Fox News reported yesterday that an internal United Nations audit of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Gaza found that UNDP “allowed at least five non-staff contract employees to handle ‘core’ procurement processes that only staffers are supposed to handle, including those for ordering up ‘significant’ civil construction activities.”

The report notes a number of other irregularities that that the audit turned up, included charges for construction projects “at far less than … full value,” allowing the projects to avoid scrutiny, as well as failure to track receipts and expenditures properly.

Taken together, the findings in the carefully manicured audit report — which was vetted by UNDP management at the affected office — point to a possible black hole in the supervision of civil construction, and perhaps other programs in Gaza and the other Palestinian territories for at least a year before the current explosion of terrorism.

The upshot of all of these irregularities, according to Fox, is that they lend “credibility to Israeli accusations that internationally-managed relief supplies to Gaza were diverted into construction of the elaborate and highly-engineered tunnels under the territory that were used by Hamas terrorists to launch and coordinate rocket attacks and incursions into Israel that dramatically escalated in March.”

In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Claudia Rosett of the Foundations for Defense of Democracies observed that another UN agency, UNRWA, which also operates in Gaza and is implicated in aiding Hamas, “has even less oversight than a typical UN agency.”

UN funds aren’t just diverted for terror purposes, but as Asaf Romirowsky wrote in The Real Palestinian Refugee Crisis in the May 2014 issue of The Tower magazine, the funding supports projects that “[perpetuate] the Palestinians’ eternal sense of victimhood and the refugees’ narrative.”

[Photo: roman yakubov / YouTube ]