[News] What’s behind Israel’s decision to target UNRWA?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 What’s behind Israel’s decision to target UNRWA?

*Israel has long tried to eliminate the UN agency, which enshrines the
right of Palestinian refugees to return home.*
[image: Palestinian employees of United Nations Relief and Works Agency
(UNRWA) take part in a protest against job cuts by UNRWA, in Gaza City
September 19 2018]
Palestinian employees of UNRWA take part in a protest against job cuts in
the UN agency in Gaza City on September 19, 2018. [File: Ibraheem Abu
Mustafa/Reuters]
By Mat Nashed
<https://www.aljazeera.com/author/mat_nashed_20143411712946213>
Published On 31 Jan 2024 -
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/1/31/israels-allegations-unrwa-effort-eliminate-agency
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Kholood Mkhamer fled her neighbourhood weeks after Israel began bombing the
Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7.

An employee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees (UNRWA), Mkhamer moved from northern Gaza to the south, heeding
Israel’s orders for more than one million people to make that journey. The
UN feared
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/17/israel-could-be-in-breach-of-global-law-with-gaza-relocation-order-un>that
the order amounted to the forceful transfer of a population, which is a war
crime, but Mkhamer just wanted to survive.

Shortly after relocating with her parents and siblings, they were killed.
By that time, Mkhamer, a medical secretary, was working in a clinic along
the border with Egypt when the house the family was staying in was shelled.

“They were all martyred,” said Halima Loaz, a former colleague of Mkhamer’s
and an UNRWA nurse who recently relocated to Spain. “Her, her mother and
her brothers.”
Attacks on UNRWA

In recent days, a series of countries – including the United States,
Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
Finland, Estonia, Japan, Austria and Romania – have cut funding for UNRWA,
the agency that Palestinians have relied on for everything from
vaccinations to education for seven decades.

This came about after Israel alleged that a dozen of the agency’s employees
were involved in the October 7 attacks on southern Israel, in which 1,139
people were killed and 240 abducted. UNRWA has fired nine of its employees
preemptively as it investigates the allegations, which surfaced on the same
day that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to restore
vital provisions and scale up aid to the enclave as part of a series of
measures to prevent genocide in Gaza.

“I don’t think it is coincidental that these allegations came out
immediately after the ICJ ruling,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian legal
expert in international law. “It is designed to deflect from the ICJ ruling
and focus the attention on UNRWA and to undermine any attempts to hold
Israel accountable or stop the genocide.”

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philip Lazzarini said
<https://twitter.com/UNLazzarini/status/1751345422918959147?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet>
the
decision by major donors to cut funding for the agency would only further
deepen the misery of the people of Gaza.

“Our humanitarian operation, on which 2 million people depend as a lifeline
in Gaza, is collapsing. … Palestinians in Gaza did not need this additional
collective punishment. This stains all of us,” he said in a statement.

It’s only the latest hit that UNRWA has taken since October 7.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed 152 of UNRWA’s Palestinian employees, which
is the highest number of UN casualties since the world body was founded in
1945. Some have been killed in Israel’s deliberate, repeated attacks on
UNRWA hospitals and schools, which shelter more than 1 million
<https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-38-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-Jerusalem>
displaced
Palestinians in Gaza.

According to UNRWA, Israel has hit its facilities 263 times
<https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-70-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-Jerusalem>
since the start of the war, resulting in 360 civilian deaths. The attacks
on UNRWA staff and facilities are emblematic of Israel’s broader efforts to
destroy the agency, analysts, Palestinian refugees and rights groups said.
The right to return

UNRWA was formed after more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from
their homeland during the creation of Israel in 1948, an event referred to
in Arabic as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”.

The agency collectively recognises Palestinians who were displaced to Gaza,
the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan as refugees entitled to education,
healthcare and other services until they can exercise their right to return
to their land as stipulated in UN Resolution 194
<https://www.unrwa.org/content/resolution-194>.

