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.
In January 2024, the Israeli government alleged that 12 members of Unrwa’s staff had taken part in the 7 October attack. Although Israel has been slow to provide evidence, Unrwa immediately dismissed 10 of the 12 (the other two were said to be dead) and vowed to hold accountable anyone implicated in the attack. The UN also launched an investigation. These steps are exactly what a responsible agency should take.
But the Israeli government saw a broader opportunity. It distributed “intelligence reports” that were said to show that 10% of Unrwa’s staff had unspecified “ties” to Islamist militant groups in Gaza. Israel then pressed governments to suspend funding for Unrwa, which many did, including the United States, Unrwa’s largest funder, and Britain. Some of these governments, including those of the EU, Canada and Australia, have now at least partially resumed funding. Britain and others are awaiting a report on the UN’s internal investigation. The budget deal earlier this month that kept the US government funded through the end of September barred any US funding of Unrwa for a year. (US military aid and arms sales continue, even as Israel bombs and starves Palestinian civilians.)
This attack on Unrwa could not come at a worse time for the Palestinian civilians of Gaza. As has been widely reported, hunger is widespread in Gaza, and famine is projected in the north by May if current trends persist.
With Unrwa’s 13,000 employees in Gaza, “No other entity has the capacity to deliver the scale and breadth of assistance that 2.2 million people in Gaza urgently need,” according to UN leaders. Eight of the biggest private humanitarian agencies working in Gaza said: “The plain reality is that Unrwa’s humanitarian role in this crisis is indispensable and cannot remotely be replaced by any other aid organization.”
Destroying Unrwa thus furthers the Netanyahu government’s starvation strategy for Gaza. Since the siege it imposed on 7 October, the Israeli government has been letting in just enough food to avoid widespread deaths but nowhere near enough to alleviate hunger or to dim the prospects of famine. This past weekend, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, visited the Egyptian side of the Gaza border and saw “long lines of blocked relief trucks waiting to be let into Gaza”. Israel’s understaffed, convoluted procedures for inspecting aid trucks can take three weeks, with trucks often rejected for carrying a single innocuous item that Israel deems of military value, forcing them to start the process all over again.
Israel has allowed much-publicized airdrops and sea delivery of food, but they amount to a tiny fraction of what is needed. Only land deliveries can provide the scale of food required. Unrwa’s delivery system is indispensable for those deliveries.
A land delivery that Israel organized without Unrwa in February ended in disaster, with more than 100 killed and hundreds more wounded when Israeli troops opened fire at hungry people desperate for food, contributing to panic. As some governments resumed Unrwa funding, averting the agency’s potential shutdown, Israel said it would prevent Unrwa from delivering aid to northern Gaza, where, because it is most distant from the two open southern entrances, the need is most dire. The World Health Organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Israel was “denying starving people the ability to survive”.
Israel’s obstruction flouts the UN security council’s demand that it lift “all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance at scale”. That blockage is a war crime, as the international criminal court prosecutor Karim Khan has warned. It also contravenes the international court of justice’s order in its preliminary genocide ruling, which, fueling further Israel’s animosity, relied in part on evidence provided by Unrwa.
Israel also hopes to destroy Unrwa because the government naively believes that Palestinian refugees would then somehow forget that they are Palestinian refugees and stop insisting on a right to return. Many would not exercise that right but others would. Israel denies this right not only for return to Israel within its 1967 borders but also for return to the occupied Palestinian territory – to Palestine.
Israeli partisans suggest that the passage of time since 1948 should lead us to forgive and forget its criminal forced deportation, that Palestinian refugees should resettle elsewhere and abandon their hopes of return. But even Moshe Dayan, the legendary Israeli general, realized that “Palestinians would never forget the nakba or stop dreaming of returning to their homes”.
To justify their rejection of Palestinian refugees, Israeli partisans make various unfounded arguments. They assert that only the people who were forced out of Israel in 1948 – few of whom are still alive – should be considered refugees, not their descendants.
But it is common for descendants of refugees to be considered refugees. That is the case for Rohingya from Myanmar in Bangladesh, Somalis in Kenya, Afghans in Pakistan, Sahrawis in Algeria, Bhutanese in Nepal, and others. This multigenerational understanding is a prerequisite for many governments to accept refugees because of the governments’ regrettable but real reluctance to contemplate resettlement if the need for a refuge persists, as it often does.
The partisans also complain that Palestinian refugees should be resettled elsewhere the way some other refugees are. But most refugees flee ongoing persecution or war and do not want to return; for them, resettlement is the best option. But many Palestinian refugees do want to return. They see their compatriots in Israel and Palestine and want to join them. They are barred only by the Israeli government. Refugee status should maximize the welfare of refugees, not serve as a tool for governments to rid themselves of an unwanted population.
Moreover, it is hardly unprecedented for refugees to seek a temporary but not a permanent safe haven. That is what many Ukrainian refugees want now that the Russian invasion has stalled.
The attack on Unrwa is best understood as part of Israel’s quest to alter the demographics of the land it seeks to control. The population of the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is currently divided roughly equally between Jews and Palestinians. The obvious way for Israel to maintain its Jewish majority would be to allow a Palestinian state, but Netanyahu opposes that. Israel might continue to rule by repressing and disenfranchising millions of Palestinians in the occupied territory, but that has rightly been condemned as apartheid and prompted calls for equal rights for all in what has become a “one-state reality”.
Some Israeli leaders see an ugly third way out of this conundrum – reducing the number of Palestinians. By starving Palestinians in Gaza and destroying much of the housing and infrastructure, Netanyahu seems to want to render Gaza unlivable. That would be consistent with the calls of his rightwing ministers for mass deportation from Gaza – an effort to wipe 2.2 million Palestinians from the demographic balance sheet.
Certainly Netanyahu does not want to make the demographics worse by offering any sustenance to Palestinian refugees who might want to return – even to Palestine. Destroying Unrwa is part of that awful plan. No funder should join it.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs
