A United Nations worker tasked with monitoring Palestinian workplace rights was injured by Palestinian rock-throwers on Friday, The Times of Israel reported.
Mounir Kleibo, who heads the UN bureau of the International Labor Organization in the Palestinian Territories, sustained serious injuries to his jaw after coming under attack by Palestinian rock throwers in East Jerusalem on Friday.
The UN coordinator for development and humanitarian activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, Robert Piper, condemned the attack “on a clearly marked United Nations (UN) vehicle traveling on Route 50 in East Jerusalem, which seriously injured a senior UN official.
The Hebrew-language news website NRG reported that Kleibo promotes Palestinian martyrdom on his Facebook page, despite ostensibly being a neutral UN official. “We mourn not only our shahids [martyrs] but also ourselves, our eyes, our hearts, our consciousness and our humanity,” he wrote in a post.
The Times reported that Kleibo himself did not condemn the attack:
After the attack — in an update apparently posted from his hospital bed at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood — Kleibo said that both he and his wife, Tamara, were fine, and then added, “May Allah forgive those who throw the rocks at night.”
An Israeli Foreign Ministry official told NRG that it was “regrettable that the UN did not explicitly condemn all Palestinian stone throwers, who hurt, among others, a senior UN official.”
The website of the International Labour Organization notes that it “has been working with labour inspectors across the [occupied Palestinian territories] to bolster their capacity and improve their ability to identify, report and address issues such as occupational safety and health.”
Last week, a group of Palestinians attacked an Israeli ambulance carrying an Israeli Arab to the hospital after the man was attacked by Palestinians because they thought he was Jewish.
[Photo: Ruben Salvadori / Flash90 ]