The Israeli military says it has discovered tunnels underneath the main headquarters of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City, alleging that Hamas militants used the space as an electrical supply room.
The unveiling of the tunnels marked the latest chapter in Israel’s campaign against the embattled agency, which it accuses of collaborating with Hamas.
Recent Israeli allegations that a dozen staff members participated in the Hamas attack on Israel Oct. 7 plunged the agency into a financial crisis, prompting major donor states to suspend their funding as well as twin investigations. The agency says that Israel has also frozen its bank account, embargoed aid shipments and canceled its tax benefits.
The army invited journalists to view the tunnel on Thursday.
1 week later we find out that Israel dug those tunnels 20 years ago
Even AP makes the “evidence” sound weak:
It did not prove definitively that Hamas militants operated in the tunnels underneath the UNRWA facility, but it did show that at least a portion of the tunnel ran underneath the facility’s courtyard. The military claimed that the headquarters supplied the tunnels with electricity. …
Lazzarini said the agency has not revisited the headquarters since staff evacuated Oct. 12, and is unaware of how the facility may have been used.
This kind of thing doesn’t really justify shutting down an aid agency, let alone killing 30,000 civilians.
In fact, it’s odd that Israel’s army and politicians don’t see that when they come out with evidence this weak, it actually undermines their case for violence. Before, we might wonder whether they know something we don’t that supports their bombardment of Gaza. After seeing this “evidence”, the best they could muster, we know they have no justification for it.
Almost 30k dead Palestinians (mostly women and children) to find an electrical supply room and series of tunnels under a building?
Israel is a racist terrorist state.
When I was scrolling down I saw the title first before seeing the forum and immediatelly thought - I kid you not - that “This must be The Onion”.
One has to be incredibly naive (or a pro-Israel racist) to believes in all these “amazing coincidences” one after the other of Israel suddenly “discovering” (whilst providing zero evidence) all manner of bad things about the Humanitarian agency that’s keeping Palestinians from starving to death and thus impeding a “final solution” for the “Palestinian problem” (both quotes are from Israeli officials)
Also: why are we demonizing tunnels?
I’ll be honest, I assumed half of the last paragraph was stolen from Nazi material and had jewish references replaced with Palestinian ones.
Holy shit. I knew they were genocidal as fuck, but I didn’t know they actually used those words. Could you please post some sources for those quotes? I’d love to take a look into it.
So do you get paid for your posts here?
3€ for every sentence
Given your history here is essentially just this, I think there js a good chance you are being somewhat honest in this answer.
Yes, I care about the Palestinian cause quite a lot.
Now go do your hasbara somewhere else
Ahh so the people who aren’t doing this as a job don’t care.
Good to know.
Come back to me when you make 3€ for every sentence.
The Israelis also claimed there was a Hamas base under a cemetery, but their claims about the location were disproven by CNN*: entrances weren’t where the Israelis said they were, and tunnels didn’t run where the Israelis said they did. Just briefly glancing at this article, I see that the reporters did not or were not given the opportunity to verify several Israeli claims, including
“Twenty meters above us is the UNRWA headquarters,” and “The military said Saturday night that the tunnel began at a UNRWA school”
I’d like to see more evidence before believing Israel here. Especially since they haven’t shown the ‘UNWRA staff participated in the October attacks’ evidence to the UN or several other countries.
* Israel claims a tunnel ran through this Gaza cemetery it destroyed. A visit to the site raised more questions than answers. Or if you prefer video: IDF says they destroyed this Gaza graveyard because of Hamas activity. CNN can’t find the evidence.
Leaving the facility, it was nearly impossible to identify one window left fully intact. Bullet holes pockmarked the walls. Shrapnel was everywhere, crumpled-up U.N. vehicles were perched precariously atop building debris. Dogs roamed the area.
"The Israeli army is occupying our biggest UNRWA headquarters,” Touma said in response to Israeli allegations. “That’s what’s outrageous.”
Also of note, Gaza is like what, 4 square miles?
