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Jason Koutsoukis in Gaza City
Sydney Morning Herald
January 26, 2009
PALESTINIAN civilians living in Gaza during the three-week war with Israel have spoken of the challenge of being caught between Hamas and Israeli soldiers as the radical Islamic movement that controls the Gaza strip attempted to hijack ambulances.
Mohammed Shriteh, 30, is an ambulance driver registered with and trained by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
His first day of work in the al-Quds neighbourhood was January 1, the sixth day of the war. "Mostly the war was not as fast or as chaotic as I expected," Mr Shriteh told the Herald. "We would co-ordinate with the Israelis before we pick up patients, because they have all our names, and our IDs, so they would not shoot at us."
Mr Shriteh said the more immediate threat was from Hamas, who would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety.
"After the first week, at night time, there was a call for a house in Jabaliya. I got to the house and there was lots of shooting and explosions all around," he said.
Because of the urgency of the call, Mr Shriteh said there was no time to arrange his movements with the IDF.
"I knew the Israelis were watching me because I could see the red laser beam in the ambulance and on me, on my body," he said.
Getting out of the ambulance and entering the house, he saw there were three Hamas fighters taking cover inside. One half of the building had already been destroyed.
"They were very scared, and very nervous … They dropped their weapons and ordered me to get them out, to put them in the ambulance and take them away. I refused, because if the IDF sees me doing this I am finished, I cannot pick up any more wounded people.
"And then one of the fighters picked up a gun and held it to my head, to force me. I still refused, and then they allowed me to leave."
Mr Shriteh says Hamas made several attempts to hijack the al-Quds Hospital's fleet of ambulances during the war.
"You hear when they are coming. People ring to tell you. So we had to get in all the ambulances and make the illusion of an emergency and only come back when they had gone."
Eyad al-Bayary, 32, lost his job as a senior nurse at the Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza City, about six months ago because he is closely identified with Fatah, the rival political movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Twice last year Mr Bayary was arrested by Hamas, and once he was jailed for six days for flying the Fatah flag above his house in Jabaliya. He now works part-time as an English teacher at al-Azhar University.
"After the first day of the war, I go to the hospital to work, to help, but I was told to go away. They tell me 'you are not needed here' and they push me away," Mr Bayary said.
Since the ceasefire was declared on January 17, Hamas has begun to systematically take revenge on anyone believed to have collaborated with Israel before the war.
Israel makes no secret of the fact that it has a network of informants inside Gaza who regularly provide information on where Hamas leaders live, where weapons are being stored and other details that formed an important part of Israel's battle plan.
According to rumour, a number of alleged collaborators have already been executed. Taher al-Nono, the Hamas government's spokesman in Gaza, told the Herald that 175 people had been arrested so far on suspicion of collaborating.
"They will be dealt with by the court and the judge and we will respect the judge's decision," Mr Nono said.
And if the sentence is death?
"We will respect the decision."
But the breakdown between Hamas and Fatah over the last 18 months did not prevent some co-operation between the two sides during the war.
The commander of one al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade unit - the brigades are a coalition of secular militia groups which operate under the loose umbrella of Fatah - said the real enemy remains Israel.
The unit commander, who used the name Abu Ibrahim, invited the Herald into his home.
On the wall of his lounge room hung the portraits of George Habash, who founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a communist paramilitary organisation, and Abu Ali Mustafa, the man who succeeded Habash as leader of the PFLP and who was killed by Israeli forces in 2001.
"Of course we fought together with Hamas because we all have the same aim: to liberate our homeland," he said.
With his two-year old daughter on his knee, Mr Ibrahim, 30, said he would never accept peace or negotiation, even if it might lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.
"I believe in the existence of Israel because it exists on my land - but the war with Israel will only end when I liberate all of my land. This last war with Israel was not the first war, and it will not be the last."
Showing posts with label Hamas use of ambulances. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hamas use of ambulances. Show all posts
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
UNRWA - Hamas ally or tool?
There is a long history of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) facilities and organisation being used by Hamas, including:
• On Jan. 6, 2009, as part of defensive operations in the Gaza Strip, IDF forces came under mortar attack from within the UNRWA-run al-Fakhora school in Jabalya. In response to the incoming enemy fire, the IDF returned mortar fire to the source. The IDF return fire landed outside of the school but reports indicate that dozens of Palestinians were killed. IDF spokesmen have said that among those killed were Imad Abu Iskar and Hassan Abu Iskar, two senior Hamas rocket operatives. The presence of Hamas fighters outside the school has been confirmed by first-hand accounts by residents of the area in reports in the Associated Press and The New York Times. Israeli defense officials told the Associated Press that booby-trapped bombs in the school had triggered secondary explosions that killed additional Palestinian civilians there.
