Please read my latest piece for Jacobin Magazine, Is Iran Next?
The Israeli Knesset passed two new laws which would essentially eliminate UNWRA, the United Nations agency established in 1950 to serve the then-1-million Palestinian refugees expelled by Israel in 1948. Currently, it provides for 2.5-million Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and a total of 6-million throughout the region. Regionally, it has 30,000 staff with 13,000 in Gaza alone. It provides virtually every service imaginable: education, food, medical care, education, sanitation, water, etc. Though there are other humanitarian aid organizations active in Palestine, it is the only aid agency offering so many vital services to so many Palestinians.
The Lancet highlights the critical impact it has on Palestinian life:
UNRWA has been instrumental in delivering crucial health and social services to Palestinians. In 2022, UNRWA maintained 278 schools with over 290 000 students in Gaza and 96 schools with over 45 000 students in the West Bank.
UNWRA saves childrens’ lives
Since 10/7, Staff in UNRWA health centres…ran maternal and child health programmes, while the agency distributed food to over 1·7 million people…ensured shelter for over 700 000 people, and facilitated polio vaccination campaigns, among many other life-saving and life-sustaining activities…Nearly 1·9 million people have received essential food items in Gaza. It has also provided…water, sanitation, and hygiene services by maintaining water wells and distributing hygiene kits to displaced Palestinians.
In the West Bank, UNRWA has expanded its services in the wake of escalated violence from the Israeli military…providing shelter, health services, psychosocial support…for Palestinian refugees. This work has not been without profound risk to UNRWA staff and its services; at least 190 UNRWA facilities have been damaged or destroyed and at least 233 UNRWA employees have been killed by the Israeli military.
Parenthetically, Israeli forces have murdered hundreds of UNWRA staff, journalists and health care workers.
It also provides education for 45,000 students in the West Bank and 140,000 in Gaza. Most of the agency’s facilities in Gaza, including hospitals and schools, have been destroyed. US academics have coined a new term as part of the lexicon of genocide: scholasticide. It is:
The…systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.
Israel has destroyed most UNWRA facilities in Gaza
Israel’s Knesset: law as genocide
This passage from an Israeli security think tank, outlines the law’s provisions and conveys how completely it will dismantle the agency:
The laws forbid government authorities, public agencies and officials from maintaining any contact with UNWRA…By the end of January 2025 the ministries of foreign affairs and interior cannot issue entry visas to UNWRA staff. Ports of entry and tax authorities may not transfer UNWRA salaries; rules governing Israeli banks which provide services to UNWRA will be tightened. The IDF will be compelled to break off any work contacts with UNWRA, as well as COGAT’s coordination with Palestinian officials via UNWRA.
The law will limit tax relief and diplomatic benefits the agency receives. It also restricts UNWRA activity outside the borders of Israel–in Gaza and the Judea and Samaria [sic]–which are largely dependent on contact with Israeli officials and require close coordination with them. The law also prohibits indirect contact with UNWRA through third-parties.
Israel is playing a double game. At home, Netanyahu basks in the hatred Israelis feel toward UNWRA. For the outside world, he makes attempts, feeble as they are, to “solve” the problem by passing it off to the UN, with the US acting as his second. The international body is having none of it:
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres refused over the last two months to engage in a discussion with Israel about alternative UN agencies that could take on some of UNRWA’s roles, U.S. and Israeli officials said.
It suits Israel fine to make Guterres look like the obstacle to solving the refugee problem. Even though he has no obligation to do Israel’s bidding in the matter.
The Crisis Group details the impracticability of Israel’s proposals to replace UNWRA and calls them, in a vast understatement, “flawed” :
One is for other UN agencies such as the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to take over basic humanitarian operations. UN officials say this idea is unrealistic…because the WFP and other UN entities already do considerable work in the West Bank and Gaza that relies heavily on UNRWA’s infrastructure. No other entity is presently equipped to provide assistance of the kind that UNRWA does and at the necessary scale and speed without the agency’s help. Even in a hypothetical scenario in which UNRWA withdrew, other UN entities would need to hire its former staff to run operations. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has directed UN agencies to reiterate that UNRWA is irreplaceable.
Can you imagine the WHO or WFP providing sanitation or educational services to Palestinian refugees? This is far outside their core-mission. It’s simply ridiculous and shows Israel not only doesn’t have a serious plan, it simply doesn’t care about their fate. It washes its hands of them and tells others to deal with it.
