The former head of the UN agency for Palestine refugees, (UNRWA), Matthias Schmale, has argued that the timing of the revelations about the alleged involvement of UNRWA workers in Hamas attacks in Israel served political purposes..

According to Israeli accusations, 12 UNRWA staff members were involved in the October 7 attack by Hamas militants in Israel.

The reports on the alleged involvement came to light shortly after the January 26 ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague about Israel’s war in Gaza, Schmale told the German television network Deutschlandfunk today.

The former head of UNRWA stressed that there was a possibility that the workers in question were involved in the Hamas attacks and noted that he was not surprised by the reports. “But it seems to me that the timing of the charges is largely politically driven,” he said.

Smalle said he doesn’t think that’s likely about 10% of the UN agency’s roughly 12,000 employees working in the Gaza Strip to have connections with Hamas or Islamic Jihad, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, citing an Israeli intelligence dossier.

There are people among the workers who have sympathies for Hamas, he said. “But during my tenure, we always watched very closely how people were working, how they were behaving, whether they were behaving in line with UN values, and we were taking action when we realized that wasn’t the case.”

During his tenure, eight people were “fired” over a period of almost four years – not only because of connections to Hamas, but because of behavior that did not meet the values ​​of the United Nations, Smale said. This is a much smaller percentage than what Israeli intelligence reports.

“I think those numbers published by the Wall Street Journal are completely inflated“, he argued.

Thirteen countries suspended all future payments to UNRWA, which enrolls some 5.9 million Palestinians, following the Israeli accusations.