• On Oct. 29, 2007, terrorists in Beit Hanoun, Gaza used an UNWRA school to launch mortars into Israel. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon deplored the attack and asked UNRWA to conduct a full investigation.
• In May 2008 Reuters reported that Awad al-Qiq, an Islamic Jihad rocket engineer, had been moonlighting as a science teacher and deputy headmaster at the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by UNRWA. Al-Qiq was killed while supervising a factory assembling rockets and other weapons for use against Israel, located just a short distance from the school.
• Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attallah, UNRWA's Director of Food Supplies for Gaza, admitted to using his UN vehicle on multiple occasions during the summer of 2002 to transport arms, explosives, and activists from the Popular Resistance Committee to carry out terrorist attacks. Attallah also confessed to contacting members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Syria "in order to obtain money for transferring arms to the Gaza Strip as assistance for the PRC."
• Armed Palestinians have been filmed using UNRWA ambulances to transport
terrorists and, possibly, remains of fallen Israeli soldiers in Gaza.
• Of the 17 UNRWA employees Israel has arrested and indicted since 2001 for aiding terrorists, seven have been convicted in military courts.
• UNWRA's former Commissioner-General Peter Hansen admitted that the agency has employed members of Hamas and other terrorist factions but that he was not aware of any who were active members. According to Hansen: "Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another."
• On April 25, 2007 the UNRWA representative in New York, Andrew Whitley, revealed to congressional staff that UNRWA provided cash assistance to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
• According to a November 2003 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report: "During the first 6 months of 2003, assailants occupied or attacked UNRWA facilities on nine occasions."
• Alaa Muhammad Ali Hassan, a Tanzim member affiliated with Fatah, confessed during interrogation that he had carried out a sniper shooting from a school run by UNRWA in the al-Ayn refugee camp near Nablus. He also told his interrogators that bombs intended for terrorist attacks were being manufactured inside the UNRWA school's facilities.
• In 1982, President Reagan accused UNRWA of allowing its Lebanese camps to become armed bastions of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Forced to investigate when Reagan threatened to withhold U.S. funding for the organization, UNRWA admitted that several camps indeed had been militarized. While the Security Council hasn't enforced 1208 in the Palestinian territories, it has applied pressure on militant Palestinian refugees elsewhere.
In fact, a search on Google for "UNRWA and Hamas" shows numerous articles about the intricate links between the two organisations. These are from the first 2 pages of the search alone:
Gaza Bedfellows UNRWA And Hamas
How UNRWA supports Hamas
Congress Should Withhold Funds from the UNRWA
UNRWA's Hamas employees
Head of UNRWA admits Hamas members on payroll
UNRWA has no Hamas employees, and other UN fantasies
• On Jan. 6, 2009, as part of defensive operations in the Gaza Strip, IDF forces came under mortar attack from within the UNRWA-run al-Fakhora school in Jabalya. In response to the incoming enemy fire, the IDF returned mortar fire to the source. The IDF return fire landed outside of the school but reports indicate that dozens of Palestinians were killed. IDF spokesmen have said that among those killed were Imad Abu Iskar and Hassan Abu Iskar, two senior Hamas rocket operatives. The presence of Hamas fighters outside the school has been confirmed by first-hand accounts by residents of the area in reports in the Associated Press and The New York Times. Israeli defense officials told the Associated Press that booby-trapped bombs in the school had triggered secondary explosions that killed additional Palestinian civilians there.
• On Oct. 29, 2007, terrorists in Beit Hanoun, Gaza used an UNWRA school to launch mortars into Israel. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon deplored the attack and asked UNRWA to conduct a full investigation.
• In May 2008 Reuters reported that Awad al-Qiq, an Islamic Jihad rocket engineer, had been moonlighting as a science teacher and deputy headmaster at the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by UNRWA. Al-Qiq was killed while supervising a factory assembling rockets and other weapons for use against Israel, located just a short distance from the school.
• Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attallah, UNRWA's Director of Food Supplies for Gaza, admitted to using his UN vehicle on multiple occasions during the summer of 2002 to transport arms, explosives, and activists from the Popular Resistance Committee to carry out terrorist attacks. Attallah also confessed to contacting members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Syria "in order to obtain money for transferring arms to the Gaza Strip as assistance for the PRC."
• Armed Palestinians have been filmed using UNRWA ambulances to transport
terrorists and, possibly, remains of fallen Israeli soldiers in Gaza.
• Of the 17 UNRWA employees Israel has arrested and indicted since 2001 for aiding terrorists, seven have been convicted in military courts.
