Here is a brief postscript to yesterday’s post about UNRWA. As I noted, Israel shared a dossier of intelligence which purported to show that roughly a dozen UNRWA employees were not only affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad but directly participated in the death squad massacres in southern Israel on October 7th. The intelligence appears to have been detailed, precise and basically incontrovertible, as judged both by journalists who have reviewed portions of the dossier and the response of various government funders. A growing list of governments, beginning with the U.S. but now including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and others, have suspended funding in response. As far as I can tell no one connected to UNRWA has disputed the claims about the specific staffers and they’ve all been fired.

But there’s something that doesn’t quite seem to fit about the response. It seems at least a bit more than you’d expect.

The Department of Defense has identified the three soldiers killed in the drone attack on the undisclosed U.S. base in Jordan. They are Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, GA; Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, GA; and Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, of Waycross, GA. The three were assigned Fort Moore, Georgia and deployed near the Syrian border as part of the U.S.’s on-going fight against the Islamic State.

Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” is out tonight with a report about the pro-Palestine “Ceasefire Now’ protestors which are showing up at basically every Biden event.

Here’s the lede of the newsletter which gives a taste of it …

You’ve probably seen the stories about the UN Agency which allegedly had amongst its employees Hamas operatives who directly participated in the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. The story is both more and less than it seems. The background helps illuminate this as well as much of what we’ve seen over the last three months.

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was founded in 1949 to administer refugee camps for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had either fled the fighting or were driven out by the Israeli military during both phases of the Israeli War of Independence, what Palestinians call The Nakba. (Most of this happened during the first phase of the war.) There were camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Those camps are still there 75 years later. “Camps” is a misnomer. Over time permanent buildings replaced temporary structures and tents. Schools, hospitals, civic buildings and businesses grew up. They are more like towns, or districts of towns. The vast majority of residents of the camps are third and fourth generation descendants of the original refugees of 1947-48. Under UNRWA’s framework they are also refugees. UNRWA still plays a central role administering these communities — running schools, hospitals, various civil services.