Israeli threat to banish aid agency looms over Gaza

Jerusalem: To Palestinians, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, is a critical lifeline, providing food, water and medicine to hundreds of thousands of Gaza Strip residents who have endured more than a year of war.

To the Israeli government, it is a dangerous cover for Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that led the 2023 surprise attack on Israel. Now, Israeli legislators have laid the groundwork to ban the agency with the passage of two bills set to take effect this month.

If Israeli authorities enforce the new laws, UN officials are warning that no other group will be able to replace UNRWA and that its crucial humanitarian operations in Gaza will grind to a halt at a moment when experts say famine is threatening parts of the territory.

U.N. officials say they are preparing to shutter UNRWA operations in both Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

"It would be a massive impact on an already catastrophic situation," said Jamie McGoldrick, who oversaw the U.N. humanitarian operation across Gaza and the West Bank until April. "If that is what the Israeli intention is -- to remove any ability for us to save lives -- you have to question what is the thinking and what is the end goal?"

UNRWA, the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, stands apart from other agencies in the international body. Its 30,000 employees -- mostly Palestinians -- operate schools, medical clinics, job-training centers, food banks and even garbage collection for 6 million Palestinians across Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, UNRWA has transformed itself into an anchor of the international aid response. With 5,000 workers still on the ground, it oversees aid deliveries, runs shelters and medical clinics and distributes food assistance. It clears trash and human waste and provides the fuel that powers hospitals, water wells and nearly every other aid organization in Gaza.

"The world has abandoned us. We have nothing but the aid we get from UNRWA to survive," said Sami Abu Darweesh, 30, who lives in a refugee camp in southern Gaza run by UNRWA. "If that stops, what will we do?"

Israel and UNRWA have had a tense relationship for decades. It ruptured last year when Israel accused 18 of the agency's employees of taking part in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. Israel has also claimed that Hamas uses UNRWA schools to hide fighters.

A UN investigation found that nine employees may have been involved in the attack on Israel and the agency fired them. U.N. officials reject most of Israel's accusations and say the government has refused to share much evidence.

A recent New York Times analysis of Hamas records showed that at least 24 members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a smaller Palestinian militant group, worked at UNRWA schools.

In late October, the Israeli parliament voted overwhelmingly for legislation to ban UNRWA activity on Israeli soil. The ban is set to go into effect this month, 90 days after the measures were passed.

There are a number of uncertainties surrounding what exactly will happen next.

The legislation does not directly address the agency's operations in Gaza or the West Bank, and the Israeli government has been vague about how, or whether, it plans to enforce the new laws there.

Sharren Haskel, Israel's deputy foreign minister, declined to clarify the government's approach to UNRWA in the territories when she spoke to reporters in late December. She suggested only that Palestinian officials should deal with UNRWA in the West Bank, while accusing the agency of harboring terrorists in Gaza.

UN officials have said they are preparing to close down operations in both territories largely because the laws would prohibit Israeli officials from interacting with UNRWA. The agency says it must coordinate with Israel's military every time its workers deliver aid or move across Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

"If we can't share that information with Israeli authorities on a daily basis," said Louise Wateridge, a senior UNRWA official on the ground in Gaza, "then we have staff lives in danger." She said more than 250 UNRWA workers had already been killed in the war in Gaza.

The Israeli lawmakers behind the legislation have suggested that they hope it will effectively banish the agency from Gaza and the West Bank. Some have said that the 90-day deadline for the laws to take effect was intended to give time for other aid groups to take UNRWA's place.

"We gave the government 90 days, and, actually, the entire world 90 days," said Yuli Edelstein, the chair of the parliamentary committee that drafted the UNRWA bills. "Whoever truly cares about the population, let them bring about the groups that would help."

Israel is already moving away from cooperating with UNRWA, agency officials say.

Officials at the agency said the Israeli military had prevented UNRWA from using crossings between Israel and northern Gaza, an area where Israel has mounted intense assaults in recent months.

At the same time, UNRWA's aid deliveries have been repeatedly looted in southern Gaza, prompting the agency to halt deliveries at one key southern border crossing since the beginning of December.

That has deepened the desperation in Gaza, Wateridge said.

Enas al-Hila, 31, said she and her three children fled their home in central Gaza earlier in the war and now live in a tent in a camp managed by UNRWA. She said the agency had been providing food, dried milk and diapers for her children.

Even those basic supplies have recently become rare, forcing her to wait in long lines to buy them from resellers for several times the normal price.

"UNRWA has always been our only hope for jobs, food, flour," she said. "It's the lifeline for us and our children, just as it was for our parents and grandparents."

The United Nations established UNRWA in 1949 to aid the millions of Palestinians who were made refugees in the war surrounding Israel's founding in 1948.

Many Israelis view the agency as perpetuating conflict because generations of Palestinians have been allowed to inherit refugee status. Some Israelis also accuse UNRWA teachers of indoctrinating young Palestinians to hate Israel. The United Nations denies this.

Since the laws banning UNRWA were passed, the Israeli government has kept up a drumbeat of criticism of the agency and suggested that plenty of aid groups were prepared to replace it.

The United States is among the nations that have pushed Israel to allow UNRWA to keep operating. Washington has long been the primary funder of the agency, though it suspended donations in January after Israel's accusations.

U.S. officials warned Israel in October that banning UNRWA "would devastate the Gaza humanitarian response at this critical moment."

In Gaza, UNRWA has become central to the aid response partly because it was already so woven into the community. Before the war, UNRWA said its 288 schools educated 300,000 students in Gaza, nearly half of the territory's school-age children, and its 22 medical clinics handled 2.6 million patient visits a year.

"My grandparents used to say, 'You have God with you and the UNRWA coupon,'" recalled Yasser Abu al-Assal, 39, who said his family long relied on the agency for education and medical care before the war and for food since the conflict began. "Now it feels like even that promise is slipping away."

UNRWA is also critical in parts of the West Bank, serving 900,000 Palestinians there.

A recent visit to the Qalandiya refugee camp in the West Bank and East Jerusalem showed how UNRWA operates in a quasi-governmental role.

In the poor, densely populated neighborhood of at least 16,500 people, UNRWA runs four schools, a job training center, a medical clinic and garbage collection. All the services are free.

The Qalandiya camp is one of the UNRWA operations most likely to be closed by the new laws.

UNRWA schools serve 50,000 students in the West Bank. The public schools elsewhere in the territory -- mostly run by the Palestinian Authority government -- are already near breaking point with 650,000 students. Teachers at those schools have gone on strike in recent years because of low pay.

Jamila Lafi, 40, has two children in UNRWA schools and a third at UNRWA's job-training center in Qalandiya, and her entire family uses its medical clinics. The agency's classes are overcrowded but there is no alternative, she said.

"We don't have the means to send them anywhere else," she said. "Without UNRWA, I don't know how we'd survive."