The Fatal Effort To Dismantle UNRWA
Early in the year, State Department officials briefed Joel Rayburn from the Trump transition team there could be a humanitarian “catastrophe” in Gaza when a new Israeli law barring contact with the UN refugee agency for Palestinians takes effect at the end of the month.
The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is the primary aid agency operating in the Gaza Strip. After more than a year of war, the UN and other aid organizations warn Gaza is close to uninhabitable. Tens of thousands of houses have been destroyed. More than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 107,000 injured. In the future, these numbers are likely to prove three to four times higher. And still worse could be ahead.
During President Trump’s first term, his administration gradually cut all U.S. assistance to UNRWA. The Biden administration later resumed U.S. aid to the agency. Last March, Congress passed a law that bans the U.S. from funding UNRWA until at least 2025.
Why should the horrific policy errors of the past be compounded with monstrous new policy mistakes?
The origins
The fate of UNRWA is one of the many dilemmas I scrutinized while working on The Fall of Israel (2025). After achieving an initial truce in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, used it to lay the groundwork for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Bernadotte tried to balance the different interests of the Israelis and Palestinians, the major powers in the region and the UN Partition Plan. Having witnessed the horrible outcome of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe and hoping to avert a catastrophe in Palestine, he also proposed that the UN should establish a Palestine conciliation commission and Arab refugees would have a full right to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory.
Just hours after his proposal, Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Jewish paramilitary Stern group, while pursuing his official duties. One of those who planned the killing was Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister of Israel, and the predecessor and onetime mentor of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current PM.
Ever since then, UNRWA has been a lifeline to generations of Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the adjacent Arab countries. Created as a purely temporary measure, UNRWA’s mandate has been subject to renewal every three years ever since.
Historically, the United States has been UNRWA’s largest financial contributor, with more than $7.3 billion since 1950. From the start, these contributions have been subject to a variety of legislative conditions and oversight measures, however.
Funding threats
Decades of U.S. policy toward Israel and the occupied territories, however ambiguous, was reversed almost overnight, when the Trump administration executed a series of dramatic policy changes in 2018 and canceled nearly all U.S. aid to the West Bank and Gaza, plus $360 million in annual aid previously given to the UNRWA. Subsequently, the Biden administration restored much of the funding, yet provided Israel weapons and financing for the mass atrocities of those the UNRWA funding was supposed to help.
After allegations surfaced connecting a few of the 30,000 UNRWA employees with the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks against Israel, the Agency fired nine staff members following a UN investigation. While it denied allegations that the agency has widespread links to Hamas, Congress enacted a March 2024 prohibition on U.S. funding to UNRWA (P.L. 118-47), which is set to last until late March, 2025.
To put things into context: The Empire State Building is said to have 21,000 employees. Imagine what would happen if six of them would be suspected of terrorism and therefore the entire building would have to be dismantled and all employees fired? It would be an absurd collective punishment for the alleged crimes of a few.
Worse, the Israeli laws passed on October 28, 2024 and scheduled to take effect 90 days later, would endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.
Millions of lives threatened
The new U.S. and Israeli legal measures emboldened Jewish settlers, particularly the Messianic far-right. In May 2024 they launched several attacks on the UNRWA headquarters, setting fire to the perimeter of the building in East Jerusalem. The attacks against UNRWA came after months of far-right settler protests outside of the building, following Israeli claims of UNRWA-Hamas links; accusations that lacked verification, according to U.S. intelligence.
Among the protesters was Aryeh King, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem and a prominent advocate for settlements, who called Palestinian Gazans “Muslim Nazis,” described them as “sub-human” calling for captured Palestinians to be “buried alive” in December 2023.
By the year-end of 2024, some 265 UNRWA staff had been killed in hostilities since October 7, 2023. Despite a record-high number that suggests intentional targeting, those behind the Israeli strikes have not been prosecuted.
More than 5.9 million Palestinians, including three of four in Gaza, are registered with UNRWA as refugees.
The stakes
In Gaza, nearly two million Palestinians are displaced and dependent on aid for food, water and medical services. U.S. officials say there’s no serious backup plan for providing humanitarian supplies and services to Palestinians. With the new U.S.-Israeli laws, senior UNRWA emergency officers presage social order in the Strip could collapse.
Here are some ways to preempt such disasters:
- The White House should pressure Israel to suspend and nullify the impending adverse acts against UNRWA
- S. Congress should lift current prohibition on UNRWA funding through March 2025
- UNRWA’s funding should be broadened by the U.S. and internationally in light of the devastation and genocidal atrocities caused in Gaza
- The Agency’s existence should be premised on the implementation of all relevant and existing UN resolutions both the U.S. and the international community have voted for.
