Israel unveils tunnels underneath Gaza City headquarters of UN agency for Palestinian refugees
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.
Almost 30k dead Palestinians (mostly women and children) to find an electrical supply room and series of tunnels under a building?
Israel is a racist terrorist state.
The Israelis also claimed there was a Hamas base under a cemetery, but their claims about the location were disproven by CNN*: entrances weren't where the Israelis said they were, and tunnels didn't run where the Israelis said they did. Just briefly glancing at this article, I see that the reporters did not or were not given the opportunity to verify several Israeli claims, including
I'd like to see more evidence before believing Israel here. Especially since they haven't shown the 'UNWRA staff participated in the October attacks' evidence to the UN or several other countries.
* Israel claims a tunnel ran through this Gaza cemetery it destroyed. A visit to the site raised more questions than answers. Or if you prefer video: IDF says they destroyed this Gaza graveyard because of Hamas activity. CNN can't find the evidence.
Also of note, Gaza is like what, 4 square miles?
There's tunnels and bomb shelters under literally everything. For reasons that should be obvious now that they're pretty much the only structures left intact
About 141 square miles.
So it is ~4 miles wide.
At its thinnest, yes.
Ad not even double that at its thickest.
Your numbers seem to indicated that it's right around double the width of its thinnest point at it's thickest.
7.4 is not 7.5.
You are correct that it is close, however even 7.5 miles is tiny.
Ha, you think any of those tunnels were used as bomb shelters for civilians? Hamas rather force them to stay in their homes to get them better footage.
Not the dreaded Hamas electrical supply room!
It’s next to the bombed Hamas park used by Hamas children.
Yeah and the Hamas children used Hamas transit to travel Hamas km to do Hamas on the Hamas.
Say it were actually an electrical supply room used by Hamas under the UN headquarters like Israel is suggesting, does the affiliation of the UN with the organization that planned and executed the terrorist attack on innocent people mean nothing?
It doesn't mean anything if it is unsubstantiated BS.
I agree. They are inviting reporters to look at it though. Are they unbiased sources? I don’t know but if they were from reasonably unbiased sources and they verified the claims, wouldn’t it mean something?
They've already faked it twice, so I wouldn't believe it the 3rd time personally.
I’m trying to look at this logically. If you were going to fake something, how is the best you can come up with an electrical supply room? It’s a pretty crappy gotcha. Which brings us back to my original question of even if Israel had faked it before, if this time it was proven to be true, wouldn’t that mean something? I would liken that scenario to be like the police frame two people for murder but the third one is legitimate. It’s right to be very sceptical but if it’s all proven to be true for the 3rd person it should still mean something
They are so obsessed with tunnels. Meanwhile 28,000 people have died and hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered homeless in genocide by the hand of Israel. Genociders are trying get us to look elsewhere. What a fucking joke.
"A tunnel!!! We better kill another twenty thousand civilians, just in case." --- The IDF, probably.
"A child as young as 5 years old can help dig a tunnel and even unborn babies can grow up to be tunnel diggers, so to protect the Israeli people we have to stop them now." --- The IDF, probably.
Every hospital in my area has basements and tunnels going under parking lots and connecting facility wings.
Hamas really is everywhere.
I just found a basement beneath my own house
Quick, someone drop a 5 ton bomb. There might be hummus down there!
Ladies and gentlemen we got him, arrest this man.
MFW
There are tunnels all over my town! Sure the paperwork SAYS it's sewage and old tunnels that have been walled off for over a century, but we all know Hamas is in there.
When I was scrolling down I saw the title first before seeing the forum and immediatelly thought - I kid you not - that "This must be The Onion".
One has to be incredibly naive (or a pro-Israel racist) to believes in all these "amazing coincidences" one after the other of Israel suddenly "discovering" (whilst providing zero evidence) all manner of bad things about the Humanitarian agency that's keeping Palestinians from starving to death and thus impeding a "final solution" for the "Palestinian problem" (both quotes are from Israeli officials)
I'll be honest, I assumed half of the last paragraph was stolen from Nazi material and had jewish references replaced with Palestinian ones.
Also: why are we demonizing tunnels?
Holy shit. I knew they were genocidal as fuck, but I didn't know they actually used those words. Could you please post some sources for those quotes? I'd love to take a look into it.
1 week later we find out that Israel dug those tunnels 20 years ago
Even AP makes the "evidence" sound weak:
This kind of thing doesn't really justify shutting down an aid agency, let alone killing 30,000 civilians.
In fact, it's odd that Israel's army and politicians don't see that when they come out with evidence this weak, it actually undermines their case for violence. Before, we might wonder whether they know something we don't that supports their bombardment of Gaza. After seeing this "evidence", the best they could muster, we know they have no justification for it.
A Hamas electrical supply room! Maybe there was a Hamas McDonalds down the road as well.
They were improperly storing lightbulbs and extension cords . So Israel is definitely in the right
God damn Hamas, that's a fire hazard! We better genocide more innocent civilians just in case!
Oh, this time I believe them!
The more Israel obsess over how many tunnels there are in Gaza, the more I realize they're more like public infrastructure than scary military hideouts
Like a rational response to a constrained geographic footprint...
UNRWA evacuated the HQ on the 12th of October 2023 and hasn't visited it since then, following the Israeli evacuation orders and as bombardment intensified, as per Lazzarini, Commissioner General of UNRWA said in a press release.
