life imprisonment but this murdering jihadist now heads Hamas in Gaza"] about the identity of the jihadist who emerged as Hamas' new head of operations in that process.

Dr. Suhail Ahmed Hassan Al-Hindi addresses a protest rally directed
against UNRWA in Gaza, October 2016. The subsequent strike led to
a settlement with UNRWA management. Al-Hindi is flanked
by other Hamas figures [Image Source]

The Amit Report notes that Sinwar was one of fifteen people elected to lead Hamas, and that their ranks are

dominated by members who hold extremist views.

One of those newly-elected extremists, Dr. Suhail Ahmed Hassan al-Hindi, has for the past five years been chairman of UNRWA's staff union in the Gaza Strip - a union controlled by Hamas, and one that has demanded, and gotten via sanctions, strikes, riots and shutdowns, major concessions from UNRWA's management.

Confronting UNRWA on resource issues, budgets and salaries amounts to confronting the donors who fund it. UNRWA's funding throughout its seven decade-long history has been overwhelmingly - almost exclusively - provided by the governments of Western countries, led by the United States. [For background: "05-Jun-16: Where does the money for the ongoing decades-long UNRWA fiasco come from?"]

In the most recent such round of demands against UNRWA management in October 2016, Al-Hindi - flanked by key Hamas figures - announced a series of demands including a general strike [see Alreselah (Arabic) October 25, 2016]. That confrontation eventually resulted in a December 2016 "fundamental understanding with UNRWA [that] ended its protests and sanctions" [Amit Report quoting gazaonline.net, December 20, 2016]

The reality of Hamas infiltration of UNRWA gets some minor degree of media attention from time to time, but generally is resolved by the Hamas side being bellicose and noisy and the UNRWA side backing down. In 2009, for instance, John Ging, an Irish lawyer serving as director at the time of UNRWA operations in the Gaza Strip, threatened to fire UNRWA employees who belonged to Hamas or organizations with similar terrorist agendas [background here] after those affiliations emerged and got some attention. The threat was never carried out and he left the position. (He has been at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York since February 2011.)

This is relevant to Dr. al-Hindi. In addition to his labor relations position at UNRWA, he holds down a day job as principal of an UNRWA education facility, Palestine Boys' Elementary School. An October 5, 2011 report on the English-language Ma'an News Agency website mentions his key role

Al-Hindi stands outside UNRWA headquarters in
Gaza on October 5, 2011 as he leads a teachers'
strike against the UN agency  [Image Source]

Thousands of teachers on Wednesday protested at UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City over the dismissal of a union official, a Ma'an correspondent reported. The Local Staff Union called for the general strike on Wednesday, the second such action in a week, to protest at UNRWA's suspension of the head of the union, Suhail al-Hindi. Hamas sources said the UN agency had accused Hindi of meeting with Hamas political officials. Buses took some 7,000 teachers employed at UNRWA-run schools to UN headquarters in Gaza city where they held a sit-in, calling for an end to "UNRWA political punishment of employees." "Death rather than humiliation" read a banner held by striking teachers. "Deception, lying and hypocrisy have become the core values of UNRWA," read another.
The strike affected all of UNRWA's 243 schools in Gaza. Hindi told the teachers he would stand against "oppression and injustice" but added that Palestinians saw UNRWA as a symbol of the cause of refugees and that its role should be preserved "until the Israeli occupation is removed" ...Chris Gunness, UNRWA's chief spokesman in Jerusalem, said disputes should be resolved internally and not through actions that undermine agency operations and services to refugees in Gaza.

Pretty clearly, Gunness and UNRWA were aware then, six years ago, that Al-Hindi was a leading Hamas figure. But they had no problems taking him off suspension, and retaining his services in all the years since then.

