The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is almost as old as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. And it has often been found at its center. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have sought safety in schools and UNRWA compounds during the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. And there are more than 150 members of his staff among the 26,000 dead Gazans.
The organization is now in crisis. On Friday, January 26, Israel said it had evidence that at least a dozen of its 13,000 personnel based in Gaza were involved in the October 7 attack by Hamas against Israel. In response, more than ten governments, including those of the United States and Germany (the two largest funders) have announced that they will suspend donations. It is unclear exactly how much money is being withheld or how long the suspension will last. However, UNRWA says that without that money it will be forced to cease operations at the end of February.
Some of the evidence for Israel’s accusations comes from interrogations of Palestinians captured during and after the Hamas attack. Israeli officials say they also obtained information from computers and documents found in Gaza by Israeli soldiers. Israel maintains that it has found UNRWA accreditations on the bodies of some Palestinian militants killed in Israel. Telephone interceptions place other employees inside Israel at the time of the attacks. Those involved are accused of participating in the kidnapping of a woman, distributing grenades and collaborating in the transfer of the body of an Israeli soldier to Gaza.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, has fired nine workers. The death of at least one other has been confirmed. It is not clear what has happened to the other two. On January 26, Lazzarini announced the decision to “initiate an investigation to clarify the truth without delay.” On January 28, the United Nations itself announced an investigation by its Office of Internal Oversight Services.
It remains to be seen whether that will satisfy the agency’s critics or some donors. On January 29, the European Union demanded an independent audit by external experts appointed by it on the capacity of control systems to prevent “the possible involvement of its personnel in terrorist activities”; He also called for a review of all personnel to confirm their non-involvement in terrorist attacks.
It is not the first controversy to affect UNRWA. In 2017, the principal of one of his schools was fired shortly after being elected to the Hamas political leadership. Israel has long claimed that the organization’s school textbooks incite hatred against Jews; In 2019, a US State Department investigation only found “anti-Israel bias” in only 3% of them. UNRWA has admitted in the past to finding Hamas weapons stored in its schools. The Trump administration suspended funding in 2018, saying the organization was fundamentally off track. Joe Biden, the current US president, restored it in 2021.
UNRWA is very different from other United Nations agencies. It was founded after Israel’s war of independence in 1948 to care for the 700,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes (in the first four years it also helped Jewish refugees displaced in the same war). Today, it serves the nearly 6 million descendants of those Palestinians and operates in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. It is the only United Nations agency that serves a specific group of refugees in a specific geographic area. Part of the controversy it raises is due to the breadth of its definition of a refugee. The 1951 refugee convention defines a refugee as a person “fleeing conflict and persecution.” UNRWA, on the other hand, considers refugees to be the descendants of all those whose “normal place of residence” was historic Palestine between June 1, 1946 and May 15, 1948 before being displaced.
Consequently, UNRWA’s position is politically sensitive. The Israeli authorities have been thinking about closing it for some time. They accuse her of unnecessarily perpetuating the refugee status of Palestinians and preventing their integration into host countries. For many Israelis, UNRWA’s very name supports the idea that Palestinian refugees could one day return to their former homes in Israel, a right that Israel does not recognize; that perspective would undermine the Jewish nature of the State. For Palestinians, the fact that UNRWA perpetuates their refugee status keeps alive the idea that they can one day return to the homes they fled in 1948.
UNRWA is also a vital support for millions of people; especially in Gaza and, above all, during the current war. It is the backbone of humanitarian logistics in the strip. Much of the aid that reaches Gaza, wherever it comes from, is distributed through trucks, warehouses and UNRWA personnel. Their disappearance would make the humanitarian crisis much worse and also create longer-term problems. UNRWA is a major employer in Gaza; the vast majority of its 13,000 employees are local. If the organization were to disappear, another entity would have to take over its work. As a United Nations official in Jerusalem says, “You can cut all the funding in the world, but that’s not going to make the Palestinians go away.”
It is not surprising that some members of an organization with such deep and long roots in Gaza have ties to Hamas. However, this defense of UNRWA also raises thorny questions about whether it is sufficiently neutral, transparent and accountable. It is probably essential in the short term to avoid an even deeper humanitarian crisis in Gaza. What is much less clear is whether it should be an essential part of Gaza’s long-term future.
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
