The Israeli military says it has discovered tunnels underneath the main headquarters of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City, alleging that Hamas militants used the space as an electrical supply room.
The unveiling of the tunnels marked the latest chapter in Israel’s campaign against the embattled agency, which it accuses of collaborating with Hamas.
Recent Israeli allegations that a dozen staff members participated in the Hamas attack on Israel Oct. 7 plunged the agency into a financial crisis, prompting major donor states to suspend their funding as well as twin investigations. The agency says that Israel has also frozen its bank account, embargoed aid shipments and canceled its tax benefits.
The army invited journalists to view the tunnel on Thursday.
As is often the case in these kinds of discussions, you are both right.
Yes, if there was complicity on the part of UNRWA that’s messed up.
And yes, the cabling involved looks like it had to have had someone in a restricted area of UNRWA setting it up.
But also yes, it could have been being done without the organization’s knowledge by anything from a Hamas operative wearing a hardhat after interfering with their Wi-Fi to agents infiltrating as employees. Intelligence services do that kind of infiltrating and setup quite frequently.
And once set up, I’d be quite surprised if this was going to be caught in a routine inspection. It just looks like a slightly below ground cable feed. It’d be weird to even look at the cables and think “I wonder if there’s a secret server room below here.”