A U.N. spokesman said it “would be very difficult” for UNRWA to find out whether the latest employee revealed to have participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre was carrying out a task for the U.N. body or the terrorist organization.
Mohammad Abu Itiwi, a commander in Hamas’s elite Nukhba force who was killed in an Israeli airstrike while driving a U.N. vehicle in Gaza last Wednesday, was alleged by Israel in July to have participated directly in the massacre. UNRWA, the scandal-plagued Palestinian-only aid and social-services agency, said it received the allegations about Itiwi and others but could not act upon them without additional information.
Israel says Abu Itiwi directed the murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians seeking refuge in a bomb shelter after fleeing from Hamas’s attack on the Nova music festival in southern Israel. Sixteen civilians were killed in the shelter, while four, including American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin, were taken hostage. (Goldberg-Polin, along with five other hostages, was executed in a Gaza terror tunnel on Aug. 31 after 11 months in captivity.)
After Abu Itiwi’s death, Israeli officials provided a photograph placing him at the scene of the bomb-shelter killings. UNRWA subsequently admitted his role as a Hamas member, while U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres mourned the strike that “took the life of yet another one of our UNRWA colleagues,” failing to mention Abu Itiwi’s role as a Hamas commander and participation in the Oct. 7 attack.
Abu Itiwi was employed by UNRWA as a driver since 2022.
Farhan Haq, Guterres’s deputy spokesperson, said on Friday in response to a question from JNS that he didn’t know what mission Abu Itiwi was on at the time of his killing.
“Drivers drive vehicles. That’s the nature of their job. But beyond that, I have no details on what he was doing at that time,” said Haq.
Asked by JNS if an investigation was going to be undertaken to find out whether he was wearing his U.N. or Hamas “hat” inside the U.N. vehicle in which he was killed, Haq deemed it a “leading question,” claiming that the United Nations was trying to obtain further relevant information from Israeli authorities about Abu Itiwi.
Pressed by JNS on why UNRWA wouldn’t have information about what kind of assignment its employee was carrying out in a U.N. vehicle at a given time, Haq responded, “UNRWA has information about different things, but having hour-to-hour information about the movement of employees during a time of war would be very difficult to collect.”
An internal U.N. investigation found in August that nine UNRWA staffers “may have” participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
But Haq later clarified that the conclusions were more definitive in nature.
Asked whether those nine UNRWA workers “likely or highly likely were part of the attacks,” Haq responded, “I think that’s a good way of describing it.”
Despite international pressure, the Knesset is set to vote on Monday on two bills that would make it illegal for Israeli officials to cooperate with UNRWA, and for it to operate in Jerusalem.
U.S. Congress has banned funding for UNRWA through March of next year, due to the agency’s ties to Hamas and its failures to address related issues with urgency. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, however, is pressuring Israel to relent on its activities to halt or limit UNRWA’s operations.