• UNWRA's former Commissioner-General Peter Hansen admitted that the agency has employed members of Hamas and other terrorist factions but that he was not aware of any who were active members. According to Hansen: "Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another."
• On April 25, 2007 the UNRWA representative in New York, Andrew Whitley, revealed to congressional staff that UNRWA provided cash assistance to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
• According to a November 2003 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report: "During the first 6 months of 2003, assailants occupied or attacked UNRWA facilities on nine occasions."
• Alaa Muhammad Ali Hassan, a Tanzim member affiliated with Fatah, confessed during interrogation that he had carried out a sniper shooting from a school run by UNRWA in the al-Ayn refugee camp near Nablus. He also told his interrogators that bombs intended for terrorist attacks were being manufactured inside the UNRWA school's facilities.
• In 1982, President Reagan accused UNRWA of allowing its Lebanese camps to become armed bastions of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Forced to investigate when Reagan threatened to withhold U.S. funding for the organization, UNRWA admitted that several camps indeed had been militarized. While the Security Council hasn't enforced 1208 in the Palestinian territories, it has applied pressure on militant Palestinian refugees elsewhere.
In fact, a search on Google for "UNRWA and Hamas" shows numerous articles about the intricate links between the two organisations. These are from the first 2 pages of the search alone:
Gaza Bedfellows UNRWA And Hamas
How UNRWA supports Hamas
Congress Should Withhold Funds from the UNRWA
UNRWA's Hamas employees
Head of UNRWA admits Hamas members on payroll
UNRWA has no Hamas employees, and other UN fantasies
Saturday, January 10, 2009
The ambulances-for-terrorists scandal
Original article
Posted: June 02, 2004
1:00 am Eastern
By Michelle Malkin
© 2009 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
The United Nations and Red Cross have been providing cover for terrorists – literally. And American taxpayers are footing some of the bill.
Last week, an Israeli television station aired footage of armed Arab terrorists in southern Gaza using an ambulance owned and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Palestinian gunmen used the UNRWA emergency vehicle as getaway transportation after murdering six Israeli soldiers in Gaza City on May 11. The footage shows two ambulances with flashing lights pull onto a street. Shots and shouts ring out during the nighttime raid. A gang of militants piles into one of the supposedly neutral ambulances, clearly marked "U.N." with the agency's blue flag flying from the roof, which then speeds away from the scene.
AccessMiddleEast.org, a nonprofit global news monitoring service, posted the video (shot by a Reuters TV cameraman) on its website last week. To date, Access Middle East Managing Director Richard Bardenstein in Israel informs me, not a single U.S. television news station has expressed interest in showing the footage to American viewers.
Why should we care? Because since 1950, the United States has provided UNRWA with $2.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies – about one-third of the relief agency's total budget. And because instead of investigating this latest black eye-inducing scandal, the United Nations is blasting American troops for defending themselves against such outrageous tactics – now being emulated by Iraqi guerrilla warriors sniping at our men and women from ambulances in Fallujah.
International relief officials are in stubborn denial about the abuse of their emergency vehicles and hospital credentials by terrorists. They claim the videotaped May 11 ambulance-assisted attack was an isolated incident and that the driver was forced to transport the gunmen. But this ambulances-for-terrorists program has been going on for years. And "humanitarian" workers have been willing collaborators.
According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, senior UNRWA employee Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attalah confessed to using his official U.N. vehicle to bypass security and smuggle arms, explosives and terrorists to and from attacks. He was in charge of distributing food supplies to Palestinian refugees. Nidal 'Abd al-Fataah 'Abdallah Nizal, a Hamas activist, worked as an UNRWA ambulance driver and admitted he had used an emergency vehicle to transport munitions to terrorists.
U.N. vehicles aren't the only ones being used by terrorists. An intensive-care ambulance carrying the acronym of the Palestine Red Crescent Society was used to deliver an explosive belt found underneath a stretcher on which a sick child was lying in spring 2002. Female suicide bomber Wafa Idris, who blew herself up in a January 2002 attack in Jerusalem, was a medical secretary for the PRCS. Her recruiter was an ambulance driver for the same organization. PRCS receives financial support from governments and organizations around the world, including the American Red Cross and International Committee of the Red Cross.
The UNRWA has long been suspected of providing aid and comfort to terrorists. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, recently documented how "buildings and warehouses under UNRWA supervision are allegedly being used as storage areas for Palestinian ammunition and counterfeit currency factories." Cantor's 2002 report also noted that UNRWA hosts summer camps in martyrdom for young terrorists-in-training. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., has also lobbied for increased scrutiny of UNRWA funding, which has been used to publish anti-Semitic textbooks and posters in schools that "glorify homicide bombers and the slaughter of innocents."
