The head of the UN Agency responsible for Palestinian Refugees has confirmed an internal report alleging Israeli abuse of Palestinian detainees taken into custody after the October 7th Hamas attack.
Philippe Lazarrini, the Commissioner-General of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, confirmed that the Agency had compiled an internal report citing complaints of mistreatment of Palestinians released back into Gaza.
UNRWA’s head says those Gazans detained by Israeli forces were completely traumatized upon their release, detailing abuses while in Israeli custody.
This development comes as a new, separate UN report released this week found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence was perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis during that October 7th attacks.
Confirmation of the internal UNRWA report comes as the Agency finds itself in the crosscurrents of the war in Gaza, accused by Israel of employing hundreds of terrorists within its ranks.
Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan, “Out of UNRWA’s 13 000 employees in Gaza. 12%, I repeat, 12% are members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and hundreds of them are active terrorists. Friends, UNWRA has been proven to be an instrumental part of Hamas’s terror machine.”
“For years, Hamas has infiltrated and poisoned the organisation. But UNWRA, even before Hamas hijacked it in Gaza, has always been part of the problem and never part of the solution.”
A matter put to the UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazarrini, who pointed to their quick action to immediately fire 12 staff members accused by Israel of being part of the October 7th attacks, while a UN investigation into the allegations is ongoing.
“We are UNRWA or I as commissioner general, have never been informed or seized. As you know, we are providing on a yearly basis the entire list of our staff in Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem to both the Israeli authority and to the Palestinian authorities. I have never received the slightest concern about the staff that we are employing. The only allegation that has been communicated to me has been on January 18, about the 12 alleged staffers, this is an information which has been shared with me on an oral basis but I felt that this was horrific enough and serious enough to take the action that we have taken. All the other allegations have not been communicated to me but if this allegation is being substantiated that we keep saying that this should cooperate with the UN and provide this to any team looking into this.”
He also confirmed an earlier New York Times report that UNRWA had compiled an internal report based on the testimony of more than 100 Gazan detainees who accuse Israel of abuse.
“There is a report which has not been made public of hundreds of detainees who have been released. We have seen these people coming back from detention, some of them for a couple of weeks, some of them for a couple of months. And most of them coming back completely traumatized by the ordeal they have gone through. And indeed, a number of people have been after that, debriefed about, you know, their ordeal. And we have, indeed, an internal report about their experiences. And this report now is also shared with the relevant human rights entities dealing with detention.”
Lazarrini was pressed on the details of this internal report.
“We heard stories of people not only having been systematically humiliated, we had quite to know a lot about people have been obliged to be naked, pictured naked, being subject of verbal and psychological abuse. They have been the threat of use of electrocution. We know that there have been a lot of sleep deprivation or use of extreme noise to prevent people to sleep. We heard about the use of dogs to intimidate the people so there have been quite a number of various way of putting people under pressure. When I was in Gaza, that was on the 18, the last time it was in Gaza was a 16th of June where I heard quite a number of humiliating situations where people were forced to be on diapers because they could not access a toilet for days, if not weeks. And basically, this could have ranged people from the age of 15 to more than 80.”
A statement from the Israeli Defence Force said mistreatment of detainees during their time in detention was absolutely prohibited, further denying claims of sexual abuse of detainees.
Meanwhile, on Monday, a report from the Office of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict said it found reasonable ground to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred at several locations during the Hamas-led attacks on Israel last October.
The report concludes that based on the totality of information gathered from multiple and independent sources, there were reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred across the Gaza periphery, including in the form of rape and gang rape.
