‘Very serious allegation,’ UN says of reports hostages held at its sites in Gaza

(JNS) – Reports that freed Israeli hostages had been held in United Nations shelters in Gaza amount to “a very serious allegation,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told JNS on Wednesday.

“We call on those who have information on this to share it formally with UNRWA or other parts of the United Nations, so that we can investigate it further,” Haq told JNS at the global body’s press conference in New York.

Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, who were released on Sunday, said that Hamas had held them in U.N. camps, which the global body created during the war to protect Gazan civilians and to provide them with food and water.

It wasn’t clear from public records and reporting in which camps they were held, when and for how long. Israeli intelligence, taken from captured Hamas terrorists, assessed that several Israeli hostages were held at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, Fox News reported.

The United Nations and other global groups have criticized the Israeli military extensively for conducting military operations in and around shelters, U.N. camps and Gazan hospitals. The Israel Defense Forces has said that Hamas has a documented history of using such facilities for terror operations. Hamas is known to embed in civilian and humanitarian areas.

“As you know, any time we’ve received information on the misuse of facilities, we followed up with investigations,” Haq told JNS at the briefing. “It is unclear at this stage whether the shelters were among those that had been abandoned during the fighting, so we’d need further knowledge about that and other aspects of what happened.”

JNS also asked Haq about a scheduled meeting between Guterres and Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday—the first publicly known meeting between the two since the beginning of Israel’s war against Hamast.

Herzog plans to travel to New York at Guterres’s invitation to deliver the keynote address at a special assembly marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Haq told JNS that Guterres “looks forward to meeting with President Herzog.”

“That is a solemn event, where we try to work together as a community to learn the lessons from the Holocaust and ensure that the sort of tragedy that happened as a result of this horrific event will not recur,” Haq said. (He added that he had no agenda for the meeting to release.)

Herzog’s office stated on Wednesday that the meeting will “focus on advancing international efforts to secure the release of hostages held captive by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.” It added that the Israeli president plans to meet with other senior officials. (JNS sought comment from Herzog’s office.)

The Israeli president is scheduled to meet in New York with relatives of victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, and on Sunday evening, he is slated to attend the dedication of the Altneu, a new Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Guterres and the Jewish state have been at odds since the U.N. chief said in late October 2023 that Hamas’s attack on Israel “did not happen in a vacuum.”

Eli Cohen, then the Israeli foreign minister, was at the United Nations that day for a Security Council session. Cohen immediately canceled his meeting with Guterres, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since refused to take Guterres’s calls.

Herzog, whose role is outside the political sphere, is the only known Israeli official who has spoken to Guterres during the war, with the two talking on the phone several times. The two last met in July 2023, according to public information.