When children begin to starve in Gaza as a consequence of five months of blockade imposed by Israel, its restrictions on humanitarian aid entry and the systematic destruction of livelihoods in the Strip, the last lifeline left for the enclave’s population to stay afloat also sinks. Since mid-January, after Israel’s allegations against UNRWA’s neutrality and purported links between some of its workers and terrorism emerged, Israel has accelerated its campaign of harassment and pressure against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Beyond the well-known suspension of donations by 16 countries, a cascade of administrative measures adopted by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to obstruct the agency’s work and force its eventual departure from the region have joined the tally.
“UNRWA faces a deliberate, concerted campaign to undermine its operations and, ultimately, to end them”, warned the agency’s commissioner, Phillip Lazzarini, before the United Nations General Assembly on Monday. He explained that part of this campaign involves flooding donors with disinformation to sow distrust and stain the agency’s reputation. Israeli claims have grown week by week. Initially, twelve of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff in Gaza were accused of involvement in Hamas’s lethal October 7 attack, and it was asserted that 10% of the workforce had ties to Palestinian armed factions. This week, the claim extended to 435 staff members serving as militants in those militias. “It is not merely coincidence. It is systematic. No one can claim they did not know it”, said Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari this week.
Yet Israel, which frequently uses disinformation, has not presented evidence to back its accusations. Neither to donors nor to UNRWA itself, an agency established by a United Nations mandate that has opened two investigations to clarify events after abruptly dismissing nine of the 12 identified workers. (The remainder are either dead or not identified.) “Israel has given us nothing, neither to us nor to the UN”, said Raquel Martí, UNRWA’s director in Spain, in this publication. The only action taken on January 18 was to report the facts to the agency’s head and provide the names of the 12 suspected terrorists. “We do not know what they based their involvement on or what kind of evidence they hold”, Martí added.
Doubts about Israeli allegations
Media outlets that have reviewed the Israeli dossier, such as Channel 4 and The Daily Beast, have raised many questions about its veracity. At the end of last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence could not corroborate the claimed 10% staff ties to Palestinian armed groups and assessed the involvement of a handful of them in October 7 with “low confidence”. This means that, while it treats the possibility as plausible, verification remains elusive. None of this has prevented many of UNRWA’s major donors from pulling support when Gaza’s situation is most dire, while Israel pursues administrative suffocation of the agency.
To begin with, customs authorities have kept UNRWA aid shipments in port, in clear violation of precautionary measures ordered by the International Court of Justice to increase humanitarian aid to prevent mass atrocities in the Strip. For three weeks, more than a thousand containers with flour, chickpeas, oil, or sugar have waited in the Ashdod port, enough food to sustain Gaza’s hungry population for one month. Martí states that Israel has prohibited UNRWA’s suppliers, from transporters to storage firms, from working with the UN agency, which coordinates all aid entering the enclave.
Concurrently, the Israeli Finance Ministry, led by the far-right settler Bezalel Smotrich, began procedures to revoke UN and its official exemptions from taxes. Those exemptions stem from a 1946 agreement approved by the organization and signed by most member states. The UNRWA bank account at Leumi Bank in Israel has been blocked as well, accompanied by numerous movement restrictions for agency workers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since October 7, hundreds of them have been prevented from accessing schools, clinics, and offices that the agency maintains in the holy city, according to UNRWA itself.
Steps to expel UNRWA from Jerusalem
Netanyahu has stated clearly that one of his plans for the “day after” in Gaza is to shut down UNRWA. What he did not say is that he is also attempting to physically eject the agency from the rest of occupied territories, as if its disappearance would resolve the refugee status held by more than five million Palestinians. Authorities have already asked the agency to abandon facilities in Kalandia (East Jerusalem) used for vocational training, a site granted by Jordan to the UN in 1952, and have begun efforts to seize its headquarters in the contested capital. A proposed law would additionally bar all UNRWA activity on Israeli soil.
“The notion that the agency can be dismantled without violating the human rights of its beneficiaries and endangering global peace and security is naïve at best”, Lazzarini commented on Monday. The response appears less like prudence and more like the swift path to eradicating Gaza’s population after five months of Israeli offensive that has left more than 100,000 Palestinians dead or wounded. UNRWA remains not only the main supplier of aid to Gaza’s people but also the logistics hub coordinating the work of the other UN agencies present in the enclave’s war-torn landscape.