Israel’s vendetta against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa) illustrates the callousness with which Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has fought the war in Gaza. It also reflects an effort to use Hamas’s 7 October attack as an opportunity for demographic re-engineering.
Unrwa established by the UN general assembly in December 1949 to address the 700,000 Palestinian refugees whom Israeli troops had forced from their homes during the war that led to the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948. Palestinians refer to this expulsion as the nakba, or catastrophe. Today, Unrwa provides education, healthcare and social services to the surviving refugees and their descendants. They number nearly 7 million, scattered among Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as well as the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