Al-Hindi's name appears on the list of the members of Hamas' newly-elected political bureau published this month in the Palestinian media. The Amit Report calls this mention "reliable" (attributed to a "senior Hamas source" and quotes the Quds Press news agency in support), which says the same thing. But look what happened:

After his election had been publicly announced, Dr. al-Hindi issued a series of vigorous denials, claiming he had not been elected to the bureau. He even claimed he planned to sue those responsible for the reports. So far, Hamas has not formally related to the issue of his election... His vigorous denials may be the result of the fact that publicizing his election will make difficulties for him (and Hamas) in dealing with UNRWA. In the past UNRWA objected to its staff belonging to Hamas or other organizations, although the agency never took decisive action to enforce its objections. [Amit Report, February 23, 2017]

The report makes some important observations about what this means in terms of the future of Gaza's children:

The election of Dr. Suhail al-Hindi to Hamas' political bureau in the Gaza Strip is another illustration of Hamas' deep penetration into the Gaza Strip's educational system and of the great power of its activists in UNRWA institutions in the Strip. That allows Hamas to systematically indoctrinate Gazan school children with its extremist Islamist ideology. In addition, Hamas' great influence on the educational system in the Gaza Strip enables it to hold paramilitary activities within schools, training young children to join Hamas and the ranks of its military wing. Since Hamas is the power ruling the Gaza Strip, its ideological and military activities in the educational system are not curbed either by UNRWA... or by the Palestinian Authority(which is formally responsible for the educational system in the Gaza Strip, but as in many other governmental areas, its actual influence is limited). [Amit Report, February 23, 2017]

UNRWA itself declares proudly that it operates 252 schools in the Gaza Strip, serving more than 240,400 school students:

These children grow up in bleak conditions, frequently surrounded by poverty and violence. School provides them with one place where they are able to learn the skills for a better future.

We believe the numbers but the "better future" claim is preposterous as we have noted over and again when referring to the culture of terrorism, murder and suicide that is now deeply and very evidently ingrained in the lives of Gaza's children. See "27-Oct-16: Who put those knives into the hands of these two little Palestinian Arab boys?" and "10-Feb-15: The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed" and "15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?"

UNRWA, ostensibly an agency that exists to ameliorate the suffering of Arab refugees in reality serves as a cornerstone of the seven-decades-long Arab strategy to keep the Palestinian Arabs displaced, as miserable as possible and in the news. By their own reckoning, UNRWA's people and budget play a huge role in the education of Palestinian Arab children. They are certainly part of the problem and not of the solution.

As misconceived, camouflaged and fraudulent as UNRWA's role in the disaster happening daily in Gaza's education system is, UNRWA does not deserve all the blame for the horror. Other contributors, including UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development deserve long-overdue attention for the unforgivable and complicit silence and apathy that serve as their indictment.

14-Aug-16: Who actually cares that foreign aid is diverted from needy Gazans to terror? Not who most people think

A Hamas/Gaza tunnel under construction, October 2013 [Image Source]

Audit firms, governments and Christian aid groups are sorting out their post-exposé strategies following the arrests of several Palestinian Arabs on charges of illegally and surreptitiously siphoning vast sums into Palestinian Arab terror.

But strangely those who are most identified with doing humanitarian good for the Palestinian Arabs don't appear to be in the front lines of those expressing deep concern at the harm such diversions have caused. And that's an understatement.

One of the most visible signs of where the cash goes (that's present tense - no one believes the scandal has been stopped) is the tunnels of Gaza. The latest news from there - just this month and just from Palestinian Arab sources indicates this vast engineering project is not going smoothly:

• August 6, 2016: "The al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, has reported that one of its fighters was killed, Saturday, when a tunnel collapsed on him, in the Gaza Strip. In a statement, al-Qassam said the fighter has been identified as Khaled Methqal al-Hoor, 23... According to the al-Qassam Brigades, ten of its fighters have been killed in several tunnel accidents in several parts of the Gaza Strip, since the beginning of this year." [IMEMC, a Palestinian media source which "combines Palestinian journalists’ deep understanding of the context, history, and the socio-political environment with International journalists’ skills in non-partisan reporting."]
• August 10, 2016: "Eight Palestinians were injured when a tunnel collapsed in the al-Shujayya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, local sources told Ma’an. They were taken to al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City to be treated for light to moderate injuries, according to Gaza Ministry of Health spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra. The incident came after three Palestinians died over recent weeks in tunnel collapse accidents in the Gaza Strip. On Saturday, a member of Hamas' military wing the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades was killed, and in mid-July, two members of the Islamic Jihad were killed in separate incidents..." [Ma'an News Agency, based in Bethlehem]
• August 14, 2016: "...A member of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, was killed by an electric shock on Saturday while working inside a tunnel in the besieged Gaza Strip. The military wing released a statement confirming the death of Muhammad Shlouf from the city of Gaza... The Hamas movement which governs the blockaded Palestinian territory has been allegedly reconstructing a vast tunnel network intended to be used for carrying out attacks on Israeli military targets and civilians, swathes of which were destroyed during the war... The Institute for Palestine Studies reported in 2012 that Hamas authorities had counted 160 deaths inside the tunnels since the Israeli blockade began in 2007, and in August 2014, al-Jazeera reported that figure to be as high as 400." [IMEMC]

Setting aside the appalling matter of lives thrown away (many of them, probably hundreds, are children) in the cause of expanding the terrorist infrastructure and earning Hamas tunnel-traffic royalties from smuggled cigarettes to benefit Hamas insiders, there's a colossal amount of tunnel building going on in Gaza.