But Israel opposes the return of nearly six million Palestinian refugees
registered with UNRWA. Israel has instead lobbied
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/6/11/israel-calls-for-end-of-un-palestinian-refugee-agency>
Western states to eliminate UNRWA in an effort to sabotage the right of
return for stateless Palestinian refugees, according to Shatha Abdulsamad,
a legal and refugee expert with al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank.

“UNRWA is uniquely placed to highlight the need for a just solution for the
plight of displaced Palestinians,” she told Al Jazeera. Its elimination,
she added, “would facilitate and expedite the liquidation of the
Palestinian cause because it could contribute to undermining the collective
right of return”.

In 2018, then-US President Donald Trump cut
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/9/2/wishing-away-palestinian-refugees-end-of-us-unrwa-aid-explained>
all US funding to UNRWA, triggering international criticism. But President
Joe Biden has seen allied states like Canada, Germany, Australia and the
United Kingdom join him in pausing aid to the agency.

Israeli officials have championed the move with Foreign Minister Israel
Katz tweeting
<https://twitter.com/Israel_katz/status/1751153470617379008?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1751153470617379008%7Ctwgr%5E77a8d6df4d167cd0339b5c0eec68ff59dde2f910%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newarab.com%2Fnews%2Fwhy-israel-trying-destroy-unrwa>:
“We have been warning for years that UNRWA perpetuates the refugee issue.”

Omar Shakir, the Israel-Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said the
Israeli government is not hiding its motives.

“It’s clear that there has been a years-long politicised effort to
undermine UNRWA’s work. It happened during the Trump administration, and
there are pro-Israeli groups that entirely focus on UNRWA because they seek
to liquidate the question of Palestinian rights or even their basic status
of refugees to serve a bigger political agenda,” he told Al Jazeera.
Campaign against UNRWA

Israel also wants to eliminate UNRWA to force Palestinians in Gaza and the
West Bank to migrate elsewhere out of desperation, according to Zaid Amali,
a UNRWA card holder and a civil society activist in the West Bank.

“This step of targeting UNRWA feeds into this overall goal of displacing
more Palestinians [from their land] in order to build more illegal
settlements,” he told Al Jazeera.

In December, Israeli media reported
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-hoping-to-push-unrwa-out-of-gaza-post-war-report/>
the
government was conspiring to “push” UNRWA out of the Gaza Strip after the
war, including by trying to tie the agency’s activities to Hamas.

On January 28, far-right ministers in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s government confirmed their intention
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/29/israeli-ministers-join-gathering-calling-for-rebuilding-settlements-in-gaza#:~:text=The%20far%2Dright%20conference%20urges,and%20the%20occupied%20West%20Bank.&text=Several%20members%20of%20the%20Israeli,Strip%20and%20occupied%20West%20Bank.>
to uproot Palestinians from Gaza during a conference in Jerusalem. National
Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called on Palestinians in Gaza to
“voluntarily” migrate and for Israel to re-establish illegal Jewish
settlements in the enclave.

Even if Palestinians in Gaza want to flee Israel’s violence, which may
legally constitute a genocide, according to the ICJ, most would be unable
to cross into Egypt
<https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/2/will-egypt-accept-palestinians-displaced-by-israels-war-on-gaza>,
which has made it clear it would not support any move that could lead to
the potential, permanent displacement of the people of Gaza.

With Palestinians unwilling or unable to flee, hunger and disease could
worsen in Gaza after the  funding cuts to UNRWA, according to analysts. A
UN-backed report
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/21/entire-gaza-population-facing-hunger-crisis-famine-risk-un-backed-report>recently
found that a quarter of Gaza’s population – or 577,000 people – are facing
catastrophic levels of hunger.

Loaz said the global community is directly aiding Israel’s mass killing of
Palestinians by suspending funds to UNRWA at such a critical time.

“They are going to let everyone [in Gaza] die,” she told Al Jazeera. “If
people in Gaza don’t die from Israeli shelling and bombs, they’ll die from
famine.”
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