UN to Israel: Replacing UNRWA aid agency is your responsibility, not ours
Guterres’s office warns global body can’t provide alternative to Palestinian relief organization; Israel’s envoy says notion that UNRWA is irreplaceable is ‘absurd’
The United Nations has said that replacing its Palestinian relief agency UNRWA in Gaza and the West Bank is not the world body’s responsibility, signaling it is Israel’s problem, according to a letter excerpt seen by Reuters.
The UN formally responded in a letter to Israel’s decision to cut ties with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a move that UNRWA has said leaves its operations in Gaza and the West Bank at risk of collapse.
Israel’s envoy to the UN dismissed as “absurd” the notion that UNRWA cannot be replaced, in a meeting of the General Assembly on Wednesday.
Under a new law, Israel told the UN on Sunday it was ending a 1967 cooperation agreement with UNRWA that covered its protection, movement, and diplomatic immunity. The law, which was backed by lawmakers from both the coalition and opposition, will also ban UNRWA’s operations in Israel from late January 2025.
“I would note, as a general point, that it is not our responsibility to replace UNRWA, nor do we have the capacity to do so,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s chef de cabinet, Courtenay Rattray, wrote to a senior Israeli foreign affairs official late on Tuesday.
The mention of responsibility is a veiled reference to Israel’s obligations as an occupying power.
The UN views Gaza and the West Bank as Israeli-occupied territory. International humanitarian law requires an occupying power to agree to relief programs for people in need and to facilitate them “by all the means at its disposal” and ensure food, medical care, hygiene, and public health standards. Though Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, due to its control of the borders and ongoing military operation there against the Palestinian terror group Hamas, the UN holds it responsible for the humanitarian situation in the territory.
Israel’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Rattray’s letter.
“If UNRWA is no longer able to operate, it would be the responsibility of the Israeli authorities to replace the services that it delivers to civilians, in education, in health, and all sorts of other areas,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric later clarified to reporters.
Top UN officials and the Security Council describe UNRWA as the backbone of the aid response in Gaza, where Israel and Hamas have been at war for the past year, leaving the enclave in ruins. War erupted on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led a massive cross-border attack on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw 251 people abducted as hostages to Gaza.
“UNRWA may be defined by a single word – failure,” Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon told a meeting of the General Assembly on UNRWA on Wednesday. “This idea that UNRWA could not be supplemented is absurd.”
Sitting next to released Israeli hostage Mia Schem, he strongly criticized the General Assembly and all other UN bodies for failing to condemn Hamas or to hold a single session dedicated to the hostages.
Israel has long had a combative relationship with UNRWA, which it argues has perpetuated the Palestinian refugee crisis by allowing the status to be passed down through generations. Frustration with UNRWA in Jerusalem has picked up over the past decade as Israel has found the Gaza-ruling Hamas terror group embedded within the agency’s infrastructure.
That anger has peaked since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, in which a number of UNRWA staffers were found to have participated, including kidnapping and killing Israelis. Israel has alleged that 10 percent of the UN agency’s staff in Gaza have ties to Hamas — a charge the agency says it has no evidence of.
The UN has said nine UNRWA staff may have been involved in the attack and had been fired. Later, a Hamas commander in Lebanon killed in September by Israel was found to have had a UNRWA job.
Two weeks ago, UNRWA confirmed that a Hamas Nukbha commander killed in an Israeli strike, who led the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7 last year, had been employed by the agency since July 2022.
In February, the IDF revealed the existence of a subterranean Hamas data center directly beneath UNRWA’s Gaza Strip headquarters. The IDF has also repeatedly targeted Hamas command centers and gunmen hiding out in UNRWA schools.
UNRWA was established in 1949 following Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. It provides aid, health, and education to millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring Arab countries — Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
It is only one of two UN refugee agencies. While UNRWA caters to Palestinians, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is responsible for all other refugees around the world.
The United Nations has repeatedly argued there is no alternative to UNRWA. Israel says its job can be carried out by other agencies it views as less corrupted by terror support.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that implementing the Israeli law would have “disastrous consequences,” adding: “Millions of Palestine refugees fear that the public services on which their lives depend will soon disappear.”
“They fear that their children will be deprived of education; that illnesses will go untreated; and that social support will stop,” Lazzarini said. “The entire population of Gaza fears that their only remaining lifeline will be cut.”
“In Gaza, dismantling UNRWA will collapse the UN humanitarian response, which relies heavily on the agency’s infrastructure,” he warned.
“In the absence of a capable public administration or state, only UNRWA can deliver education to more than 650,000 girls and boys in Gaza. In the absence of UNRWA, an entire generation will be denied the right to education,” he added.
Assembly President Philemon Yang told members at the informal meeting that Israel’s legislation against UNRWA “constitutes an intolerable affront to the authority of this assembly, an affront to international law and, most importantly, an affront to the human dignity of innocent Palestinian civilians.”
Yang said the assembly extended UNRWA’s mandate — most recently in December 2022 — by an overwhelming majority until June 30, 2026. He urgently called on Israel to comply with its international legal obligations, the UN Charter, and UN resolutions.
In a letter to Netanyahu last week after Israel’s parliament approved the new law on UNRWA, Guterres raised several legal issues regarding the decision.
Rattray reinforced that message, calling on Israel “to act consistently” with its obligations under the founding UN Charter and international law, stressing in his letter: “National legislation cannot alter those obligations.”
Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and Gaza from Egypt — areas the Palestinians want for a state — in the 1967 Six Day War. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but, along with neighboring Egypt, controls the enclave’s borders.
Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour told the General Assembly: “The agency is indispensable and irreplaceable.”
Notifying the UN of Israel’s decision to sever ties on Monday, outgoing Foreign Minister Israel Katz said that only 13 percent of the aid to Gaza currently goes through UNRWA, and argued the notion that there is no alternative to UNRWA is fiction.
The Israeli ban has raised fears that UNRWA employees will lose their ability to coordinate with Israeli authorities to cross checkpoints and move from one place to another in the West Bank and Gaza.
While Israel has worked to gradually limit UNRWA’s role in the delivery of humanitarian aid, in favor of the World Food Program, UNICEF, and other agencies, UNRWA is still heavily involved in the Strip’s humanitarian operation, running shelters, clinics, and warehouses.
Despite pledges by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Foreign Ministry to make sure that the flow of aid remains uninterrupted, representatives of the International Organization for Migration and UNICEF have both stated that they would be unable to fill the gap left behind when UNRWA has to cut back or halt operations in Gaza.
