UN official visits Israel after incendiary tweet

During March violence OCHA field officer posted link to photo of father carrying bleeding girl, photo was from 2006 accident unrelated to Israel.

By HERB KEINON
Anti-Israel Twitter post 390 (photo credit: Twitter screenshot)
Anti-Israel Twitter post 390
(photo credit: Twitter screenshot)
A small group of people demonstrated in front of a UN office in Jerusalem Tuesday in support of a worker who used her Twitter account to send an incendiary message against Israel when rockets were falling on the South in March.
The gathering took place at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) during a visit here by a senior UN official, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Catherine Bragg.
Bragg came to examine both OCHA’s work here and the fallout from the tweeting incident.
During the March violence in the South, Khulood Badawi, a field officer for OCHA, posted a link to a photo of a father carrying a young girl covered in blood, along with the tweet: “Palestine is bleeding. Another child killed by #Israel… Another father carrying his child to a Grave in #Gaza.”
The picture, it emerged, was a Reuters photo from 2006 that depicted a Palestinian girl who died in an accident unrelated to Israel.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor expressed outrage at Badawi’s conduct, and called for her dismissal in a letter at the time to the Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos.
The UN, however, also came under pressure from Arab and Palestinian circles not to fire the worker.
Bragg, who arrived in the country Sunday and left Tuesday, is Amos’s deputy. She did not meet with Foreign Ministry officials during her visit, and Jerusalem is still waiting to hear from OCHA about how it intends to deal with the affair.