Moreover, according to Rep. Smith, a UNRWA school hosted a Hamas rally by a key Hamas leader in July 2001 and another UNRWA employee praised homicide bombers, proclaiming: "The road to Palestine passes through the blood of the fallen, and these fallen have written history with parts of their flesh and their bodies."
While jihadists gain shelter in its emergency vehicles, the U.N. continues to lambaste the U.S. for assorted wartime "atrocities." Not one more American dime should go to fund the bloody self-righteousness of the world's most generous terrorist relief organization.
WATCH THE VIDEO:
Michelle's Video Report
Here are those video clips again:
UN Ambulances transporting gunmen after murdering 6 Israelis
UN Ambulance used to smuggle explosives into Israel
Posted: June 02, 2004
1:00 am Eastern
By Michelle Malkin
© 2009 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
The United Nations and Red Cross have been providing cover for terrorists – literally. And American taxpayers are footing some of the bill.
Last week, an Israeli television station aired footage of armed Arab terrorists in southern Gaza using an ambulance owned and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Palestinian gunmen used the UNRWA emergency vehicle as getaway transportation after murdering six Israeli soldiers in Gaza City on May 11. The footage shows two ambulances with flashing lights pull onto a street. Shots and shouts ring out during the nighttime raid. A gang of militants piles into one of the supposedly neutral ambulances, clearly marked "U.N." with the agency's blue flag flying from the roof, which then speeds away from the scene.
AccessMiddleEast.org, a nonprofit global news monitoring service, posted the video (shot by a Reuters TV cameraman) on its website last week. To date, Access Middle East Managing Director Richard Bardenstein in Israel informs me, not a single U.S. television news station has expressed interest in showing the footage to American viewers.
Why should we care? Because since 1950, the United States has provided UNRWA with $2.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies – about one-third of the relief agency's total budget. And because instead of investigating this latest black eye-inducing scandal, the United Nations is blasting American troops for defending themselves against such outrageous tactics – now being emulated by Iraqi guerrilla warriors sniping at our men and women from ambulances in Fallujah.
International relief officials are in stubborn denial about the abuse of their emergency vehicles and hospital credentials by terrorists. They claim the videotaped May 11 ambulance-assisted attack was an isolated incident and that the driver was forced to transport the gunmen. But this ambulances-for-terrorists program has been going on for years. And "humanitarian" workers have been willing collaborators.
According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, senior UNRWA employee Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attalah confessed to using his official U.N. vehicle to bypass security and smuggle arms, explosives and terrorists to and from attacks. He was in charge of distributing food supplies to Palestinian refugees. Nidal 'Abd al-Fataah 'Abdallah Nizal, a Hamas activist, worked as an UNRWA ambulance driver and admitted he had used an emergency vehicle to transport munitions to terrorists.
U.N. vehicles aren't the only ones being used by terrorists. An intensive-care ambulance carrying the acronym of the Palestine Red Crescent Society was used to deliver an explosive belt found underneath a stretcher on which a sick child was lying in spring 2002. Female suicide bomber Wafa Idris, who blew herself up in a January 2002 attack in Jerusalem, was a medical secretary for the PRCS. Her recruiter was an ambulance driver for the same organization. PRCS receives financial support from governments and organizations around the world, including the American Red Cross and International Committee of the Red Cross.
The UNRWA has long been suspected of providing aid and comfort to terrorists. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, recently documented how "buildings and warehouses under UNRWA supervision are allegedly being used as storage areas for Palestinian ammunition and counterfeit currency factories." Cantor's 2002 report also noted that UNRWA hosts summer camps in martyrdom for young terrorists-in-training. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., has also lobbied for increased scrutiny of UNRWA funding, which has been used to publish anti-Semitic textbooks and posters in schools that "glorify homicide bombers and the slaughter of innocents."
Moreover, according to Rep. Smith, a UNRWA school hosted a Hamas rally by a key Hamas leader in July 2001 and another UNRWA employee praised homicide bombers, proclaiming: "The road to Palestine passes through the blood of the fallen, and these fallen have written history with parts of their flesh and their bodies."
While jihadists gain shelter in its emergency vehicles, the U.N. continues to lambaste the U.S. for assorted wartime "atrocities." Not one more American dime should go to fund the bloody self-righteousness of the world's most generous terrorist relief organization.
WATCH THE VIDEO:
Michelle's Video Report
Here are those video clips again:
UN Ambulances transporting gunmen after murdering 6 Israelis
UN Ambulance used to smuggle explosives into Israel
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