JERUSALEM: Israel said on Tuesday it had charged a United Nations staffer with helping the Islamist movement Hamas, the second such case involving aid workers in Gaza in a week.

Engineer Waheed Borsh, who has worked for the UN Development Programme (UNDP) since 2003, was arrested on July 16 and indicted in a civilian court in Israel on Tuesday, a government statement said.

Hamas, which has run the Gaza Strip since 2007, denied the allegations. UNDP said it would release a statement later.

The government said 38-year-old Borsh, from Jabaliya in northern Gaza, had been recruited by “a senior member of the Hamas terrorist organisation to redirect his work for UNDP to serve Hamas’s military interests”.

It said he had confessed to a number of accusations, including diverting rubble from a UNDP project in the coastal strip to a Hamas operation to build a jetty for its naval force.

He is also alleged to have last year persuaded UNDP managers to focus home rebuilding efforts in areas where Hamas members lived, after pressure from the group.

Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2016