Monstrous complicity As UN links to Hamas are revealed, the BBC-led media airbrush these away Melanie Phillips
In a sane universe, the discovery of a Hamas data centre and server farm in a tunnel 700 metres long and 18 metres deep directly underneath the headquarters of the UN Works and Relief Agency in Gaza would be of huge significance.
Ariel Kahana reported in Israel Hayom:
I saw with my own eyes the cables connecting UNRWA’s communication room on the first floor of the building to Hamas’ server room exactly underneath it.
Did Thomas White, UNRWA Gaza director since the summer of 2021, not notice the trucks removing soil for years from the compound he managed? Did he not wonder who the people walking around his headquarters were when he didn’t employ them? Was he not puzzled by the computers, air conditioners, servers, batteries, cement mixers, cables, tiles, steel doors, and even the motorcycles that arrived in his backyard without him ordering them? Did he not notice the fibers that very strangely dangled from his communication room to an unknown destination underground? Did he never once have a doubt that made him think to report to his superiors at the UN?…
The UNRWA headquarters above ground and Hamas’ “brain” below ground are a physical reality connected by thick cables, and not just as a metaphor…After we again sank into the mud, crawled through the tunnel, walked hunched over for hundreds of meters, and came out into Gaza’s trembling skies, the IDF APCs brought us to UNRWA’s headquarters. There, among offices, schools, kindergartens, and SpongeBob drawings, the commander of 401st Brigade, Col. Benny Aharon, shows us the agency’s own server room.
“We’re in UNRWA’s server room. Coincidentally — I say this cynically — it’s located right above the server room you found underground,” he says. “Notice that all the cables are ripped and disconnected, they left almost nothing, only what they managed to cut off. We’re lucky a few cables remained that they didn’t manage to cut off some of the cables that going down below. They took out all the DVRs and computers from here. Only someone who has something to hide does something like this. What kind of international humanitarian organisation that only has good intentions behaves this way?”
What kind indeed. The discovery of this terrorist server farm, directly beneath UNWRA HQ and with the UNWRA server centre connected through cables through the floor to the Hamas nerve centre directly beneath, would seem to have caught UNWRA bang to rights over complicity with Hamas.
Combine that with the revelation that UNWRA fired a number of its staff after Israeli intelligence produced evidence that twelve of them were involved in the October 7 Hamas pogrom, and the further revelation by UN Watch that more than 3,000 UNRWA staff and teachers celebrated that pogrom and praised the murderers and rapists as “heroes,” and the implications become seismic.
Through one of its agencies, the UN, the world’s supposed guardian and promoter of peace and justice, has been complicit with a terrorist organisation bent upon the genocide of the Jews and destruction of Israel.
But you won’t have read much or indeed any of that in the British and American media. You’ll have read and watched instead the continued demonisation of the Jewish targets of that genocide.
The New York Times responded to the discovery of the Hamas/UNRWA tunnel with incredulity. Honest Reporting wrote:
Rather than report on the IDF’s disturbing findings, particularly how it is likely UNRWA staff knew of the terror base, the NYT reframed the story to push a wildly distorted narrative of a plucky UNRWA fighting against Hamas in the Strip and resisting the terror group’s efforts to infiltrate the UN agency…
Worryingly, the piece only mentions the uncovering of the tunnels beneath UNRWA’s offices in the 17th paragraph of the piece, with the article’s authors Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman suggesting the IDF only showed journalists this particular tunnel network to “bolster [Israel’s] argument” that UNRWA “has done too little to stop Hamas from building military infrastructure close to its facilities”.
Most of the story is instead dedicated to an implicit defence of UNWRA, including anonymous former staffers’ assurances that the agency has “long taken seriously and investigated accusations of infiltration by Hamas” and the NYT casting doubt on whether UNRWA staff would have spotted the tunnels…
CNN, meanwhile, relegated the story to a short post included in its live updates feed. Casting doubt on the existence of the tunnels at all, CNN turned the story into mere “claims” made by Israel against the UN agency, describing the tunnel as an “alleged finding”.
It couched the finding as occurring against a backdrop in which “Israel has longstanding issues with UNRWA,” suggesting the evidence is part of some nefarious campaign against an organisation tasked with caring for Palestinians.
So what was the British media’s response to this shattering discovery of the symbiotic relationship between UNRWA and Hamas?
Virtual silence.