This is one of the Middle East's most ambitious current undertakings, ignoring the mind-blowingly, astronomically-expensive preparations for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar about which we wrote here: "11-Jul-13: Football and barefaced hypocrisy". And in a world where there are no free lunches, someone's paying for it. Paying for the construction and materials, that is. Essential safety equipment is evidently still looking for a donor.

This is infrastructure investment on a truly serious scale. So, in hideous terms, is the pay-off:

"A Hamas operative who was captured in June after illegally crossing into Israel revealed that the terrorist group’s fighters can travel underground throughout the entirety of Gaza." [The Tower, August 11, 2016]

This is Gaza too: the Al-Mashtal Hotel as it looked some years
ago [Image Source: Reuters]

An important piece this weekend in the Wall Street Journal by one of its editorial writers, David Feith, reaffirms the depressing point ["Your Tax Dollars Fund Palestinian Terror", August 11, 2016] that none of this could happen but for the willful blindness of governments, foremost among them the United States.

It's a weighty charge if true. The WSJ analysis is driven mainly by recent events here in Israel where sensational criminal prosecutions have recently been brought against Palestinian Arab individuals alleging they succeeded in diverting aid money into the hands of Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations. Many millions of dollars are involved.

Sounding an ambitious note, Feith addresses the scandal we have long called here the PA's Rewards for Terror Scheme:

This revelation should spur a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government... [since] the Palestinian government has used U.S. and other foreign taxpayers’ money to pay generous rewards to the families of terrorists. The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy... No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. [WSJ, August 11, 2016] 

Should spur a broader reassessment. But almost certainly will not.

This happens while the Hamas regime in Gaza, along with its humanitarian-aid-industry co-conspirators and principally UNRWA ["Gaza Emergency"], continues to make the case that the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza are undergoing prolonged suffering from a lack of housing reconstruction. Yes, there's a connection. Cash, cement and goodwill have been pouring into Gaza yet those houses remain piles of rubble. UNRWA's most recent Gaza Situation Report, dated August 12, 2016, like all those before it, makes approximately zero references to the malevolent hand of Hamas in repurposing humanitarian aid into terrorist resources. (Repurposing in this context means stealing.)

The reassessment of foreign aid programs and charitable subventions ought to, but almost surely will not, be affected the factors disclosed in those recent Israeli revelations.

Israel has discovered that Mohammed El-Halabi, currently employed as director of the Gaza branch of World Vision, is actually a major figure in the terrorist/military arm of Hamas... World Vision is an international NGO, one of the largest charitable and humanitarian aid organizations in the world, which operates in more than 100 countries. It receives support primarily from the UN and from Western governments...  El-Halabi has been taking advantage of his position to divert the humanitarian organization’s funds and resources from the needy to benefit Hamas’ terrorist and military activities... More than half of World Vision’s resources in the Gaza Strip – originating in aid money from Western states such as the United States, England and Australia – were transferred to Hamas to strengthen its terrorist arm... During the investigation, El-Halabi revealed that he has been a Hamas member since his youth and had undergone organizational and military training in the early 2000s. In 2005, Hamas dispatched El-Halabi to infiltrate World Vision. El-Halabi related that Hamas believed that he had a good chance of infiltrating the humanitarian aid organization because his father works for the UN and he himself had worked in UNDP... Over the years, El-Halabi advanced in the charity’s hierarchy until he was appointed director of the Gaza branch. In this capacity, he controlled the budget, equipment and aid packages which amounted to tens of millions of dollars... [Foreign Ministry of Israel Backgrounder, August 4, 2016]

El-Halabi's methods were not the most sophisticated. But then neither do the checks and balances of World Vision and others among the world's humanitarian aid giants appear to be.

