Americans in Gaza Meet
with John Ging
According to Xinhua, the Chinese news agency:
A group of eight U.S. congressmen arrived in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip Monday in a low-profile visit, well-informed Palestinian sources said. After crossing from Israel into Gaza, the eight legislators headed for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)'s headquarters in the city and started a meeting with John Ging, the UNRWA operations director, the sources said. UNRWA officials refused to comment on the visit.
Neither Xinhua nor interested bloggers could identify the Congressmen and we would point out that Ging is the man who accused Israel of deliberately targeting an UNRWA school in Gaza in January. Israel didn't hit the school. From JINSA Report #854:
"I never said anyone was killed in the school. Our officials never made any such allegation. (This is patently untrue; an official UN report three days after the attack said, "Israeli shelling directly hit two UNRWA schools.") I know no one was killed in the school," Ging told The Jerusalem Post. "But 41 innocent people were killed in the street outside the school. Many of those people had taken refuge in the school and wandered out onto the street. The State of Israel still has to answer for that. What did they know and what care did they take?"
What did Israel know? Is Ging suggesting that Israel deliberately dropped a bomb on a street full of civilians? Israel warned Palestinians in Arabic before they attacked, urged them to take shelter or leave the area. Oh, right, they DID take shelter - in the school - according to Ging. The school Israel DIDN'T hit. Question for Ging: why were they "wandering" on the street and how does he know they were "innocent"? Maybe they weren't and maybe they weren't civilians, either. See the outstanding report by Steven Stotsky for CAMERA, analyzing casualty figures from Palestinian sources to conclude that males, aged 15-40 (prime combatant age for Hamas, but violating the Geneva Convention on Child Soldiers), were heavily overrepresented on casualty lists.
What care did Israel take? Israel didn't hit the school.
UNRWA operates in Gaza hand-in-glove with radical Palestinian forces, and in March, slipped a letter from Hamas to President Obama into a packet of materials for Sen. John Kerry. [He returned it unopened and UNRWA apologized.] So was Mr. Ging asking the U.S. Congressional delegation for more American aid for Gaza - beyond the $80 million President Bush announced in December and the additional $900+ million President Obama announced in January?
Or something else? UNRWA has come under attack in Gaza from Hamas for its summer camp activities. A Hamas official told Al-Arabiya TV the UNRWA summer camps were "part of a plan to corrupt the younger generation and prepare it for normalization with Israel." [At Hamas summer camps, children reenact the abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit and have military training with plastic weapons.] UNRWA was forced to respond this week to rumors that Hamas had threatened Mr. Ging's life.
So, what did the Congressmen learn? Is Mr. Ging looking for American help for UNRWA against intrusion by Hamas? Or is he still trying to figure out how to blame Israel for the depredations of Hamas against the people of Gaza, as well as against Israelis?
And who were those Congressmen, anyhow?
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