Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft Nürnberg

Head of UNRWA probe rejects @guardian headline, says she had “excellent cooperation” with Israel; her mandate had nothing to do with identifying UNRWA terrorists, Israel is sharing info with separate UN inquiry run by OIOS. ----- Q: How would you characterize the Israeli cooperation with you, given that as you may have seen today, the main takeaway from your report is Israel has yet to provide any evidence for its allegations that UNRWA personnel were involved in the October 7th attack. So how would you characterize that cooperation and this main takeaway? Catherine Colonna: Thank you. I covered everybody when I said that we received very good cooperation from everywhere, including Israel. I could go in details who received us and so on and so forth, but I want to repeat that we had an excellent cooperation from all sides. Now about one of the quotes—I couldn't read everything this morning—but one of the quotes that have been issued does not respect, I think, the text of the report. We have written – and the beauty of writing reports is that you can refer to what's written—we've written that UNRWA has not received evidence by Israel, not that there is no evidence. It's very different. So please, again and again, refer to the content of the report and not to what you hear sometimes about it. I would really appreciate if you could base your comments and base your judgments on the content and not on preconceived opinions. Q: You stated that Israel has given no evidence to UNRWA about their claims that any UNRWA employees took part in October 7th, but did you during your investigation ask Israel for evidence? Catherine Colonna: Thank you for this opportunity to have me repeating that there must be no confusion between what we've been tasked for, which is assessing whether UNRWA does everything in its power to ensure neutrality and address challenges, etc., and what the OIOS is in charge of. There are two separate missions. So allegations regarding individuals, a difficult case, are in the scope of the OIOS mission. It is not the scope of our mandate. And by the way, it is no surprise that Israel did not provide evidence to UNRWA because it doesn't owe this evidence during the investigation to UNRWA, but to the OIOS. And my understanding is that they have a better cooperation now than at the beginning, and that the team will, their investigators will return there soon. So this is a separate, separate mission.

Gleichzeitig wäre ein „Nein“ zum aktuellen Entwurf falsch: Denn wir wollen das Leid der Palästinenser beenden. Deshalb setzen wir uns für #HumanitärePausen ein. Damit die Geiseln endlich freikommen. Damit die dringend benötigte Hilfe zu den Menschen in Gaza gelangt. 4/4