by Mojzu wrote:No, a building being run by UN personnel would not be hiding weapons, schools and hospitals that are sympathetic to Hamas might be persuaded to, but I highly doubt it (because they know well enough that it won't stop them being shelled). But the idea that a UN building, run by UN personnel is hiding weapons? Absurd. Unless you're going to claim that the UN, the organisation that drew up proposals of the partition in the first place, is secretly in collusion with Hamas.I believe UNRWA facilities and refugee camps occupy something like 1/3 of the inhabited areas within the gaza strip, so it would have been quite remarkable and surprising if some their compounds weren't shelled or if none of their hundreds of UN run schools were not bombed during the flare-up. And according to the BBC, Israel already allows 15,000 tons of humanitarian aid into Gaza a week, so the flotilla of 10,000 additional tons is nothing more than a publicity stunt to shame Israel and provide moral encouragement for Hamas and their supporters. To the best of my knowledge, those are the facts of matter; make what you will of them.
So because they cover a large area, it's okay if they're accidentally shelled? Some UN supported facilities within Gaza may have possibly been harbouring Hamas (because not all are run by UN personnel, and may be run by Palestinians sympathetic to Hamas), but the UN headquarters are run by UN personnel (and a UN chief had been visiting at the time) and would not be harbouring Hamas or weapons that were being used by Hamas. As for the blockade it was only April of this year when Israel allowed a shipment of clothes and shoes into Gaza that had been held at it's sea ports for 3 years, it still bans children's crayons and books from entering Gaza, the source you quote is not the BBC, but the BBC who asked the Israeli government to provide them with a figure (the same government that refused to let Journalists enter Gaza during their offensive, so I wouldn't trust any figures given by Israeli government press officials), and that figure is less then a quarter of what Gaza received before the blockades were put into place, and much less then they need.
I believe most of the humanitarian aid allowed into the Gaza strip by the Israeli government is supplied and received by UNRWA inside the Gaza strip, so those figures supplied by the BBC should be easy enough to confirm or discredit if you care to search through the UNRWA website.
And you'll have to provide a source please regarding the ban on crayons and markers and all that stuff. According the UNRWA site, an estimated half a million Palestinian children who attend their schools will have received an OLPC laptop by 2012. I would probably be really envious of those little brats if not for the fact that I already have one - which I paid over 300 dollars for during their ‘buy one, get one’ program back in 2007. They're really, really cool computers - and had I sold mine around the Christmas three years ago when it came in the mail, I could have sold it for $600 on ebay, because there was the buy-one/get-one was a very limited time offer that only lasted a few months (and I had to wait almost three months to receive it once I ordered it online.) I would totally be willing to go without a few crayons and markers if I could have one of those instead, but since I live here, I can have both (although I don't happen to have any crayons at the moment since I gave them away to the little kid next door to me.) And I wouldn't worry too much about that shipment of shoes that allegedly got held up at a seaport somewhere, I'm sure there have been tons and tons of pairs of shoes supplied to all the little feet in those refugee camps while the missing shoes sat around unused. If I had to choose to be a 'fugee in a UN camp somewhere, it would most likely have to be there - where I'd get free education, clothes, medicines, food (and quite possibly a brandnew laptop computer.)
