How will Israel’s new anti-UNRWA laws impact the controversial agency’s operations?
New laws don’t explicitly bar UNRWA from working in Gaza and West Bank but likely make its operations impossible, with potentially severe consequences for Palestinians and Israel
Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter
The Knesset passed legislation on Monday to severely limit the operations of the UNRWA Palestinian aid agency in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
But the new laws enacting this policy are somewhat vague and lack detail, and their legal implications for the agencies operations are therefore not entirely clear.
There is also another critical impact the laws may have: their effect on Israel’s ability to abide by its obligations under international law, and its commitments to the US, to ensure that Palestinian civilians in Gaza do not starve.
The Knesset passed the laws due to allegations by Israel that UNRWA has become infiltrated by Hamas; the evidence that some of its employees took part directly in the October 7 atrocities and helped facilitate it; accusations that large numbers of its Gazan staff are members of terrorist groups; and claims that the agency has allowed Hamas to divert aid to its combatants and use the organization as cover for its terrorist activity.
UNRWA itself conceded in August that nine of its employees “may have been involved” in the October 7 attacks and has fired them. The agency also confirmed just last week that Muhammad Abu Attawi, a commander in Hamas’s Nukhba force killed by the IDF in Gaza, who is documented as having murdered civilians in the notorious bomb shelter attack near Re’im on October 7, was one of its staffers.
UNRWA denies the allegations that large numbers of its staff are members of terrorist groups.
The provisions of the laws
The legislation, approved in Knesset with extremely large majorities, was passed in two parts.
The first law bans UNRWA from operating in sovereign Israeli territory, which according to Israeli law includes East Jerusalem.
This mainly impacts UNRWA’s operations in the so-called refugee camp of Shuafat in East Jerusalem, where the agency collects rubbish, provides some sanitation services, runs three schools and a health care clinic, and provides some social services.
All of this will come to an end when the law takes effect in three months time. The law makes no provision for who will take over those services.
UNRWA’s offices in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Maalot Dafna were already in the process of being confiscated even before the latest legislation.
The second law is what has created greater legal uncertainty concerning its effects on UNRWA’s operations.
Its first provision, which came into effect immediately, annuls the exchange of letters between Israel and UNRWA in which Israel gave the agency permission to operate in Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, after it captured them from Egypt and Jordan respectively during the Six-Day War.
The second clause bans any Israeli state agency from having any contact at all with UNRWA and the organization’s staff.
In Israel’s letter to UNRWA, Jerusalem said it would “permit the free movement of UNRWA vehicles into, within and out of Israel and the areas in question,” ensure the protection of UNRWA personnel, installations, and property, provide UNRWA staff with the necessary documentation to allow them to operate, and permit the agency’s staff to move about within those territories.
Cancelling these arrangements would ostensibly create severe problems for UNRWA’s ongoing operations the West Bank, and possibly to a lesser extent in Gaza.
The difference between the two territories lies in the fact that Israel argues that it is not in a legal occupation of Gaza. This was the case before October 7, and the state has continued to assert in proceedings in the High Court of Justice that this remains so amid the current conflict.
In the West Bank, Israel does agree that its control of the territory is what is legally known as a belligerent occupation whereby the military commander — in this case the head of the IDF’s Central Command — is the de facto ruler, and has charge of civilian affairs.
While the new laws passed this week do not explicitly ban UNRWA from operating in Gaza and the West Bank, they simply withdraw Israel’s commitment to facilitate the agency’s work.
But the legislation does mean that the organization’s local staff will essentially become like any other Palestinian, something which will severely hamper their ability to function. Its foreign staff will likely face severe difficulties obtaining the relevant visas and documentation to enable them to work.
The issue of providing aid to Gaza will also be greatly complicated by the new legislation.
Israeli officials, ostensibly including the IDF and the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Civilian Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) unit which is responsible for, among other tasks, coordinating the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, will be banned by law from having any contact with UNRWA officials.
UNRWA however is one of the most important agencies supplying humanitarian aid to the Gazan population during the current conflict, taking delivery of consignments from the Gaza border crossings and helping distribute it to the Palestinian population inside the territory.
Coordination of the collection of aid from the border crossings between UNRWA and COGAT would therefore appear to be impossible, as would coordinating the delivery of the aid inside Gaza between the UNRWA and the IDF.
Additionally, if UNRWA cannot coordinate its movements, its staff would be at grave risk of being targeted by the IDF as they move about Gaza, rendering such operations too hazardous to carry out.
On a technical level, UNRWA and especially its local staff would in theory be able to conduct the other services it provides in Gaza such as health care and education since Israel has not prohibited such activity.
Similar to the West Bank though, it would appear that foreign nationals working for UNRWA will not be able to obtain the necessary visas and other documentation necessary to enter Gaza.
UNRWA’s ability to at least import aid into Gaza and get its foreign personnel into the territory would be easier under these circumstances if the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza was open, but Egypt closed the crossing after Israel took control of Rafah in an operation beginning in May.
International legal obligations
The legal implications of Israel’s new laws against UNRWA might not be confined to its ability to operate, and could also extend to its responsibilities under international law to ensure that Palestinians in Gaza do not starve.
The Fourth Geneva Convention to which Israel is a signatory, and its additional protocols, which Israel has not signed, are generally seen to require that the provision of humanitarian relief be facilitated to a civilian population in times of war, although there are exceptions.
Additionally, international law forbids the use of starvation as a weapon of war, while the Genocide Convention which Israel has also signed prohibits a country from deliberately creating conditions designed to destroy a group of people.
Prof. Yuval Shany of Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law said that UNRWA remains at the heard of the effort to provide humanitarian relief to Gaza’s civilian population which has faced severe deprivation and hardship throughout the current conflict.
“If you have an obligation to provide for the needs of the local population, and the one organization which is carrying most of that burden you refuse to deal with then you are setting yourself on a course to violate those obligations,” said Shany.
He also pointed out that the government has not put forward a plan to find an alternative to UNRWA — an organization he added he was “not a fan of” — and said doing so within 90 days when fighting is still raging “does not look like a very realistic plan.”
Shany’s comments have been echoed by senior UN officials, including the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Secretary General, and the head of UNRWA.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described UNRWA “an irreplaceable lifeline to the Palestinian people,” and said that the legislation “barring UNRWA from its life-saving and health-protecting work” would have “devastating consequences.”
Said the WHO director “It contravenes Israel’s obligations and responsibilities, and threatens the lives and health of all those who depend on UNRWA.”
And the Adalah organization which provides legal aid to Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians under Israeli control talked more broadly of possibly Israeli culpability if the restrictions on UNRWA have catastrophic humanitarian consequences for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
The legislation, Adalah said in a statement to the press, “violates a range of Israel’s international legal obligations, including those under the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” alluding to criminal responsibility for such actions.
