Discovery of Rockets Hidden Relief Supplies Raises Questions About UNRWA

Jerusalem, 2 December, 2023 (TPS) -- Israeli soldiers found missiles and military gear hidden among UN relief supplies in the northern Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces announced on Saturday.

The IDF said 110 rockets, including 30 Grad rockets, were found hidden among boxes belonging to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which supports Palestinian refugees.

Russian-made Grad rockets have a range of 20-40 km.

The rockets were found inside a home in what the IDF called a densely populated area of northern Gaza.

In October, the UNRWA reported that fuel and humanitarian aid was stolen from from one its compounds by trucks purporting to be from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.

The discovery of the rockets raised further questions about the UNRWA.

On Wednesday, one of the released hostages told Israeli reporter Almog Boker that he was held captive by a UNRWA teacher. The hostage said the teacher locked him away and barely fed or cared for his medical treatment.

The UNRWA denied the accusation and asked Almog to provide further proof. Almog responded on X, formerly called Twitter, on Saturday, saying that revealing the identity of the hostage would endanger the other captives.

“One of them testified he was held hostage and starved by an @UNRWA teacher. That’s not an ‘allegation’. That’s a survivor testimony, and more testimonies are coming,” Almog tweeted.

“While Hamas holds 136 Israeli hostages in Gaza, I can’t share information that could endanger them or identify the survivor. I hope UNRWA treats this more seriously than Hamas’s theft from its stocks and abuse of its civilian facilities for terror activity.”

In November, the U.K.-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) issued a report detailing how at least 14 UNRWA teachers celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacres of Israelis on social media. The report included links and screenshots.

The report also noted that UNRWA curriculum helped fuel the massacre by noting that IMPACT-se was able to identify at least 118 participants in the Oct. 7 attack as former students of UNRWA schools.

The U.S. State Department allocated more than $220 million for UNRWA in June despite its schools’ curriculum glorifying violence and terrorism, as well as an agreement conditioning funding on the prevention of teaching hate and antisemitism.