Knesset passes 2nd bill aimed at curtailing UNRWA activities in West Bank and Gaza
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Defying US, EU and UN criticism, lawmakers vote 87-9 to approve a bill aimed at severely curtailing the activities of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, in Gaza and the West Bank.
UNRWA — short for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — provides education, health care, and aid to millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
The bill, sponsored by Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky and Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz, among others, would ban state authorities from having any contact with UNRWA.
Without coordination with Israel, it would be almost impossible, in turn, for UNRWA to work in Gaza or the West Bank, since Jerusalem would no longer be issuing entrance permits to those territories or allowing coordination with the IDF. Israel also currently controls access to Gaza from Egypt, with the IDF deployed along the Gaza-Egypt Philadelphi Corridor.
Israel alleges that more than 10 percent of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza have ties to terror, and that educational facilities under the organization’s auspices consistently incite hatred of Israel and glorify terror.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said that passing the bills would be a “catastrophe,” while European Commission Vice President Josep Borrell recently warned that it “would have disastrous consequences.”
The bill’s passage into law in its second and third readings comes shortly on the heels of the Knesset’s approval of a related piece of legislation preventing the UN agency from operating in Israeli territory by revoking a 1967 exchange of notes providing the basis for its activities.