News clip: Seven aid workers just trying to feed the hungry were killed.

Micah Loewinger: The IDF strike on a convoy of aid workers in Gaza this week has thrown a food crisis into overdrive.

Mehul Srivastava: It's an incredibly unsafe environment. Agencies can't trust that their employees will be safe.

Micah Loewinger: Now President Biden is urging a ceasefire. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media, I'm Micah Loewinger. As famine looms, how have warring media narratives threatened UNRWA, Gaza's most important source of aid? I asked a US senator.

Chris Van Hollen: I have looked at the US intelligence on this, and my interpretation is that that claim has been totally overblown.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, sports media reckons with its gambling addiction.

Brian Moritz: People who gamble are like your best readers. They care about everything. What is a gambler's edge? It's information.

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Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Katya: Hi, it's me Katya, EP of On The Media. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been in your ears asking for help to support the show. You've heard from Brooke, you've heard from Micah, now it's my turn. As the manager of this outfit, I am not going to dress it up for you, I'm going to tell you how it is. If every single one of you, every single one of our listeners gave $1 to the show right now, we'd have enough to cover the budget for a couple of years but that's just not a realistic goal. What is a realistic goal is getting the 2% of you who donate up to 3%. It's just 1% difference. Maybe you're listening to me now and you're thinking, "Oh, I'll get to it later," or, "It's just too complicated to make a donation," or even, "Someone else will do it." Well, here's what I have to say to you. Don't put it off. Do it now. It's super easy at our website. It's literally one click. Do you expect someone else to pay for your New York Times subscription or your Netflix account? No, right? It's time to pay for On The Media. We're counting on you guys. Thanks.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Thursday, six months into the Israeli-Palestinian war, the United States officially called for a ceasefire.

Antony Blinken: To stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians.

Brooke Gladstone: Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Antony Blinken: He urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay to bring the hostages home.

Brooke Gladstone: This following news from Monday night when Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF, fired on World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza.

News clip: The victims fled from one car to another but they were targeted again and then again.

News clip: Even though the non-profit says it was coordinating its movement with Israel's military.

News clip: Seven aid workers were killed.

News clip: Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the incident tragic and unintentional, also saying, "This happens in war."

News clip: World Central Kitchen had been distributing 350,000 meals a day.

News clip: The WCK has now pulled all of its operations, at least temporarily, from Gaza.

Brooke Gladstone: The UN's World Food Program has scaled back its operations along with two other humanitarian organizations, Project Hope and ANERA, American Near East Refugee Aid.

Rebecca Abou-Chedid: This is the first time in 56 years that we've had to pause operations.

Brooke Gladstone: Rebecca Abou-Chedid, an ANERA board member, speaking to NPR.

Rebecca Abou-Chedid: It's also the first time that we've lost a staff member, Musa Shawwa, in an Israeli missile strike. There have been almost 200 humanitarian aid workers that have died in the past six months.

Brooke Gladstone: That death toll includes at least 176 employees of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Administration for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Founded in 1949, the organization manages education, health and many other services for some 6 million Palestinian refugees across the region. With over 13,000 UNRWA workers in Gaza, it was by far the largest group working with Israel to bring in aid to the Strip until last week.

News clip: The UN agency for Palestinian refugees says Israel will no longer allow their food convoys from entering northern Gaza, where people are dying of hunger.

News clip: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now calling for an end to UNRWA. He also specifically is accusing UNRWA officials of being complicit in the October 7th Hamas attack against Israel.

Mehul Srivastava: I was there in Israel at the time. It became the only subject people talked about for about three weeks, I imagine.

Micah Loewinger: Mehul Srivastava is a correspondent at the Financial Times, where until recently he served as Jerusalem bureau chief.

Mehul Srivastava: The idea that somebody who was on the payroll of a 75-year-old agency whose job is to care for Palestinians had maybe taken part in some of the atrocities against Israeli citizens on October 7th kicked off a pretty furious news cycle.

Micah Loewinger: It began on January 26th when UNRWA announced it had fired 10 Palestinian employees who had allegedly participated in the October 7th attacks. These allegations came from Israeli intelligence, and over the next few days media across the world got their hands on an Israeli dossier.

