Tor Wennesland is the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. For those familiar with the UN, you know what that means: it means he’s one more virulently anti-Israel bureaucrat, just like Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied Since 1967, and the three members of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari, Chris Sidoti. These people are immune to all appeals for fairness, decency, even common sense when it comes to the Jewish state. They are firmly on the side of the Palestinians, water-carriers for the PA and intermittently defenders, even, of the terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad,
A month ago, a tweet from Wennesland declared his “horror” that a mere “scuffle” resulted in what he described as the “killing” of a Palestinian:
Horrified by today’s killing of a Palestinian man, Ammar Mifleh, during a scuffle with an Israeli soldier near Huwarra in the West Bank. My heartfelt condolences to his bereaved family. Such incidents must be fully & promptly investigated, & those responsible held accountable.
Horrified by today’s killing of a Palestinian man, Ammar Mifleh, during a scuffle with an Israeli soldier near Huwarra in the o. West Bank. My heartfelt condolences to his bereaved family. Such incidents must be fully & promptly investigated, & those responsible held accountable.
— Tor Wennesland (@TWennesland) December 2, 2022
According to Wennesland, what he described was this: during a mere “scuffle” with an innocent Palestinian Arab, Ammar Mefleh (Wennesland spells it “Mifleh”) by name, an Israeli soldier pulled out his gun and murdered – there is no other word for it – Mr. Mefleh.
But that’s not what happened. There was no “scuffle,” but a failed attempt first to murder Israeli civilians and then to kill an Israeli border policeman. Here is what actually happened: “Israel rebukes UN official for referring to terror attack as ‘scuffle,’” by Tovah Lazaroff and Anna Ahronheim, Jerusalem Post, December 3, 2022:
An Israel Border Police officer was lightly injured in a stabbing attack that occurred after a Palestinian, identified as Ammar Mefleh, attempted to break into a vehicle with an Israeli couple inside, the Border Police said.
After he realized the car door was locked, he tried to break into it using a stone, before being shot by the driver – an IDF officer on leave.
Mefleh then approached a team of Border Police soldiers and stabbed one of them in the face, lightly injuring him. Graphic footage posted to social media showed another Border Police officer trying to arrest Mefleh as two other Palestinians attempted to pull him away from the officer.
The officer then put Mefleh in a headlock, pulling him away from the other Palestinians until he broke free from the officer’s grasp. The attacker then appeared to grab for the officer’s weapon. At that point the officer pulled his handgun and fired four shots at Mefleh at point black range, killing him.
The wounded officer was evacuated from the scene of the stabbing for medical treatment, and the terrorist’s death was determined at the scene of the attack.
On Saturday night [Dec. 2], the officer told Channel 12 he feared that had Mefleh succeeded in grabbing his gun, he would have used it for a terror attack against motorists.
To summarize:
When Mefleh tried to break into a car with an Israeli couple inside, he was intent on harming them with the knife he was carrying. When he discovered that the car door was locked, he tried to break the window with a rock, hoping he could then reach inside, open the door, and stab those in the car. He was the one doing the assaulting. But the Israeli man inside the car turned out to be an IDF soldier on leave, carrying a gun, and he managed to fire that gun at Mefleh, wounding him lightly. No “scuffle” there – only a failed attempt by the Palestinian Arab to murder, with his knife, the Israeli couple inside the car. Had the car not been locked, Mefleh might well have succeeded in stabbing one or both of them before the soldier could have used his own weapon.
Then, still holding his knife, Mefleh approached a group of Israeli Border Police, and stabbed one of them in the face. That’s not a “scuffle,” but a second assault with a deadly weapon by Ammar Mefleh, more successful than his earlier abortive attempt on the couple in the car. And after he had stabbed that first border policeman, another border policeman then managed to put him in a headlock and to pull him away from his fellow Palestinians. Mefleh then tried to grab the soldier’s rifle and at that point, the soldier used his handgun to fire four shots at Mefleh, killing him. As the soldier explained, he was fearful that if Mefleh had managed to get control of the rifle, he would use it against Israeli motorists – Mefleh’s attack took place at the side of a major road.
