Red Cross: Demanding Access To Hostages Would Undermine Core Work Of Empowering Terrorists

“Those who have made the criticisms… have confused supporting functions with core functions.”

Geneva, September 4 – Officials at the world’s largest humanitarian-relief organization voiced concerns today that acquiescing to demands that the body labor to locate and examine Israeli citizens in Hamas captivity risks compromising the aid organization’s chief objective of enabling Hamas and allied Islamist groups to continue perpetrating crimes against humanity.

International Committee of the Red Cross Director-General Pierre Krãhenbühl responded today to inquiries about his organization’s activities in the Gaza Strip, with specific attention to questions about the ICRC’s manifest lack of effort in gaining access to the hostages since Hamas took more than 200 during an invasion of Israel last October.

“Criticism of the Red Cross for not examining Israeli hostages misses the mark,” he insisted. “To demand access to the hostages means displeasing Hamas, which goes against our ethos as an organization. The ICRC’s core mission involves empowering and sustaining terrorism. Everything else plays a secondary role. I believe those who have made the criticisms misunderstand, and have confused supporting functions with core functions.”

Krãhenbühl cited his previous post as chief of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, to underline the concern. “Our mission as humanitarians is not simply to provide care or basic needs,” he explained. “The humanitarian aid realm operates under a strict hierarchy of principles, chief among them the upholding and integrity of oppressive, bigoted, violent regimes that care more about holding on to power than about the welfare of their subjects. Our job, whether at UNRWA, the ICRC, Oxfam, or myriad other such organizations, is to provide the food, or care, or education, or jobs, or whatever resources, that the regime in the subject area refuses to invest in, because their priorities, understandably, lie elsewhere.”

“In terms of Gaza specifically,” he continued, “the matrix of needs also includes educating successive generations of Palestinians that Israel is illegitimate and that all means are acceptable to destroy it. Those who believe that the Red Cross should antagonize its hosts in Gaza to achieve some dubious value of ascertaining the condition of a bunch of Jews miss the larger context in which such demands undermine the organization’s core mission and functions.”

ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric Egger voiced optimism that the perceived conflict of interest will fade. “One way or another, soon there will be no more living hostages in Gaza,” she stated. “Then the Red Cross can do its crucial work without this distraction.”

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