Mehul Srivastava: We saw the dossier. We described it in our stories for our readers. It was a summary of a set of allegations, conclusions that this unnamed intelligence agency had reached, and it had the names of a few people and rather broad allegations against UNRWA at large but they didn't have any of the supporting evidence.

Micah Loewinger: That's interesting because one of the first articles in the American press about these allegations came from the AP, which referred to "detailed allegations against UNRWA workers." Either the AP had access to something else, or they characterized it differently than you are now.

Mehul Srivastava: Well, the allegations are detailed. It's the evidence that was scanned in the document that we saw. The allegations were very specific that this person and that person had crossed over into Israel proper, had taken part in this or this atrocity. There was one indication that it came from cell phone location data and from ID cards that were retrieved from bodies that were found inside Israel after they'd been killed by security forces there. It wasn't presented as, "Well, look at this ID card. Look at this location data. This is how we reached this very, very damning conclusion about this one individual," and then repeated the process for another 12 people.

Micah Loewinger: Early media reports emphasized other allegations from Israeli intelligence. On January 29th, Reuters ran a story with the headline "Israel accuses 190 UN staff of being hardened militants." The Wall Street Journal's piece on that same day featured the subheading "Around 10% of Palestinian aid agencies, 12,000 staff in Gaza have links to militants, according to intelligence dossier."

Mehul Srivastava: I can tell you that the documents that we saw did not provide any evidence for these things. Perhaps Reuters or the Wall Street Journal had access to a deeper document than I had but our understanding from speaking to other people within the Israeli intelligence networks is that at some point during a raid that took place in a certain part of the Gaza Strip, a computer was taken away for examination and there was a list of members on that and they cross-referenced that with the employee list that UNRWA has and reached this conclusion.

I've not seen this computer. I've not seen this evidence. This was only described to me by somebody who I've spoken to for quite some time and that's the extent of what the dossier said. It just said, "Further, we have now reached the conclusion that 190 people have ties to Hamas militants," but it didn't provide any evidence for that.

Micah Loewinger: Tell me about what, if any other proof has emerged to help corroborate Israel's account since the story first broke.

Mehul Srivastava: There's been a small drip drip of facts that were either presented in Israeli media or in other media that included CCTV footage of one person that was described as an UNRWA employee picking up a body from one of the kibbutzes in the south on October 7th. Then there was later on headshots of all these people who were named that were leaked to the Israeli media which were their identity photos.

Micah Loewinger: The Washington Post also reported on this CCTV footage.

Mehul Srivastava: We've looked at the same footage and I know a lot of other people did and it did match the kind of behavior and activities we'd seen Hamas militants take part in on October 7th.

Micah Loewinger: A couple of days after these allegations were first made public, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a press conference.

Antony Blinken: The reports that we got last week and UNRWA brought them to us were deeply, deeply troubling.

Micah Loewinger: He went on to say.

Antony Blinken: We haven't had the ability to investigate them ourselves, but they are highly, highly credible.

Micah Loewinger: What do you think he was basing this on?

Mehul Srivastava: He's the US Secretary of State. He has access to information that I don't have, especially given the depth of the relationship US intelligence services have with Israeli intelligence services.

Micah Loewinger: This is part of why I wanted to speak with Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. When we spoke on Monday, I asked him about Israel's claim that 10% of UNRWA is affiliated with Hamas or other militants.

Chris Van Hollen: I have looked at the US intelligence on this and let me just say that my interpretation of that is that that claim has been totally overblown and I will leave it at that.

Micah Loewinger: You got to give me more than that.

Chris Van Hollen: I think the evidence is insufficient. I would also make another point, which is that UNRWA year after year has provided not only Israel, but the United States with the names of all of their employees in Gaza, all 13,000. Israel has a very capable intelligence service that can always vet those and report any concerns to UNRWA. With respect to the up to 14 members of UNRWA who may well have been complicit in the horrors of October, 7th, absolutely. They need to be investigated. They need to be fully held accountable. The reality is that we shouldn't punish 2 million innocent Palestinians in Gaza who rely on UNRWA to provide that desperately needed assistance because of the terrible alleged acts of 14.

