After the Israeli Parliament passed a law in October 2024 to halt the work of the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency UNRWA and forbid contact with its personnel, the ban came into effect on 30 January, leaving thousands of UNRWA personnel and the millions of Palestinians they provide services for in limbo.
Shock, confusion, and uncertainty sit heavy in the premises of the only UN agency that provides humanitarian assistance and essential services to six million Palestinian refugees.
The 30 international staff of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) who were based in the agency’s East Jerusalem headquarters were forced to leave Israel by 30 January after the authorities refused to renew their work visas or risk arrest.
While many of the East Jerusalem local staff relocated to the agency’s headquarters in Ramallah in the West Bank, the future of UNRWA’s diverse and crucial services is dangerously uncertain. The agency’s Gaza staff have been denied entry since the ban was enforced.
Before the Israeli war on Gaza that started in October 2023, UNRWA maintained the largest UN presence in the enclave, with 13,000 personnel and 300 premises. Israeli officials have since launched intense attacks on the UN agency, accusing it of hiring militants among its staff.
Israel has also charged that the 7 October 2023 cross border operation led by Hamas’ military wing happened with the participation of militants it alleges are UNRWA staff.
While the agency has denied the accusations, it fired nine employees despite the inconclusive findings of an UN investigation into Israel’s claims, which it failed to present any evidence for in support.
With the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to northern Gaza from which they were forcibly displaced during the war, the need for massive humanitarian aid is crucial for survival in an area that the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have decimated beyond recognition.
For months, the IOF proceeded to flatten the vast majority of northern Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and destroy all water supplies and the electricity network.
UNRWA provides almost half of the humanitarian aid that goes to Palestinians in Gaza. Other UN agencies like the children’s agency UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP), among others, provide the other half.
More importantly, the agency runs hundreds of schools, medical clinics, and food distribution centres in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The agency which employs 13,000 people in Gaza, is the cornerstone of public services for six million Palestinians.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini made a plea to the UN last week to address Israel’s banning of his agency from working in the OPT.
“Curtailing our operations now – outside a political process, and when trust in the international community is so low – will undermine the ceasefire,” Lazzarini said. “It will sabotage Gaza’s recovery and political transition.”
The Israeli government claims that UNRWA’s services can be transferred to other entities. But Lazzarini explained that the agency’s mandate to provide public services to an entire population is unique.
“Our capacity to directly provide primary healthcare for millions of Palestinians, and to resume education for hundreds of thousands of children, far exceeds that of any other entity,” he said. “These services can only be transferred to a functioning state.”
UNWRA was established in 1949 by a UN General Assembly resolution with a mandate to provide temporary assistance to Palestinian refugees displaced during the Nakba of 1948. In 1967, Israel signed a formal agreement recognising UNRWA activity in the West Bank and Gaza and committing not to interfere in the affairs of the UN agency in the humanitarian field.
Feeding the present anti-UNRWA incitement campaign by the Israeli authorities, an Israeli hostage who was released last week as part of the Israeli-Palestinian prisoner agreement, was quoted by her mother as saying she was held in an UNRWA facility during her captivity.
The timing of her only public statement fuelled Israel’s attack on the agency, which was forced to abandon the vast majority of its multiple premises in Gaza during the war.
Observers say Israel’s campaign against the agency, whose existence is a manifestation of the unresolved status of six million Palestinian refugees, signals the failure of diplomacy to achieve self-determination and statehood for the Palestinians.
“Beyond its claims and declarations, Israel’s goals in escalating its campaign against UNRWA… are essentially political goals,” according to Mtanes Shihadeh, Israel Studies Programme director of the Arab Centre Washington DC, a think-tank.
Israel’s relations with the agency over the last two decades have been characterised by hostility and tension, he said.
Last year, Israel pressured 15 Western countries to suspend funding to the agency. Israel had previously undertaken a similar campaign after the 2014 war on Gaza, pressuring the US administration and some European countries to stop funding UNRWA.
In 2018, US President Donald Trump froze funding to UNRWA and tried to shut it down in response to Israeli pressure.
Israel’s enmity towards UNRWA is rooted in the agency’s mandate rather than in Israel’s war with Hamas, Shihadeh argued. A 2015 Israeli academic paper from Bar Ilan University considered that UNRWA “was born in sin,” a reference to the context of the agency’s founding after the Palestinian Nakba of 1948.
UNRWA was created by the UN in response to pressure from the Arab countries to establish a special and exclusive agency for Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of 1948, when Zionist militias forcibly displaced 750,000 Palestinians.
The vast majority became refugees, and many went to live in Gaza. In 1967, Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, creating another wave of forcible displacement and exacerbating the refugee problem.
UNRWA’s temporary mandate has thus continued to take a permanent form, involving itself in the daily lives of millions of Palestinians for whom it has become a quasi-government in the absence of a Palestinian state.
According to UNRWA, Palestinian refugees are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”
The descendants of the original Palestine refugees are also eligible for registration. This has perpetuated the Palestinian refugee population, who demand the right to return (ROR) to their homes in the OPT.
The ROR, which is enshrined in UN resolutions and international law, is a thorn in Israel’s side because it wants its illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories to become permanent.
The vast majority of UN member states, multiple UN resolutions, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) all consider Israel’s occupation of the 1967 territories illegal.
Prior to the Knesset’s banning of UNRWA, the Israeli Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy published a paper advocating the termination of the agency’s work to erase the rights of Palestinian refugees.
Palestinian refugees and UNRWA, it argued, “are the most explicit expression of [the Palestinian] refusal to recognise the results of the 1948 War... and the establishment of the State of Israel. Precisely for this reason, the long journey of Palestinian society towards reconciliation with the existence of the Jewish state must begin with the dissolution of UNRWA and the abolition of the refugee phenomenon.”
Such studies, which echo the Israeli discourse on UNRWA, said Shihadeh, illustrate the central objective behind the concerted efforts to eliminate or replace the agency.
The goal is to close the file on the refugee issue, not only in Gaza, but also throughout the region and especially in East Jerusalem, by revoking the refugee status of the largest possible number of Palestinians and by working to settle them in other countries.
“Thus, the right of return of the Palestinian refugees will be abolished as part of Israel’s efforts to close the file on its occupation, end the Palestinian cause, and impose a fait accompli,” he said.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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