The last inspection for the UNRWA Gaza premises was completed in September 2023. Nothing was found at the time. Inspections are done quarterly.
So, either the UNRWA staff in the Gaza HQ gave access to its electricity infrastructure to Hamas between the date of the inspection and the date on which the premises have been evacuated, or Hamas tapped into their electricity infrastructure after the staff has left the premises of the Gaza UNRWA HQ.
That is just about how much time this IDF piece deserves. The thirty thousand dead civillians won't come back now, no matter what happens, with or without Hamas tapping into UNRWA electricity lines.
So no chance that the inspectors simply ignored it? That can't be a possibility, can it?
Sure, if you have proof of that then please do say it. Otherwise this is just more IDF Hasbara speculation that I won’t engage with. If there’s no proof for a thing, then I’ll take the more probable explanation instead of some crazy conspiracy.
Meanwhile I'm still waiting here for the Al Shifa Hamas Command Center to be finally unveiled. They've conquered that hospital over two months ago.
"Israeli head of state claims to be doing everything possible to minimize Palestinian civilians"
Just admit you want to kill all Palestinians, Bibi the Big-Eared Butcher.
This article seems to allege electrical and communication cables were run through the ground between the UNRWA headquarters and the tunnel network?
If true they buried the lede here. Idgaf where the tunnels are - when you dig a miles long tunnel, it'll go under a lot of unrelated buildings. If however the headquarters was serving as a communication relay and power supply, then that's pretty damning.
I’ll argue you on the damning part.
If someone illegally, and without your consent, taps into your power lines and steals electricity to run say, a weed grow operation, are you suddenly now affiliated with that drug ring? No, of course not, you weren’t involved and are also a victim
If however you allowed that to happen, that’s a different story. The IDF has a high burden of proof to clear here, especially after their big claims of Al-Shifa and the cemetery fell flat
Sure agreed if they didn't know, but it seems like there was at least a Hamas cell inside the UNRWA that did:
My paint remains though - the wires might be linked from the building to the tunnel, but it’s a jump to say the UNRWA is complicit instead of a victim
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."
Well to use your analogy here, let's say a weed grow operation steals your electricity by plugging extension cords into several outlets and running them through open windows. Further let's say this goes on for years with you living in the house. At a certain point it strains credulity to believe that you aren't in on it.
Something similar seems to have happened here. It doesn't implicate the UNRWA as a whole, but it certainly raises questions about the employees at this location.
Is there some kind of conversion rate? Like each discovered tunnel justifies 1,000 more dead or something?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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 unearthed shaft led to an underground passageway that an Associated Press journalist estimated stretched for at least half a kilometer (quarter of a mile), with at least 10 doors.
At one point, journalists were able to gaze upward from the tunnel, through a hole, and make eye contact with soldiers standing in a courtyard within the UNWRA facility.
One of the main objectives of the Israeli offensive has been to destroy that network, which it says is used by Hamas to move fighters, weapons and supplies throughout the territory.
The offensive was launched after Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people and dragging 250 hostages back to Gaza.
Since then, Israeli war planes and ground troops have killed over 27,000 Palestinians in the strip, unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe and wreaked widespread damage.
The original article contains 844 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I am not seeing any evidence. Sad that AP is manufacturing consent for Genocide.
A reminder that the IDF straight up lied to CNN that they walked through a tunnel underneath a graveyard. Later on it was proven that the tunnel did not go underneath the graveyard.
https://youtu.be/34CxzZtVxnE?t=3m18s
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/34CxzZtVxnE?t=3m18s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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You can minimalize it as much as you want. Better than the previous denial i guess. But the fact is, multiple countries have stopped donations and they will not fund until the UN presents a full and transparent investigation.
Multiple countries blindly trusting Isreal isn't exactly a good thing.
But multiple countries believing in reality and their intelligence agencies is a good thing.
Only if you think reality == Isreali Intel.
Each intelligence agency makes their own evaluation, but nice try.
Except they literally didn't in this case.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240131171342/https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/30/unrwa-gaza-israel-aid/
All* , Each intelligence agency writes their own report, from all sources available, gives it a degree of confidence and sends it to the decision maker. I very much doubt that Israeli intelligence was the only thing used.
When will Israel submit evidence to the UN?
We need a full and transparent investigation of Israel.
It's the UN's agency. It's up to them to do the fact finding if they want funding.
No.
Israel is the one who made the claim.
It is up to them to provide evidence.
No. You don't trust what Isreal says so you want them to investigate a separate organization? Now why would that be?
I want them to submit their evidence to the UN to be assessed by an organization designated for peace.
You want to blindly believe anything Israel claims, despite the constant history of lying. I can only assume this is to justify to yourself the atrocities they are committing?
No. I'll see what the UN claims. You can suppose anything you want about me, but you don't have to suppose this will be our last communication
A.K.A. you'll blindly believe Israel despite them giving zero proof to the international community.
I bet you believed Saddam had WMD's too.
Last time I heard this excuse was when all the tankies were calling Biden a lier and stoking tensions for saying Russia was going to invade Ukraine.
Ah yes, guilty until proven innocent.
This conversation is just silly.
Great rebuttal there, shows you've got some really good arguments