Micah Loewinger: Last month, Congress passed a bill that will ban US funds for the agency through 2025 as part of the last-minute spending bill. Although he opposed it, Senator Van Hollen voted for the bill. He told me because he wanted to avoid a government shutdown.

Chris Van Hollen: Many of my colleagues have fallen for the big Netanyahu government lie, which is that UNRWA is somehow a proxy or an agent of Hamas. This is just pure nonsense. Netanyahu has been trying to get rid of UNRWA since about 2017. Long before the most recent allegations arose. The person on the ground in Gaza, who is the main point person for UNRWA, is actually a US Army vet, about a 20-year vet in the US Army. I've met with him personally, I can assure you he is not an agent of Hamas.

Micah Loewinger: Still, Israeli officials say they can no longer let UNRWA aid into Northern Gaza and that aid in general is scarce because Hamas is taking it.

Jonathan Conricus: It's a Palestinian that spoke with an Israeli officer who said, so.

Micah Loewinger: IDF Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus on NBC.

Jonathan Conricus: That he sees UNRWA workers that are controlled by Hamas and that Hamas goes into UNRWA facilities and takes food. Food that is paid for by US taxpayers' dollars.

Micah Loewinger: President Biden's US Envoy in the region has said that Israel has not provided American officials with evidence of the claim that Hamas is stealing aid. Mehul Srivastava of the Financial Times doesn't believe it either.

Mehul Srivastava: There is no overwhelming evidence to support that allegation. We have seen isolated incidents where there's been video on social media of perhaps somebody who may be tied to Hamas being involved in maybe one convoy or one truck. I would say this, at this moment right now, there's several different battles that are going on. There's the actual fighting between the IDF and Hamas militants.

There's a diplomatic battle going on at the UN, at the ICJ, at other places and there's a media battle going on. The Israeli Army has had for a very long time of very well-developed and very effective media outreach program. This is their point of view that the reason people in Gaza are hungry right now is because Hamas is stealing the food.

Micah Loewinger: The media battle that Mehul Srivastava described rages on in Washington DC where advocates like Senator Chris Van Hollen have used the press to try to alter the course of the war. You've been on quite a media tour. You've been on Face the Nation, CBS, MSNBC.

Chris Van Hollen: We need to focus on getting the hostages back and a ceasefire. This is why I'm for a ceasefire. We have a situation where Netanyahu continues to essentially give the finger to the President of the United States and we're sending--

Micah Loewinger: Who are you trying to reach by doing these interviews, the President? What's your goal?

Chris Van Hollen: Look, obviously, I hope to influence the President and the Biden administration. I've been critical about the fact that they have not used effectively all the tools they have to try to enforce the President's own demands on getting more assistance into Gaza. When you've got people who are dying of starvation, literally until the President's demands requests have been met, it doesn't seem to make sense to be giving a blank check to the Netanyahu government in the form of additional bombs and other kinds of equipment.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think we will give that blank check anyway?

Chris Van Hollen: Right now, the Biden administration has decided to send more bombs. In my view, they essentially, once again, found a way to do an end-run around the congressional notification process. The congressional notification process provides an opportunity for concerned members of Congress to weigh in against any proposed transfer. By structuring these latest transfers the way they did, the Biden administration has done an end-run around that process.

Micah Loewinger: Senator, I'm just trying to understand what motivates you personally. Why are you devoting so much time to this issue given how controversial it can be for a member of Congress to repeatedly accuse the President of Israel of lying? What's driving you on this fight?

Chris Van Hollen: I do believe we have to be true to our values and our principles and that we cannot apply them only to our adversaries. We have to also apply them to friends and allies. If we don't do that, we will lose credibility everywhere around the world, which is what I'm afraid is happening right now as we speak. If we want to argue that we stand for democracy and we stand for human rights, that we have to fight for those principles no matter what the circumstances are.

Otherwise, we are justifiably accused of applying double standards and being hypocrites. I stand with the President in supporting Israel's right to self-defense in the aftermath of October 7th, but how it conducts a just war matters, and it needs to be conducted justly.

Micah Loewinger: Senator, thank you very much.

Chris Van Hollen: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Christopher Van Hollen is a senator for Maryland

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up a history of UNRWA includes some shared DNA with depression era work programs.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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