To divert the funds, the Shin Bet said el-Halabi initiated fictitious projects meant to help farmers, the disabled and fishermen. He would falsely list Hamas operatives as workers on those projects and write up inflated receipts, according to the Shin Bet. Companies hired to carry out certain projects under fictitious tenders were “made aware” that 60 percent of the project’s funds were destined for Hamas, the Shin Bet statement said, adding that some of World Vision’s budget was used to pay the salaries of Hamas operatives. The Shin Bet also said el-Halabi would transfer to Hamas materials such as steel, digging equipment and pipes that were meant for World Vision agricultural assistance. Thousands of packages with food and medical aid received monthly would allegedly be diverted to Hamas operatives and their families rather than reach Gazan civilians. Beyond arms purchases and tunnel digging, the funds also helped build military bases, including one constructed in 2015 built entirely from British aid money, according to the Shin Bet. The security agency also said that since his arrest, el-Halabi divulged intelligence about employees working for United Nations agencies and other aid groups who were also assisting Hamas, without elaborating. [Associated Press, August 4, 2016] 

Little publicized (for some reason), the el-Halabi indictment included a paragraph devoted to suspected malfeasance at another humanitarian aid agency active in Gaza:

An official from Save the Children was also allegedly turned to Hamas, according to Halabi’s charge sheet. [Times of Israel, August 11, 2016]

There quickly followed further Israeli charges said to implicate the United Nations via its UNDP arm:

Israeli authorities have announced charges against a Palestinian employee of a United Nations agency, accusing the Gaza resident of providing "material assistance" to Hamas. According to a statement released on Tuesday by the Israeli Security Agency (ISA), or Shin Bet, 38-year-old engineer Waheed Borsh was arrested on July 16 and charged in a Beersheva court on Tuesday. The indictment accused the UN Development Programme (UNDP) staffer Borsh of abusing his position to renovate Hamas members' homes, having been recruited by "a senior member of the Hamas terrorist organisation to redirect his work for UNDP to serve Hamas' military interests". The ISA claimed that Borsh had confessed to the charges, and admitted that "other Palestinians who work for aid organisations are also working for Hamas". According to the ISA, the case exemplifies "how Hamas exploits the resources of international aid organisations at the expense of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip"... In a statement, UNDP said it was "greatly concerned" by the Israeli allegation that Borsh had "complied with a request from a senior Hamas individual to transport 300 tonnes of rubble from a UNDP rubble removal project site to a Hamas-run location at the Northern Gaza Hamas-operated port". UNDP added that it will be "conducting a thorough internal review of the processes and circumstances surrounding the allegation". [Aljazeera, August 09, 2016]

It's good to know of the "great concern" and the "thorough internal review" now said to be on the way. The problem is that allegations of these kinds have been made by Israel for years, and no response ever occurred.

Matters are considerably worse, as we view them, when you consider that the diverted and abused funds are charitable and/or characterized as foreign aid, making a reasonable person think the trustees of the cash would have bent over backwards to defend their probity.

But that reasonable person would be wrong. Nothing - for all practical purposes - has happened until now, even though the consequences are huge.

That's expressed well in a statement published last week by Robert Piper, an Australian development aid coordinator for the UN who, since May 2015, has been the Jerusalem-based Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and the Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, with the rank of UN Assistant Secretary General. He said:

Israel’s accusations against el-Halabi “raise serious concerns for humanitarian organizations working in Gaza.” “Redirecting relief away from its intended beneficiaries would be a profound betrayal of the trust put in a senior manager by his employer and by the organization’s donors,” Piper said. “Everyone would pay a high price for such acts – beneficiaries and the wider aid effort alike. If proven by a due legal process, these actions deserve unreserved condemnation; Gaza’s demoralized and vulnerable citizens deserve so much better.” ["World Vision: ‘Huge gap’ in Israeli terror funding allegations", Times of Israel, August 08, 2016]

Unfortunately there have been few signs from the aid agencies themselves that they acknowledge the problems (other than the problem of facing accusations from the unloved government of Israel) and in particular that their internal checks are lacking. At the UNDP, they are now saying they have

zero tolerance for wrongdoing in all of its programmes and projects [The Guardian, August 9, 2016]

so look elsewhere for solutions, they seem to say. This is bold and brave of them considering that two years ago, an internal UN audit report found serious short-comings including

