Nine staff members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees may have been involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and they will be dismissed, the United Nations says.
“For nine people, the evidence was sufficient to conclude that they may have been involved in the seventh of October attacks,” deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said
He was referring to findings of the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, which he said had completed its investigation into the alleged involvement of 19 UNRWA staff members in the attacks.
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“OIOS made findings in relation to each of the 19 UNRWA staff members alleged to have been involved in the attacks,” he said.
“In one case, no evidence was obtained by OIOS to support the allegations of the staff member’s involvement while in nine other cases, the evidence obtained by OIOS was insufficient to support the staff member’s involvement,” he said.
Haq said all the nine individuals who the investigation concluded may have been involved were men.
He did not give details of what they may have done, but said:
“For us, any participation in the attacks is a tremendous betrayal of the sort of work that we are supposed to be doing on behalf of the Palestinian people.”
The United Nations launched the investigation after Israel charged that 12 UNRWA staff took part in the Hamas-led October 7 attacks which triggered the Gaza war.
According to Israeli tallies, 1200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
Almost 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war that followed.
Israel stepped up its accusations in March, saying more than 450 UNRWA staff were military operatives in Gazan militant groups.
UNRWA employs 32,000 people across its area of operations, 13,000 of them in the Gaza Strip.
UNWRA said in March that some employees released into Gaza from Israeli detention reported having been pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the October attacks.
Meanwhile, Israel returned the bodies of more than 80 Palestinians killed in its military offensive in the Gaza Strip as Israeli air strikes killed at least 18 more people on Monday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.
Yamen Abu Suleiman, the director of the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, said it was unclear whether the bodies had been dug up from cemeteries by the army during the ground offensive, or whether they were “detainees who had been tortured and killed”.
“The occupation provided us with no information about the names, or ages, or anything. This is a war crime, a crime against humanity,” Abu Suleiman said.
The bodies will be screened and examined in an attempt to determine the causes of death and in an attempt to identify them.
They will later be buried in a mass grave at a cemetery near Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
The 84 bodies arrived in more than 15 bags, each containing several bodies, Abu Suleiman added.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the return of the bodies.
In the past, Israel has said it returned bodies after checks they were not Israeli hostages who had been held by Hamas since the October 7 attack
In Jerusalem, the Israeli Hostages Families Forum asked why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would allow the handover of Palestinian bodies without a ceasefire deal with Hamas.
“Why are bodies being returned outside the framework of a comprehensive deal? Such an agreement could bring back living hostages for rehabilitation and the deceased for proper burial,” they said in a statement.
In southeast Khan Younis, residents said Israeli aerial and tank shelling continued overnight, including in areas for which Israel had issued evacuation orders, saying militants had been waging attacks from there.
An Israeli air strike killed eight Palestinians in a vehicle on the road near Khan Younis on Monday, medics said.