UNRWA chief says new Israeli laws targeting UN agency mean ‘more people will die in Gaza’

Philippe Lazzarini says shuttering UNRWA operations in Israel within three months ‘would be a total disaster,’ in first comments since Knesset passed laws severing ties with agency

Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), speaks during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, September 30, 2024. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)
Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), speaks during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, September 30, 2024. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

The head of the UN agency tasked with providing relief for Palestinians said Wednesday that newly passed Israeli laws effectively banning its activities in Israel will leave a vacuum that will cost more lives and create further instability in Gaza and the West Bank.

Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview — the first since the laws were passed — that the legislation is “ultimately against the Palestinians themselves,” claiming that they are effectively denying them a functioning provider of aid services, education and health care.

UNRWA has been the main agency procuring and distributing aid in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s nearly 13-month-old war with the Hamas terror group, following its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, when terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.

On Tuesday, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel that UNRWA “was already limited and reduced” in Gaza in recent months, and is no longer the leading aid provider, pointing to UNICEF taking the lead on polio vaccinations, and the UN World Food Programme taking the lead on food distribution.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it “is committed to international law and to providing humanitarian aid to Gaza, and will continue to act on this subject with UN agencies and international organizations.”

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.

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.

Col. Benny Aharon walks into UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza City, February 8, 2024. (Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)

The UN agency also acknowledged last week that Muhammad Abu Attawi, recently killed by an Israeli airstrike, was an UNRWA staffer. The IDF and Shin Bet security agency said Attawi was a commander of Hamas’s Nukhba force, who led the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter during the October 7, 2023 attack.

According to UNRWA, Attawi’s name was included in a letter the agency received from Israel in July that included a list of 100 staff members who were also allegedly members of terror groups, including Hamas. But the agency said it did not take any action against Attawi — who worked as a driver — because Israel did not respond to a request for further information.

The new laws, passed by the Knesset on Monday, sever all ties with UNRWA and ban its operations in Israel.

Without coordination with Israel, it will be almost impossible 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 Israeli forces deployed along the border between them.

If the Israeli decision is implemented “this would be a total disaster, it is like throwing (out) the baby with the [bath]water,” Lazzarini told the AP, speaking in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where he is attending a conference to discuss the Mideast conflict.

“This would create a vacuum. It would also feed more instability in the West Bank and Gaza,” he said. “Having UNRWA ending its activities within the three months would also mean more people will die in Gaza.”

He said the agency is looking for “creative ways to keep our operation going.” He appealed for support from the UN General Assembly and donors to keep providing services and called on Israel to rescind the decision or extend the three-month grace period. He said Israel has not officially communicated with the agency following the adoption of the laws.

For decades, UNRWA has operated networks of schools, medical facilities and other services around Gaza and the West Bank — as well as in neighboring Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. In Gaza especially, it has played a major role in maintaining social services and the economy, as the territory’s largest single employer and the source of education and health care for much of the population.

Palestinians line up to buy bread at a bakery run by the UN World Food Programme and UNRWA in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on September 8, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

The laws threaten to shut down all those operations, impacting the education and welfare of hundreds of thousands of children well into the future, he said.

“We have today 1 in 2 persons in Gaza below the age of 18, among them 650,000 girls and boys living in the rubble, deeply traumatized at the age of primary and secondary school,” he said.

“Getting rid of UNRWA is also a way to tell these children that you will have no future. We are just sacrificing your education. Education is the only thing which has never, ever been taken away from the Palestinians.”

UNRWA was established to help the estimated 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. It now offers support to the refugees and their descendants, who number some 6 million around the region.

Israel argues that UNRWA perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem, and perpetuates also the narrative of the so-called right of return, whose goal is the elimination of Israel.

Israel has long complained that UNRWA, unlike UNHCR, which deals with all other global refugees, has no limits to its recognition of refugees, allowing unlimited generations of descendants, including those born in other countries or who are citizens of those countries, to continue to be classified as refugees in perpetuity.

Lazzarini said the Israeli laws are the “culmination of years of attack against the agency.” He said, “The objective is to strip the Palestinians from refugee status.”

In a letter to the UN, Lazzarini said the Israeli laws and campaign against the agency “will not terminate the refugee status of the Palestinians, which exists independently of UNRWA’s services, but will severely harm their lives and future.”

Palestinians at the site of an Israeli airstrike at a United Nations (UNRWA) school in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, on July 15, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

Lazzarini said Israel has not responded to inquiries from UNRWA for details about other allegations, including that the agency’s premises are used by terror groups. He said that the agency has been unable to verify the claims, amid the continued fighting, and called for an independent investigation.

Lazzarini spoke on the sidelines of the conference by the Global Alliance for a Two-State Solution, a Saudi government-created initiative attended by foreign ministers from Arab, Muslim, African and European countries.

“If we want to be successful in any future political transition, we need an agency like UNRWA taking care of education and the primary health of the Palestinian refugees” until there is a viable functioning state or administration to do so, he said.

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