The source in the Axios report quoted above, a Biden official, attempts to place the blame on both parties when Israel, not the UN, passed the laws which will destroy UNWRA:
Both sides are playing chicken, waiting for some magical solution — and thinking that if they do nothing, it will solve itself out,” a U.S. official said. “But it won’t.”
Language softens Israel’s crimes
Even UN officials, at least as portrayed in this report, use language that softens the catastrophe about to unfold:
UN officials said they’re concerned that after the laws come into effect, UNRWA staff won’t be able to move between Gaza and Israel, and the agency won’t be able to carry out deconfliction arrangements with the IDF. It’s also not clear if the IDF will treat the agency’s facilities as part of the UN, which can’t be targeted by Israeli forces under international law.
That will put the ability of UNRWA to continue working in Gaza in jeopardy, UN officials said.
It’s quite clear the IDF will refuse to recognize humanitarian or diplomatic status of UNWRA, unlike what the passage above states. As for putting the agency’s work “in jeopardy.” It’s far worse than that. It will eliminate UNWRA as a functioning entity. This is another example of the media downplaying the severity.
The law, as outlined above, will treat UNWRA staff as little more than aid workers with no protected status, much like the World Central Kitchen staff who were slaughtered by the IDF in two separate attacks. UN employees are already targets for Israeli forces, which have killed over 300 of the 13,000 UNWRA workers in Gaza. After the law comes into effect, it will be open season on them.
Neither the Palestinians nor the UN know what Israel will do after January 31st. Will it lower the boom suddenly and shut down UNWRA completely? Will it do so gradually like death by a thousands paper cuts? This confusion works to Israel’s favor. As long as the world doesn’t know what to expect, it can’t mobilize against it. People must wait to see how bad it will be. That reduces opposition and enables Israel to implement this disastrous policy with a free hand.
UNWRA’s existence reminds the world of Israel’s responsibility
Its existence (and the reason Israel hates it) reaffirms that Palestinians are refugees from their homeland, and that they and their descendants have a right to return to it. Just as Israel erases Palestinians physically, it must erase any global body which supports and legitimizes their existence. As long as the agency exists, Israel fears the refugees will continue to have a claim to their former homes.
The State of Israel created the refugee crisis 75 years ago. UNWRA is a reminder it is responsible for the Nakba and rectifying the injustice. It is an internationally recognized body with authority which contradicts Israel’s denial of ethnic cleansing. Israel’s thinking goes something like this: No UNWRA, no responsibility, no problem. As simple as that.
Once refugee status is eliminated, the 6-million expellees which the UN recognizes, would become the problem of the countries which took them in after 1948. Even though these countries have restricted the rights of these refugees and in many cases refused to accept them as citizens, essentially no one will take responsibility for them. They will be stateless, no matter where they live. And their ties to their ancestral homeland will be permanently severed.
Warsaw ghetto hunger victims beg for food…or die
If that reminds you of another similar episode in 20th century history, it should. 250,000 Jews survived the death camps. Most either chose not to return to their homes; or could not do so because they had been occupied by others; or from fear that former neighbors would harm or even kill them. They became stateless and were housed in DP (displaced person) camps. Eventually, 140,000 emigrated to Israel and 100,000 to the US. There they began new lives in their adopted countries.
Imagine if the DP camps had suddenly been defunded and the residents told they had to henceforth fend for themselves. They would become wards of the states in which the camps were located (Austria, Italy, Germany). Imagine the hostility towards them in these countries. Imagine their desperation and hopelessness. That is what will happen to 2.5-million Palestinian refugees in three weeks.
Trump’s collusion with Israel against UNWRA
During Trump’s first term, he cut funding for UNWRA at Israel’s behest. It was the world’s largest donor to its budget. This crippled many of the services it provided. Israel also sought for the administration to deny recognition to UNWRA, which would eliminate refugee status for 6-million Palestinians worldwide recognized by the UN agency (3.5-million live primarily in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon). He didn’t take such an extreme step. But now Israel has gone one further, by eliminating the UN body’s ability to function in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
As I noted above, media reporting on the imminent shutdown is misleading and doesn’t fully portray the impending disaster. It talks about a “potential human catastrophe,” and a “looming crisis.” This is neither potential nor “looming.” It is here, now. A crisis implies that things are bad and could become worse. It warns of what could happen. That is no longer the case.
