The main U.N. agency in Gaza said it has long investigated claims of links, firing several employees over the years. Israel says it is a compromised organization too weak to protect itself.

Current and former UNRWA officials say that the agency has long taken seriously and investigated accusations of infiltration by Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007. The agency has variously responded to tips from Israel, the United States and its own networks. It was the kind of challenge, they said, that all aid groups operating in hostile environments faced, not unique to UNRWA, which has worked in the enclave for decades.

Rather than addressing such issues in a systematic process, they dealt with them in a piecemeal way mostly in private, working with officials at the United Nations in New York. Over the years, several people who had proven Hamas links were fired or left the agency, including after the 2014 investigation, current and former officials said.

Israel has long made a broader accusation: UNRWA didn’t go far enough to root out Hamas and was unwilling to clean up systematically. It has said UNRWA is a completely compromised organization that is too weak to protect against infiltration and needs to be replaced by a more neutral aid group.

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UNRWA’s leaders say the agency strives to ensure its 13,000 employees in Gaza uphold standards of neutrality, regularly training its staff to stay above politics and investigating those who do not. But they add that it is impossible for UNRWA — like any large organization that draws its staff from a cross-section of society — to track the private political allegiances of all its employees.

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