The Telegraph published a very short story reporting it all as Israeli claims and ending with this:
Israel has been accused of falsifying information to tarnish UNRWA, which employs 13,000 people in the Gaza Strip and has been a lifeline for the aid-dependent population for years.
Here’s what the BBC told the public. Hadar Sela reports for CAMERA UK:
Some nine hours after that latest UNRWA story broke, the BBC News website published an uncredited report titled “Warnings over Rafah offensive mount as Israel plans push in Gaza” on its “Middle East” page in which readers are told only that
The IDF also said it discovered a tunnel shaft near a school run by the relief agency fir Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) that was leading to an “underground terrorist tunnel beneath UNRWA’s main headquarters.
UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini denied any knowledge of a Hamas tunnel near the agency’s office — a building which he said his staff vacated months ago.
As we see, the BBC refrained from telling its audiences what was housed in that tunnel under the UNRWA HQ, thus avoiding the topic of the physical connection between UNRWA’s server room and the Hamas data centre. In the same report, readers are told that:
In other developments on Saturday: […]
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said its air force killed two Hamas operatives in the southern city”
By the time the BBC published its report, the identities of the Hamas operatives had been on record for several hours:
The main target of the strike was Ahmed Al-Yaaqoubi, who the IDF and Shin Bet say was responsible for the security arrangements of senior Hamas officials and served as a senior officer in the Rafah district’s secret police department.
Iman Rantisi, a Hamas military operative and senior official in the terror group’s general security investigations department, and another officer in the Rafah district’s secret police department, were also killed in the strike, the IDF says.
The BBC did however take the trouble to inform readers that:
The BBC is unable to independently verify many battlefield claims made during the course of the war.
Some three hours after the publication of that report — i.e. around twelve hours after the news about the Hamas data centre under the UNRWA HQ had broken — the BBC News website published an article by Jeremy Bowen titled “Israel-Gaza war: Death and Israel’s search for “total victory” which includes comment from (and a photo-op with) UNRWA’s commissioner-general.
UNWRA’s Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini put out a tweet denying any knowledge of the Hamas data centre, claiming:
UNWRA did not know what was under its headquarters in Gaza.
Disingenuously, he noted that UNWRA had left its HQ on December 12 and so was
unaware of any activity that may have taken place there.
This was laughable. The Hamas underground terrorist centre was so vast and lavishly equipped it would have taken years to build (with, of course, the world’s “humanitarian aid” to the suffering of Gaza). There was no way on earth that UNWRA could have been unaware what was being built below its floor.
Indeed, eight days before this story broke the Wall Street Journal reported:
In 2014, part of the parking lot at the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza began sinking, likely from a Hamas tunnel dug beneath. “No one talked about what was causing the collapse,” a former UNWRA official said, “but everyone knew”.
“Everyone knew”; and yet, when the evidence was finally uncovered, the BBC and other British and western media either ignored it or made only the briefest of mentions before rushing to defame and demonise Israel with yet more Hamas propaganda claims.
As has been noted before but can’t be said often enough, this sickening behaviour by the media is due to the fact that nothing — absolutely nothing — can be allowed to challenge the narrative of Israeli oppression and its Palestinian victims. When evidence surfaces that proves the truth of what Israel has been saying for years about the links between Hamas and UNWRA, and the role played by the UN agency in indoctrinating Gaza’s Arab children into murderous hatred of the Jews, the media swings into action to obliterate that evidence.
Israeli Jews can never be allowed to be victims. That’s why the astounding IDF rescue of two of the Israeli hostages last night has also been mentioned only in passing. The Israeli hostages get in the way of the narrative in which Israelis are diabolical oppressors and the Palestinian Arabs their victims. So, just like UNWRA complicity with Hamas, the hostages are airbrushed out of the picture. While Israeli hearts are breaking, the western heart is as impervious as stone to Jewish suffering.
Mainstream media outlets in Britain and America, led by the uniquely influential BBC, are guilty of wild distortion, double standards and incitement against Israel. They also sanitise the UN — the centrepiece of another sacrosanct narrative about universalism, trans-national institutions and the brotherhood of mankind — which is actually a force not for spreading peace and justice in the world but the empowerment of murderous forces and the abandonment of the innocent.
Just as UNRWA has been complicit with Hamas’s terrorist activities, so too the BBC and other western media are complicit with the spread of evil.
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