Sunday, June 11, 2017

Israel: Netanyahu calls for shuttiing down UNRWA after Hamas terror tunnel found running beneath two UNRWA schools

(WJD) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that the time has come to shutter UNRWA, the U.N. agency that serves Palestinian refugees.

"The time has come to dismantle UNRWA and have its parts be integrated into the UN High Commission for Refugees," he told the weekly cabinet meeting.

He said he raised the issue with visiting American ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, saying the U.N. should "reexamine UNRWA’s continued existence."

Netanyahu's statement came in the wake of the discovery of a Hamas terror tunnel running beneath two UNRWA schools.

"Hamas uses schoolchildren as human shields. This is an enemy we have been fighting for many years and committing a double war crime: On the one hand, they deliberately attack innocent civilians, and on the other hand they also hide behind children," he told the cabinet.

UNRWA was founded in 1949 and was intended to be a temporary agency. Instead, it has become a massive social welfare organization that dominates much of the Palestinian economy and has been implicated in terrorism and incitement against Israelis and Jews in general.