How probable are such measures in the conceivable future? Highly unlikely.
What’s the alternative? Far worse, far worse.
The author of The Fall of Israel, Dr Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/
The original version of the commentary was published by Informed Comment on January 16, 2025.
Situation Critical: UNRWA and its Continued
Operations
Photograph Source: RomanDeckert – CC BY-SA 4.0
In April last year, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini told the United Nations Security Council that “an insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s operations is under way, with serious implications for peace and security”. Repeatedly, requests by the relief and works agency responsible for providing welfare and aid to Palestinians to continue its work, notably in northern Gaza, had been rebuffed. Its staff had been barred from coordinating meetings between other humanitarian agents along with Israeli officials. UNRWA premises and staff had also been targeted. This, it transpired, was a foretaste of things to come.
Israel’s campaign against the agency has been a matter of faith, a sickening reminder of its necessity in the aftermath of 1948. Following the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023 on the state, UNRWA was added to-do list of Israeli expectations. First followed an international campaign of accusation, with the UN body accused of employing Hamas sympathisers, activists and direct participants in the attacks that left 1,200 people dead and saw the capture of over 200 hostages.
Despite scanty evidence to buttress the grave Israeli claims, many donor countries were swift in suspending funding. The UN was equally swift in sacking several alleged suspects. A review of the allegations by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, instigated at the request of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, accepted that claims of bias could be addressed in eight areas, including neutrality of education, installations, and staff and better engagement with the relevant donors. Importantly, it also noted that “Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence” that the agency employees had been “members of terrorist organizations.” The “irreplaceable and indispensable” role of the agency in the absence of a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians made it a “pivotal” body that provided “life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.”
The restoration of funding by donor states so irked Israeli officials as to prompt the next phase of the campaign: the passage of legislation in the Knesset legalising the effective crippling of the agency’s mandate and work, both coming into effect at the end of this month. Two laws, passed on October 28, 2024, are relevant here. The first prohibits Israeli officials from having any contact with UNRWA or any individual or agency acting on their behalf. The second attacks the functional presence of UNRWA, barring it from operating any representative office or provide any services, or carry out activities, directly or indirectly, in Israel proper.
The interpretation of sovereignty as outlined in the legislation does not accept the international position on the status of East Jerusalem, which Israel has occupied since 1967. In treating East Jerusalem as Israeli territory, UNRWA’s presence to aid Palestinians in the West Bank as facilitated by its field office will essentially come to an end.
In addition to the consequences that will arise to a Palestinian populace so heavily reliant on the UN body’s services, there are also logistical matters. How severely will the laws be read? Not only will staff no longer be able to engage in any concrete way with the Israeli Defense Forces, UNRWA staff and installations risk being open targets of IDF operations. On January 8, UN Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric revealed that the UN had yet to receive “any real clarity on how the laws will be applied” from any official Israeli source.
The moves by Israel did draw the necessary, if somewhat ineffectual condemnation needed, from the UN Secretary-General to the ambassadors representing 123 UN member states, to an impotent Biden administration in its dying days. “In the midst of an ongoing catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza,” warned the Nordic countries in an October 23, 2024 statement, “a halt to any of the organisation’s activities would have devastating consequences for the hundreds of thousands of civilians served by UNRWA.”
This month, Axios reported that officials from the US State Department had also warned the Trump administration transition team about the impending humanitarian catastrophe should the Israeli legislation be implemented to the letter. “We wanted them to know what is going to happen 10 days into their presidency,” explained one of the officials. “We thought it was the responsible thing to do. It’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.”
Given the form of President Donald Trump in his first term, this may simply be the wishful utterings of a few troubled souls. Trump, for his part, delighted in ceasing US funding to the agency in 2018. “We are not paying until you make a deal,” he told the Palestinians with typical boisterousness, showing his remarkable capacity to treat all matters of money as instruments of bullying and machismo.
On January 17, the Security Council, at Algeria’s prompting, are scheduled to have closed consultations on the issue of UNRWA’s continued operations after the end of this month. Lazzarini is expected to brief the members, a situation that is bound to be influenced, in part, by the recent announcement of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire. As part of the agreement, some 600 daily shipments of humanitarian aid will feature. But any ceasefire, already soured by the killing of over 100 Palestinians since its announcement, does little to address the institutional chasm that will be left were UNRWA to cease operating in any meaningful way.
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