Matthias Smale, a former senior official at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said Tuesday that the timing of Israel’s revelations and allegations of alleged staff involvement of the agency in the Hamas attack on October 7 shows that this is a case with a political spring.

The Israeli accusation that 12 members of the service were involved in the attack came immediately after the January 26 ruling by the UN International Court of Justice in The Hague on the Gaza Strip, Mr Schmale recalled, speaking to German radio station Deutschlandfunk.

He did not rule out the possibility that the officials Israel blames were actually involved in the attack, saying it would not surprise him. “But the timing seems to me to have been very politically motivated,” he insisted.

For Mr. Smale, it is unlikely that 10 percent of UNRWA’s approximately 12,000 workers in the Gaza Strip have “ties” to Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday Monday, citing Israeli intelligence reports. .

Certainly there are people in the ranks of the agency who are sympathetic to Hamas, he acknowledged, but “as long as I was (an official) in it, we always watched very closely how they worked and how our employees behaved” so that they “respected the values ​​of the UN.” and “we took action when that wasn’t the case.”

During his time as an official of the agency (he served for almost seven years), eight UNRWA employees were “dismissed” not only because there were suspicions of their ties to Hamas, but because they “behaved in a way that did not comply with to the values ​​of the United Nations,” he explained. That’s why “I think that what was reported by the Wall Street Journal is exaggerated,” added the German, now a senior adviser at the UN agency in charge of development coordination in the African region.