There’s tunnels and bomb shelters under literally everything. For reasons that should be obvious now that they’re pretty much the only structures left intact
Gaza is like what, 4 square miles?
About 141 square miles.
The Gaza Strip is 41 kilometres (25 miles) long, from 6 to 12 km (3.7 to 7.5 mi) wide, and has a total area of 365 km2 (141 sq mi)
So it is ~4 miles wide.
At its thinnest, yes.
Ad not even double that at its thickest.
Your numbers seem to indicated that it’s right around double the width of its thinnest point at it’s thickest.
7.4 is not 7.5.
You are correct that it is close, however even 7.5 miles is tiny.
Ha, you think any of those tunnels were used as bomb shelters for civilians? Hamas rather force them to stay in their homes to get them better footage.
“A tunnel!!! We better kill another twenty thousand civilians, just in case.” — The IDF, probably.
“A child as young as 5 years old can help dig a tunnel and even unborn babies can grow up to be tunnel diggers, so to protect the Israeli people we have to stop them now.” — The IDF, probably.
The more Israel obsess over how many tunnels there are in Gaza, the more I realize they’re more like public infrastructure than scary military hideouts
Like a rational response to a constrained geographic footprint…
They are so obsessed with tunnels. Meanwhile 28,000 people have died and hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered homeless in genocide by the hand of Israel. Genociders are trying get us to look elsewhere. What a fucking joke.
UNRWA evacuated the HQ on the 12th of October 2023 and hasn’t visited it since then, following the Israeli evacuation orders and as bombardment intensified, as per Lazzarini, Commissioner General of UNRWA said in a press release.
The last inspection for the UNRWA Gaza premises was completed in September 2023. Nothing was found at the time. Inspections are done quarterly.
So, either the UNRWA staff in the Gaza HQ gave access to its electricity infrastructure to Hamas between the date of the inspection and the date on which the premises have been evacuated, or Hamas tapped into their electricity infrastructure after the staff has left the premises of the Gaza UNRWA HQ.
That is just about how much time this IDF piece deserves. The thirty thousand dead civillians won’t come back now, no matter what happens, with or without Hamas tapping into UNRWA electricity lines.
So no chance that the inspectors simply ignored it? That can’t be a possibility, can it?
Sure, if you have proof of that then please do say it. Otherwise this is just more IDF Hasbara speculation that I won’t engage with. If there’s no proof for a thing, then I’ll take the more probable explanation instead of some crazy conspiracy.
Every hospital in my area has basements and tunnels going under parking lots and connecting facility wings.
Hamas really is everywhere.
I just found a basement beneath my own house
Quick, someone drop a 5 ton bomb. There might be hummus down there!
Ladies and gentlemen we got him, arrest this man.
There are tunnels all over my town! Sure the paperwork SAYS it’s sewage and old tunnels that have been walled off for over a century, but we all know Hamas is in there.
Not the dreaded Hamas electrical supply room!
It’s next to the bombed Hamas park used by Hamas children.
Yeah and the Hamas children used Hamas transit to travel Hamas km to do Hamas on the Hamas.
Say it were actually an electrical supply room used by Hamas under the UN headquarters like Israel is suggesting, does the affiliation of the UN with the organization that planned and executed the terrorist attack on innocent people mean nothing?
It doesn’t mean anything if it is unsubstantiated BS.
I agree. They are inviting reporters to look at it though. Are they unbiased sources? I don’t know but if they were from reasonably unbiased sources and they verified the claims, wouldn’t it mean something?
They’ve already faked it twice, so I wouldn’t believe it the 3rd time personally.
I’m trying to look at this logically. If you were going to fake something, how is the best you can come up with an electrical supply room? It’s a pretty crappy gotcha. Which brings us back to my original question of even if Israel had faked it before, if this time it was proven to be true, wouldn’t that mean something? I would liken that scenario to be like the police frame two people for murder but the third one is legitimate. It’s right to be very sceptical but if it’s all proven to be true for the 3rd person it should still mean something
Meanwhile I’m still waiting here for the Al Shifa Hamas Command Center to be finally unveiled. They’ve conquered that hospital over two months ago.
