The UN has abandoned any semblance of working for peace and trying to
maintain harmony among nations. Their hatred of Israel has overridden
everything else the organization does and once stood for.
“IDF Calls Out UN for Lying About Gaza Civilian Casualties,” by Adam Kredo,
Washington Free Beacon, July 24, 2014:
Israel is calling out a United Nations aid agency for
falsely claiming that the Israeli Defense Forces did not permit
civilians to evacuate a Gaza school where 15 people were killed today.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) laid blame for the civilian
deaths on the IDF, claiming it never received approval from the IDF for
an evacuation from the facility.
UNRWA—which has been under fire in recent days for allowing Hamas to
use its facilities to store rockets—released a statement claiming:
“UNRWA had been attempting to negotiate with the [IDF] a pause in the
fighting during which they would guarantee a safe corridor to relocate
staff and any displaced persons who chose to evacuate to a more secure
location. Approval for that never came to UNRWA.”
Earlier, UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness had similarly accused the IDF of preventing a civilian evacuation.
“Over the course of the day UNRWA tried 2 coodinate [sic] with the
Israeli Army a window for civilians 2 leave & it was never granted,”
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness tweeted, following the strike.
However, in an unusual move late Thursday, multiple IDF sources
rejected UNRWA’s claims and characterized them as outright falsehoods
when reached by the Washington Free Beacon.
“For two days we were trying to move people out of that school in
particular and the Beit Hanoun area in general,” said an IDF official
who was involved in the interactions between the IDF, UNRWA, and
International Red Cross (ICRC) leading up to the incident.
The official continued: “This morning we sought a cease-fire in the
area and a humanitarian evacuation of civilians, but Hamas
refused—because they wanted to keep civilians in the area to protect
their fighters who were firing on the IDF,” the source said.
The claim
by Gunness and UNRWA that the IDF did not respond to their request to
evacuate civilians, the source said, is “a flat-out complete and total
lie.”
When asked for further details about the incident, UNRWA claimed that
its school in Beit Hanoun had been turned into “a battlefield” in
recent days.
Many Palestinians, including women and children, had sought shelter
from the fighting in the school, believing it to be safe territory,
according to UNRWA.
“This is the fourth time in the past four days that an UNRWA school has been struck by explosive projectiles,” UNRWA said.
An official IDF statement released to the Free Beacon states
that “the IDF authorized a humanitarian time window for evacuation
between 10:00-14:00 IDT earlier today.
Hamas prevented the civilians
from leaving it and once again used their infrastructure and
international symbols as human shields. In the course of the afternoon,
several rockets launched by Hamas from within the Gaza Strip landed in
the Beit Hanoun area.”
“From initial inquiries done about the incident, during the intense
fighting in the area, militants opened fire at IDF soldiers from the
school area,” the statement says. “In order to eliminate the threat
posed to their lives, they responded with fire toward the origins of the
shooting.”
“The UNRWA claims that Israel prevented the safe evacuation of the
school in Beit Hanoun are unfounded,” the statement concludes….
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