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Peter Hansen, head of UNRWA in Gaza
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners November 2, 2004 |
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The head of the UN agency that helps Palestinian refugees accused Israel on Monday of a smear campaign against his agency and crippling its work by destroying its property, blocking aid convoys, and keeping Palestinians from work.
In extremely candid remarks, Peter Hansen said Israel incited distrust toward the UN Relief and Works Agency with a barrage of accusations the group is never given a chance to respond to.
"We are working under very dangerous circumstances and we don't need false stories to make these circumstances even more dangerous than they already are," Hansen told a breakfast meeting with members of the UN Correspondents Association.
Hansen has asked for - and so far has not received - an Israeli apology after it admitted it wrongly accused the agency of allowing an ambulance to be used to smuggle Palestinian rockets and had claimed he was anti-Israeli.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has backed Hansen in the dispute, and Hansen rejected the notion that he or his agency - known as UNRWA - was biased.
"They call me a hater of Israel," Hansen said. "If they are drawing a caricature of me, the caricature has to have a certain likeness to reality. I don't find any likeness between the caricature they're drawing of me and when I look at myself in the mirror.
He also said his complaints were perfectly reasonable and questioned whether Israel would ever find anyone else acceptable for the job.
"Many have told me - and I tend to agree - that anybody doing it with conscience could not have done things much differently than I have," he said.
The spokeswoman for Israel's UN Mission, Anat Friedman, said Israel had no response to Hansen's remarks and wouldn't say if Israeli officials believe he's the problem. She also said no apology was necessary.
"We hope to work with the agency and we don't respond personally with him," she said.
The agency provides health, educational and other services to some 4.2 million Palestinians and their descendants scattered across the Middle East.
Israel has long accused UNRWA - and the United Nations generally - of bias toward it. On its Web site, the Israeli mission says many UN agencies spread anti-Israeli propaganda and accuses the UN General Assembly of undercutting the Middle East peace process with frequent resolutions condemning Israel, which pass thanks in part to the heavy influence of Arab and Asian nations.
Among the allegations Hansen leveled against Israel were blocking Palestinian teachers from going to UN funded schools, costing them about 200,000 teacher days of class. He repeated previous complaints that Israel delays hundreds of containers of relief goods and has detained UNRWA staff without charges.
The latest affront, Hansen said, was that Israel has distributed a 29-slide PowerPoint presentation, received by at least four nations' foreign ministers, attacking UNRWA.
"Needless to say nobody from Israel ever showed us the slide show," he said, offering to make a point-by-point refutation of the Israeli claims.
"This is not the way to communicate between people who have similar interests," Hansen said. "We would like to see Israel make this public and make the charges squarely and frankly and honestly against us."
Hansen made the remarks several hours before delivering his annual report on UNRWA's work to a General Assembly committee. Dated to June 30, 2004, it accuses Israel of violating international law, including the Geneva Convention and the UN Charter by its movement restrictions on UNRWA personnel.
Friedman also refused to discuss those allegations."We don't respond to these claims," she said. "We just hope to keep working with UNRWA."
However, senior spokesman of the Israeli Prime Minister said that Israel will not apologize to UNRWA, not for mistakenly believing that a stretcher thrown into one of its ambulances earlier this fall was a Kassam rocket, and not for any of the other things that Hansen and others complained about.
"The fact that there was one video in which there was a mistake does not exonerate UNRWA when we have issued indictments against 13 of its members," Sharon's spokesman Ra'anan Gissin said Tuesday. He said that the allegation that UNRWA allows use of its ambulances by terrorists is correct.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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