• Their Gaza operation should have been using an electronic funds transfer system with local banks that would have allowed the UNDP program to “be notified electronically when any bank transactions take place,”  including, as the report delicately puts it, “transactions not made by UNDP.” But it didn't use it. Why? Good question.
• Core procurement  processes for ordering up “significant” civil construction activities that were supposed to be handled strictly by staffers - were not. Outsiders somehow got into the process. Why? Anyone's guess. The auditors called this a “critical” lapse and demanded “prompt action... to ensure that UNDP is not exposed to high risks. Failure to take action could result in major negative consequences for UNDP.” We will watch to see whether this fault gets mentioned in future media reports. 
• "The office’s internal financial tracking system — a UNDP-wide system known as Atlas — was improperly recording at least $8 million worth of civil construction spending at far less than its full value, a practice that UNDP auditors noted could keep the activity under the radar of higher-level U.N. officials who must approve purchase orders above defined cost threshold levels."
• Expenditures and receipts were not adequately tracked in the financial system. For instance, a sampling of 41 payment vouchers showed 12 purchase orders had no receipts recorded. “This practice,” the report noted, “increases the risk of paying for goods that are not delivered.” [Fox News, August 11, 2014]

At World Vision, senior management

has cast doubt on Israel's accusations, saying they seemed implausible... [NPR, August 9, 2016]

And at Hamas, they amazingly

denied that Halabi was a member... [as well as] denied the allegations. A spokesperson, Sami Abu Zurhi, called the accusations “false and baseless”, saying they were designed to allow Israel to strengthen its “siege” of Gaza... [The Guardian, August 9, 2016]

Prof. Gerald Steinberg, an authority on transparency and the lack thereof in funding across borders (and president of the esteemed NGO Monitor, a research institute based here in Jerusalem) had some points to make on this in a powerful op ed in the Wall Street Journal three days ago:

World Vision leaders such as Tim Costello of the charity’s Australian branch, which provided a significant portion of World Vision JWG’s 2014 budget of more than $20 million, took refuge in distant accounting firms. “We have PricewaterhouseCoopers that audit us each year,” Mr. Costello said. But Mr. Costello and his peers at other aid groups should be aware that no international auditing firm can independently track funds in terror enclaves. In Gaza, there are no receipts for the numerous cash transactions that were conducted via World Vision. Even if there were, how would the auditors verify their authenticity? Indeed, the audit claim wasn’t enough to convince the Australian government, which immediately froze the $5.7 million annual budget granted to World Vision. Germany soon followed suit. The broader problem is that due diligence for humanitarian aid in war and terror zones requires the allocation of significant resources and a professional staff capable of detaching itself from the pressures and sympathies of the local environment. World Vision, like most aid groups operating in Gaza, clearly failed in this respect... Mr. Halabi’s arrest should be cautionary moment for other international aid organizations with operations in Gaza such as Care, Christian Aid, Oxfam and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The need to deal realistically with operations in a terror-controlled zone like Gaza, and the costs of failing to perform due diligence, should be apparent. World Vision’s auditing claims notwithstanding, cash payments in Gaza are a direct path to corruption and diversion to terror. They should be ended immediately... ["The Palestinian Charity Trap", WSJ, August 11, 2016]

The charges of malfeasance have not stopped coming. We know, for instance, from an AFP report, that

Aid workers privately admit to feeling pressure from Hamas, with the powerful group seeking to influence how projects are organized. In a few rare cases NGOs have seen their offices temporary closed by Hamas... ["Foreign aid workers fear the impact of Hamas allegations", AFP/Saudi Gazette, August 11, 2016]

That 2014 Fox News report [online here] we just mentioned also implicates the highly problematic UNRWA (the UN's pseudo refugee agency whose existence is predicated on a never-ending "Palestinian refugee problem") about which we have written often and with passion). Turns out

the main purpose of the UNDP program, based in Jerusalem and like all U.N. activities operating under diplomatic immunity from any national authorities, was to provide funding and support for what the document chastely calls “another U.N. entity” that coordinates the world organization’s activity in Gaza. That “entity” is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which has been accused for years... of allowing Hamas to divert humanitarian supplies to its own military purposes. UNWRA has some 13,000 employees in Gaza, the overwhelming majority of them local Palestinians... [Fox News, August 11, 2014]

