Lebanon. The commander of the local Hamas cell was an employee of a UN agency

A spokesman for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, said Fatah Sharif Abu al-Amin was “an UNRWA employee who was suspended in March and did not receive pay.” He added that he was under investigation due to accusations regarding his political views.

The head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, also commented on the matter, denying that he knew that Al-Amin was a Hamas commander in Lebanon. – I've never heard the word “commander” before. What is obvious to you today was not obvious yesterday, he told reporters.

The Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva wrote in a post on Platform X: “the head of the UNRWA teachers' union in Lebanon was also the head of Hamas in Lebanon.” The deputy director general for UN and international organizations at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Amir Weissbrod. “Teacher and terrorist sound familiar?” – he wrote on the X platform. He added that this situation shows that UNRWA has problems with verifying employed employees.

UNRWA has been facing allegations about its employees' links with Hamas for some time. In August, the UN internal services reported that in the Hamas attack on Israel On October 7, 2023, nine employees of this agency are believed to have been involved. Earlier, Israel accused 12 UNRWA employees of involvement in the attack. According to Israel, 10 percent of the agency's 13,000 employees in the Gaza Strip belong to Hamas and its ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad. UNRWA's critics accuse it of insufficient action to remove fighters from its ranks.

Fatah Sharif Abu al-Amin was killed in an attack on the Al-Buss camp, one of 12 camps for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. His wife and two children also died in the attack. In a statement released by Hamas after his death, he was praised for his “educational and jihadist work.”

In recent days, Israel has carried out a series of attacks on the leaders of various organizations in Lebanon. On the night from Sunday to Monday, there was an attack that killed three leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The Front, unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, is a leftist secular organization and the second largest grouping of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after Fatah. Mohammad Dahruja, a senior commander of the Sunni armed organization Jamaa Islamiyah, was also killed in the attack on Sunday. According to Reuters sources in the Lebanese security services, the organization also fired rockets into Israeli territory.

Recently, Israel has conducted numerous air attacks on Lebanese territory. According to the Lebanese authorities, over 700 people died and several thousand were injured.