Tor Wennesland was informed of these events by Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., but he neither apologized nor withdrew his intolerable remark about a mere “scuffle.”
And less than three weeks later, Tor Wennesland, United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, was at it again, this time applying his own special system of counting Israeli and Palestinian victims of violence. That unedifying tale is here: “Report by UN Middle East envoy ignores Israeli terror victims,” by Itamar Eichner, Ynet News, December 22, 2022:
UN coordinator to the Middle East Tor Wennesland, reported to the Security Council on Thursday [Dec. 22] that more than 20 Israeli victims have been killed as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the beginning of 2022 – a number lower than Israeli estimations.
The Envoy reported 150 Palestinian casualties during the same time span, the largest number in recent years.
According to the Foreign Ministry, Wennesland relied on data taken from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which only recognized 19 Israeli victims in terror attacks in 2022.
According to Israeli estimations, 31 Israelis and foreign workers were killed as a result of terror attacks, while the UN claimed the cause of the additional 12 fatalities were inconclusive or their perpetrators remained at large.
The calculations of OCHA were flatly wrong. The circumstances of those “additional twelve [in actuality, thirteen] fatalities” reveal that all of them were the result of clearly identified terror attacks.
Here are the facts, victim by victim — and in fact, there were not 12, but 13 Israeli and foreign victims of Palestinian terror that OCHA failed to count:
The Foreign Ministry said the UN’s report ignored terror attack victims including Aryeh Shchupak and Tadese Tashume who were killed in a bombing attack in Jerusalem last November, Shulamit Rachel Ovadia who was killed by a Palestinian terrorist in September, Victor Sorokopot and Dima Mitrik who were killed in a terror attack in Bnei Brak last March.
Also not mentioned were Ivan Tarnovsky who was killed in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem in March, Rabbi Moshe Kravitsky, Laura Itzhak, Doris Yahbas, and Meha and Menach Yehezkel who were killed in a terror attack in Be’er Sheva also in March, and Border Police officers Shirel Abukarat and Yezen Falah who were killed in a terror attack in Hadera that same month.
Wennesland did not mention that out of the 150 Palestinians who were killed since the beginning of 2022, at least 80% were what the ministry called “terrorists,” describing them as Palestinian civilians.
On what basis did Wennesland ignore the evidence presented by the Israelis that at least 80% of the 150 Palestinians who were killed in 2022 were terrorists, and instead described them as “Palestinian civilians”? In fact, there is reason to believe that almost all of the 30 Palestinians who were not identified as terrorists by Israel had been caught in the middle of firefights, or were the victims of “work accidents,” and there had been no intent by the IDF to kill them.
And on what basis does the egregious Tor Wennesland think he is allowed to ignore the evidence, too, of those Israeli victims of terror?
It’s the usual absurd calculus: the side with the most casualties is the one we too often end up sympathizing with. Tor Wennesland issued his report of “150 Palestinian civilians” killed and only “19 Israelis,” which leaves many with a diseased sympathy for the Palestinians. The truth is very different: in 2022, there were at least 31 Israeli victims of terror, 120 Palestinian terrorists were killed, and 30 Palestinians died, whose deaths were the result of being caught in firefights, or of “work accidents,” meaning their explosives blew up in their faces before they could use them on Israelis.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan’s appeals to the OCHA for the reevaluation of the data presented, have so far, remained unanswered.
OCHA will pay no attention to the information presented by Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan. And Tor Wennesland, who credulously relied on OCHA statistics without making any inquiries of his own or studying Israel’s corrections to OCHA’s report, has not issued a revised statement based on the information presented by the government of Israel, will do as he has always done – brazen it out.
Golem2 says
George Orwell was right.
Deodata says
These people are just on a gravy train, I can’t understand why the west belongs to any of these global organisations. What have they ever done for us? They are all Left wing, pro Muslim.