Hamas tunnel found under UN Gaza headquarters; agency says 'did not know' 

The Israeli military has said they discovered a tunnel shaft under a UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) school. They have found a tunnel network hundreds of meters (yards) long and running partly under UNRWA's Gaza headquarters in Gaza City. The army engineers took reporters for foreign news outlets through the passages at a time of crisis for UNRWA.  

Reporters on the closely escorted trip entered a shaft next to a school on the periphery of the UN compound, descending to the concrete-lined tunnel, according to Reuters. Twenty minutes of walking through the stifling hot, narrow and occasionally winding passage brought them underneath UNRWA Headquarters, an army lieutenant-colonel leading the tour said.

The tunnel, which the military said was 700 metres long and 18 metres deep, bifurcated at times, revealing side rooms. There was an office space, with steel safes that had been opened and emptied, Reuters reported, adding that there was a tiled toilet and one large chamber was packed with computer servers, another with industrial battery stacks.

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UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said the agency did not know what was under its headquarters in Gaza. "The UNRWA staff left its headquarters in Gaza City on 12 October following the Israeli evacuation orders and as bombardment intensified in the area," he said, they had not used that compound since they left it.

An Israeli intelligence dossier last month said some staff of the UN agency were involved in abductions and killings during the October 7. The six-page dossier alleged that some 190 UNRWA employees, including teachers, have doubled as Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants. 

The dossier said one of the 11 is a school counsellor who helped his son abduct a woman during the worst attack carried out by Hamas in which 1,200 people were killed and 253 kidnapped. Israel's dossier accused a UNRWA social worker of unspecified involvement in the transfer to Gaza of a slain Israeli soldier's corpse and of coordinating the movements of pick-up trucks used by the raiders and of weapons supplies.

(With inputs from Reuters)