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OCTOBER 11, 2018 | The Jewish Home
estinian killed Kim Levengrond Yehezkel, 28, and Ziv Hajbi, 35, and wounded Sara Vaturi, 54, on Sunday. He fled the scene after opening fire, and now Palestinian Authority security forces are helping the IDF find him. Na’alowa entered the offices of the Alon Group on Sunday morning armed with a locally produced Carlo-style submachine gun. He forced a janitor at gunpoint to handcuff Kim and then fatally shot her from close range. He then shot Sara in the stomach, moderately wounding her. The terrorist then shot and killed Ziv. Na’alowa worked at the Alon Group as an electrician. After the attack, the IDF arrested members of Na’alowa’s family and others – 19 people in all – in order to assist in the investigation. Shin Bet security services interrogated them to determine if they had assisted Na’alowa in the terror attack or in his escape from the scene, the army said. According to Palestinian security officials, the PA is helping to find the murderer because it “does not support violent acts and wants to maintain security and stability” in the West Bank. The PA has been heavily criti-
cized by the Palestinian people in the past for helping Israel. Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh and several other Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials have lashed out at Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for cooperating with Israel in any way. “I call for the halt of security coordination and cooperation with Israel,” Haniyeh said at a funeral in Gaza in October 2017. “It is not acceptable for any Palestinian, wherever he is or whatever he is in, to coordinate or cooperate with the enemy.” Polls have shown that most Palestinians wish to see an end of any security cooperation between Israel and the PA. A September poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that sixty-eight percent of Palestinians gave their support to the Palestinian Central Council’s decision to end security coordination with Israel. The Council, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s second highest decision-making body, recently renewed its 2015 decision to end security coordination with Israel. So far both the 2015 and 2018 decision, have not been implemented by the Palestinians.
UNRWA Employees Driven Out of Gaza
Palestinian protests forced nine foreign employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to flee from Gaza into Israel last week. The violent mob surrounded and blocked a car with the UNRWA officials inside for an hour in a “threatening” and “dangerous” confrontation, according to the head of the agency. He added that a crowd of Gazans prevented 300 employees of the Palestinian refugee agency from accessing their offices in the organization’s Gaza headquarters for eight days in a
row. Many of the senior staffers have had “serious threats” lodged against them as well. They fled to Israel to secure their safety. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency is the UN body that is meant to aid Palestinian refugees. Matthias Schmale, the head of the UN group, said that the “UNRWA employees’ union in Gaza has been protesting the dismissals [of employees] and other changes we made last month by blocking our access to our offices. We have only been able to enter them two out of the past ten days. I understand the frustration of the people who have lost jobs or been moved from full to part-time work, but we need to be able to function and do our jobs.” UNRWA announced in July that it was laying off 113 of their employees and was offering part-time employment to 584 of their full-time workers. The agency has been facing major funding problems largely because the Trump administration is giving the group far less money than the previous White House administration. Since the start of 2018, the U.S. government has only sent $60 million to the agency; in 2017, the U.S. gave $364 million. The U.S. government