This article seems to allege electrical and communication cables were run through the ground between the UNRWA headquarters and the tunnel network?
If true they buried the lede here. Idgaf where the tunnels are - when you dig a miles long tunnel, it’ll go under a lot of unrelated buildings. If however the headquarters was serving as a communication relay and power supply, then that’s pretty damning.
I’ll argue you on the damning part.
If someone illegally, and without your consent, taps into your power lines and steals electricity to run say, a weed grow operation, are you suddenly now affiliated with that drug ring? No, of course not, you weren’t involved and are also a victim
If however you allowed that to happen, that’s a different story. The IDF has a high burden of proof to clear here, especially after their big claims of Al-Shifa and the cemetery fell flat
Sure agreed if they didn’t know, but it seems like there was at least a Hamas cell inside the UNRWA that did:
Inside one of the UNRWA buildings, journalists saw a room full of computers with wires stretching down into the ground. Soldiers then showed them a room in the underground tunnel where they claimed the wires connected.
My paint remains though - the wires might be linked from the building to the tunnel, but it’s a jump to say the UNRWA is complicit instead of a victim
Well to use your analogy here, let’s say a weed grow operation steals your electricity by plugging extension cords into several outlets and running them through open windows. Further let’s say this goes on for years with you living in the house. At a certain point it strains credulity to believe that you aren’t in on it.
Something similar seems to have happened here. It doesn’t implicate the UNRWA as a whole, but it certainly raises questions about the employees at this location.
You can minimalize it as much as you want. Better than the previous denial i guess. But the fact is, multiple countries have stopped donations and they will not fund until the UN presents a full and transparent investigation.
When will Israel submit evidence to the UN?
We need a full and transparent investigation of Israel.
It’s the UN’s agency. It’s up to them to do the fact finding if they want funding.
No.
Israel is the one who made the claim.
It is up to them to provide evidence.
No. You don’t trust what Isreal says so you want them to investigate a separate organization? Now why would that be?
I want them to submit their evidence to the UN to be assessed by an organization designated for peace.
You want to blindly believe anything Israel claims, despite the constant history of lying. I can only assume this is to justify to yourself the atrocities they are committing?
No. I’ll see what the UN claims. You can suppose anything you want about me, but you don’t have to suppose this will be our last communication
A.K.A. you’ll blindly believe Israel despite them giving zero proof to the international community.
I bet you believed Saddam had WMD’s too.
Ah yes, guilty until proven innocent.
This conversation is just silly.
Great rebuttal there, shows you’ve got some really good arguments
Multiple countries blindly trusting Isreal isn’t exactly a good thing.
But multiple countries believing in reality and their intelligence agencies is a good thing.
Only if you think reality == Isreali Intel.
Each intelligence agency makes their own evaluation, but nice try.
Except they literally didn’t in this case.
The United States has not independently verified Israel’s claims, which are based on intercepted communications, phone location data, interrogations of Hamas fighters and documents that the Israeli military has recovered in Gaza, officials said. The Washington Post reviewed a document containing the names, U.N. positions and alleged Hamas roles of the 12 individuals, which were shared with the United States and other governments, but has been unable to corroborate the information.
The evidence Israel has privately presented persuaded the United States and eight other country donors to pause funding for UNRWA, a decision that other aid groups have warned imperils the safety and welfare of Gaza civilians who depend on U.N. relief and assistance. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the Israeli information “highly credible.”
US officials say that funding will depend on a credible investigation and acknowledge that there is no real alternative to UNRWA. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said “Let’s not impugn the good work of a whole agency because of the potential bad action here of a small number”.
All* , Each intelligence agency writes their own report, from all sources available, gives it a degree of confidence and sends it to the decision maker. I very much doubt that Israeli intelligence was the only thing used.
Oh, this time I believe them!