This legislation is a four-alarm fire. Palestinians will die of starvation and disease. Not just in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands have already died according to a University of Edinburgh public health expert.; but in the West Bank as well. The restrictions will also impact East Jerusalem. There could be Palestinian corpses lying in the streets of the Old City, reminiscent of the images from the Holocaust ghettos created by the Nazis.
In three weeks, 2.5-million Palestinian refugees throughout Palestine will have nothing. Food, shelter, education, health, jobs: everything cut off. Israel’s elimination of UNWRA is a crime of genocide, dwarfed only by the mass slaughter it has inflicted on Gaza.
Silverstein is an independent journalist and has published Tikun Olam since 2003. It exposes the secrets of the Israeli national security state. He publishes regularly at Middle East Eye, the New Arab, and Jacobin Magazine. His work has also appeared in Al Jazeera English, The Nation, Truthout and other outlets.
5 thoughts on “Israel Plans to Destroy UNWRA. Will It Get Away With It?”
Part of my comment is directed @oui too.
Is there any country that can still boast of being a “Democracy”? The so-called, Democracies of the West have never “looked away”, they are looking DIRECTLY at Gaza even as they arm and fund the genocide.
Given that situation, which nation will hold Israel accountable for its war crimes (including UNWRA).
The democracies of the West have been complicit/looking away for decades …
Israeli interrogators routinely ill-treat and often torture Arab prisoners.
This central conclusion emerges from a five-month inquiry into Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The methods used vary. Often there is just prolonged beating – which could imply that there are merely a number of “rogue cops” exceeding orders.
Insight has evidence, however, of techniques which go well beyond this, and place Israel’s practice firmly in the realm of torture. Prisoners are often hooded or blindfolded or hung by their wrists for long periods. Many are sexually assaulted. Others are given electric shocks. At least one detention centre has (or had) a specially constructed “cupboard”, about two feet square and five feet high, with concrete spikes set in the floor.
All Israel’s intelligence services are implicated., and it is implausible that knowledge of these practices is confined to the interrogators.
Torture is sometimes used to obtain information, and it also evidently helps to pacify the occupied territories. But one of its main purposes is to try to justify Israel’s claim that it administers the West Bank and Gaza through the rule of law.
Source: Annex to a UN Report:
Article published in “The Sunday Times” (London) on 19 June 1977 Israel tortures Arab prisoners
Special investigation by INSIGHT
Abu Ghraib were lessons learned how to (mis)treat prisoners and dehumanize men of Muslim faith. The Fallujah attacks in urban warfare were based on training camps in the Negev modeled after Jenin massacre.
Not that the ol’ Light Unto need fret much about international law, etc, but getting rid of UNRWA won’t do Israel much good from a legal perspective. In fact, in theory it would cost her good money.
As the occupying power, Israel is responsible for the welfare of the population in question. So no UNRWA, Israel herself has to properly feed, house, clothe, school, etc the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Lest she be a rogue state, an outlaw, a pariah among nations, subject to sanctions and military force, etc.
Part of my comment is directed @oui too.
Is there any country that can still boast of being a “Democracy”? The so-called, Democracies of the West have never “looked away”, they are looking DIRECTLY at Gaza even as they arm and fund the genocide.
Given that situation, which nation will hold Israel accountable for its war crimes (including UNWRA).
The Jewish State of Israel to invest $150m in Hasbara to whitewash Gaza genocide claim.
link to jewishinsider.com
The democracies of the West have been complicit/looking away for decades …
Source: Annex to a UN Report:
Article published in “The Sunday Times” (London) on 19 June 1977
Israel tortures Arab prisoners
Special investigation by INSIGHT
Abu Ghraib were lessons learned how to (mis)treat prisoners and dehumanize men of Muslim faith. The Fallujah attacks in urban warfare were based on training camps in the Negev modeled after Jenin massacre.
Israel goes through an unapologetic, unhindered JudeoNazification these days.
See/Google translate:
link to haaretz.co.il
Not that the ol’ Light Unto need fret much about international law, etc, but getting rid of UNRWA won’t do Israel much good from a legal perspective. In fact, in theory it would cost her good money.
As the occupying power, Israel is responsible for the welfare of the population in question. So no UNRWA, Israel herself has to properly feed, house, clothe, school, etc the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Lest she be a rogue state, an outlaw, a pariah among nations, subject to sanctions and military force, etc.
I know, I know — but that is the legal situation.