TEL AVIV – The United Nations Development Program said Tuesday it was “greatly concerned” by Israel’s allegation that one of its employees was assisting the Hamas terror group.
The UNDP promised in a statement that it would issue “a thorough internal review of the processes and circumstances surrounding the allegation.”
On Tuesday, the government announced that engineer Waheed Abd Allah Bossh, a staffer at the UN Development Program since 2003, was arrested in July and charged with using his position as an aid worker to “serve Hamas’s military interests.”
The government statement said that 38-year-old Bossh, from northern Gaza, had been recruited by “a senior member of the Hamas terrorist organization to redirect his work for UNDP.”
It also said Bossh confessed to several charges, one of which was rerouting rubble from a UNDP project in Gaza towards building a jetty for Hamas naval forces. He is also accuses of convincing UNDP’s upper management in the Strip to focus rebuilding efforts after the 2014 war with Israel to areas with a high concentration of Hamas operatives.
The UN insisted that despite the allegations, it had “robust measures in place” to thwart the diversion of aid.
Hamas called the allegations “incorrect and baseless” and said that it was typical of Israel “to tighten the siege of the Gaza Strip by prosecuting international relief organizations.”
Aid workers privately admit to pressure from Hamas, AFP reported.
“This is not an isolated case, but rather a troubling trend of the systematic exploitation by Hamas terrorists of UN organizations,” Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said in a separate statement.
The allegations come in the wake of news that the Gaza director of U.S. Christian charity World Vision was charged with diverting millions of dollars every year in international aid money to Hamas for terror ends.
Halabi is also charged with recruiting an employee from the NGO Save the Children to Hamas, AFP said.
Eitan Dangot, former head of the department of the Defense Ministry in charge of the Palestinian territories, said Tuesday it was highly probable that other aid agencies were similarly involved with Hamas.
“If we published two, just think how many there are besides. And there are for sure,” he told a news conference.
MK Avi Dichter (Likud), the a senior Knesset member who is also the former head of the Shin Bet security, agreed, adding that most UN aid workers in the Gaza Strip were members of Hamas.
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