Poll is the UN also to blame for attacks on UN schools (8 votes)
So basically there was a recent incident in which a UN run school that was being used as a shelter for Gazan civilians was hit by some shells and 17 people were killed. The UN is blaming Israel and UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon is pretty mad. According to the UN they examined the shells and identified them as being Israeli tank shells. Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev has said that Israel is still investigating and that if they do find out that the UN facility was hit by errant Israeli fire they will come clean about it. Regev pointed out that the day before this happened an Israeli soldier was killed by a sniper firing from a UN facility. It is possible that this school was indeed hit by Israel: the Israel military says they did respond to Hamas mortar fire near the school.
So far six UN schools have been hit since the fighting began. But as other stories have shown, the UN has discovered rockets hidden in UN schools, and in one case they handed those rockets over to the "local police" (which would be controlled by Hamas). According to a UN official named John Ging, "the case where terrorists’ weapons had been found in U.N. schools, those schools had not been operating as schools at the time, having been evacuated for safety reasons". Ging says“When we recovered those schools the U.N. were the ones who found the weapons in their inspections, because we have zero tolerance and a very high degree of responsibility to ensure that nothing is stored in our schools like weapons, and no armed people are in these facilities.” So it does appear that the UN is doing something to stop Hamas from using those UN facilities for military/terrorist purposes.
So what do you think, is the UN partially responsible for the UN facilities getting hit? Or are they doing all they can. I guess that partly depends on how Hamas was able to get those weapons into those facilities, if it is as Ging says and Hamas was able to do so because the schools had been evacuated that makes sense. The UN should secure their facilities with adequate guards (though I have a feeling Hamas might refuse to let the UN do so) to ensure that Hamas can not bring weapons into the facilities, but they can probably only secure the facilities themselves, not the area surrounding those facilities.
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