The problems at UNRWA, unique but hardly new, stem from factors outlined in sharp terms two years ago in the Wall Street Journal (again). That piece shows how the multi-billion-dollar agency agency is unusual, and unusually unaccountable compared with other UN operations, by reason of at least these three factors:

1. All other refugees world-wide fall under the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Only the Palestinians have their own dedicated U.N. refugee agency, offering special access to the perquisites of the U.N. logo, stage and fundraising. 
2. Almost all other U.N. agencies report to an executive board, allowing at least some chance of functional oversight. Unrwa reports directly to the entire 193-member General Assembly, where responsibility is broadly dispersed and easily avoided. According to a paper in 2010 by the agency's own chief of legal affairs, Lance Bartholomeusz, UNRWA enjoys the added flexibility of having no clearly defined mission: "its mandate is not conveniently stated in one place and must be derived from all other relevant resolutions and requests."
3. Thus unencumbered, UNRWA has ensured its own survival by transforming itself into the patron of Palestinian grievance, conferring refugee status down the generations... ["The U.N. Handmaiden of Hamas", Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal, August 07, 2014]

Israel's concern for the well-being of the Gazans, suffering for years already under the jackboot of a kleptocratic Fatah regime and then, for the past nine years, under the ruthless Islamists of Hamas, may not be top of its list of concerns. But it's undoubtedly a concern. Whether out of altruism or self-interest, there are few voices in Israel calling for an enlargement of Gaza's undoubted plight.

Here's an instance of the sort of Israeli voice Israelis are hearing even if the Arabs aren't. Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai is Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Unit, better known as COGAT. It's a hybrid civilian/military body with a mission

to promote and implement the policy of the Israeli Government in civilian matters, to facilitate humanitarian issues and economic and infrastructure projects in Judea and Samaria and in the Gaza Strip. In addition, the unit leads the coordination and liaison with the Palestinian Authority and with the Palestinian population the West Bank and the Gaza Strip... [fuller description here].

Mordechai, speaking in Arabic in the wake of el-Halabi's confession to the charges of subverting World Vision funding into the pockets of Hamas. addressed the Palestinian Arabs:

Hamas stole this money and passed it to its military wing to build bases, provide salary bonuses and dig the tunnels of death that have brought destruction upon you and the Gaza Strip... Hamas is burying you and your hope of living a normal life. [Associated Press, August 4, 2016]

We can't know what impact this speech had ordinary people in Gaza, or even whether they know it happened. (Freedom of information is currently scarcer in Gaza than Olympic-size pools.) But if a mission, which Israel plainly has undertaken, to produce greater benefits to ordinary Gazans from more efficient delivery of foreign aid and from less siphoning off into the maw of the terrorists, were genuinely shared by the humanitarian aid industry, there's little doubt that the benefits would be widespread and meaningful.

Israelis have always understood that the Palestinian Arabs need to have something to lose in order to be motivated to make the compromises from which peace is fashioned. Hamas and Fatah understand that too; hence the decades-long efforts to give their people literally nothing to lose from the conflict continuing.

But let's acknowledge that if that kind of sea change were to happen, it would likely lead to a rapid, substantial and irreversible cut in the headcount of certain high-profile, billion-dollar aid agencies.

And most of us know what sort of response that will trigger.

UPDATE August 17, 2016: For additional context, friends have suggested we re-post here a remarkable Tweet by the New York Times Jerusalem correspondent. We're glad to do that. Diaa Hadid and her editors seem to feel that what news consumers are missing is some self-justification by the man accused of embezzling World Vision - a disturbingly odd moral judgment but perhaps in tune with the ethos of today's journalism as practiced by the New York Times and others following in its path:

The man Israel accuses of diverting @WorldVision funds to Hamas lost 7 relatives in 2014 war, incl pregnant cousin https://t.co/sPOnhkfpHd

— Diaa Hadid ضياء حديد (@diaahadid) August 4, 2016

If it's no longer posted on Twitter (here), we have archived it here. We asked (via repeated Twitter posts) both the New York Times people and Ms Hadid to explain how these claims bear on the extremely serious charges against the World Vision man. No answer.

---

[Our thanks once again to Malgorzata Koraszewska for having translated this article into Polish. It now appears in that language on the Listy z naszego sadu site.]

http://www.listyznaszegosadu.pl/notatki/kogo-rzeczywiscie-obchodzi-gdzie-trafia-pomoc-zagraniczna