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The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is the leading institution dedicated to the humanitarian needs of the besieged people in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s devastating war, which has left more than 43,000 people dead, nearly half that number orphaned, and more than 100,000 wounded. And yet, Israel has repeatedly said it would like UNRWA to be banned.
The Israeli government has said that a 10th of UNRWA employees are linked to Hamas and that some of them were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in which more than a thousand Israelis were killed and more than 250 abducted. (Nine UNRWA employees were fired by the agency upon an investigation. They “may have been involved,” U.N.’s internal oversight arm concluded upon an investigation.)
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is the leading institution dedicated to the humanitarian needs of the besieged people in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s devastating war, which has left more than 43,000 people dead, nearly half that number orphaned, and more than 100,000 wounded. And yet, Israel has repeatedly said it would like UNRWA to be banned.
The Israeli government has said that a 10th of UNRWA employees are linked to Hamas and that some of them were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in which more than a thousand Israelis were killed and more than 250 abducted. (Nine UNRWA employees were fired by the agency upon an investigation. They “may have been involved,” U.N.’s internal oversight arm concluded upon an investigation.)
There has also been some evidence of Hamas tunnels under UNRWA schools, although the agency has said that whenever suspected tunnels are discovered under UNRWA facilities, it seals the cavities “by injecting cement” and promptly informs all stakeholders.
But the biggest reason behind the Israeli push to get rid of the agency seems to be something else.
Israelis who support the ban and those who oppose it agree that one of its main motivations is that UNRWA allows the passing of refugee status from one generation of Palestinians to another. Eliminating the agency could thus help eliminate Palestinians’ claims of a right to return to their land.
For decades, UNRWA has been responsible for emergency aid and basic services such as health care and education for Palestinians in the occupied territories as well as in neighboring countries. For almost as long, Israel has wanted to dismantle the group.
Earlier this month, the Israeli Knesset passed two pieces of legislation with an overwhelming majority that outlawed UNRWA on Israeli soil. While one of the bills banned UNRWA from carrying out its activities inside Israel, the second barred Israeli authorities from any kind of coordination with the agency. If implemented, these laws could effectively block all aid to Gaza—even the border crossing through Egypt is controlled by the Israeli military.
There will be a 90-day transition period before the laws go into effect, but judging by the bipartisan support for both bills and a supportive administration preparing to take charge in Washington, a retraction or a rethink is unexpected.
UNRWA was born in 1949 to temporarily provide relief programs for Palestinians displaced in the Arab-Israeli War the year before, but since there was no resolution to the conflict and the refugees were never resettled in an independent Palestinian state, UNRWA has had to provide for generations of Palestinians.
From roughly 700,000 people at the start of the displacement, the number of Palestinian refugees claiming a right to return has grown to nearly 6 million.
The Israeli government, high on its successes in the battlefields in both Gaza and Lebanon and having already endured scathing international criticism, has perhaps decided that it has nothing to lose and much to gain if it can deal a blow to what it sees as the core of the country’s problem with the Palestinians—their belief that they can return to where Israelis now live.
Several retired Israeli officials have told me over the years that they believe that UNRWA schools propagate anti-Israel attitudes through hateful content, and that the agency’s mere existence lends international legitimacy to the claim for a right to return to millions of Palestinians settled elsewhere. They deem this an unrealistic demand that nonetheless feeds anger toward Israelis and is seen as a constant threat to Israeli security.
“They teach Palestinian kids that they can come back, that their home is in Israel,” said Eran Lerman, a former deputy national security advisor to Israel. “That’s a recipe for disaster. It hardens the hearts of Palestinians toward us and doesn’t pave the path to peace.”
Others say that Israel is essentially trying to bury the two-state solution when the country tries to ban UNRWA and casts it as biased toward Hamas.
Maya Rosenfeld, a sociologist and anthropologist who teaches at the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has been researching UNRWA since the 1990s, said that by banning UNRWA, Israel is undermining its own legitimacy as a state since both were formed under U.N. resolutions.
“The issue is that UNRWA began as an emergency relief agency and a temporary agency, only until a solution to the refugee problem was found,” she said. “But because Israel refused to accept their right to return and the refugee problem persisted, it has had to look after generations of refugees.”
“The truth is that it is Israel that has been dragging its feet on Palestinians’ right to have their own nation,” Rosenfeld added. “By banning UNRWA, it essentially wants to demolish the case for a two-state solution.”
Daniel Schwammenthal, the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Transatlantic Institute in Brussels, said that UNRWA is instead an “obstacle to peace” and contrasted it with the U.N.’s broader refugee agency, UNHCR. “Unlike UNHCR, which deals with all the world’s other refugees, UNRWA doesn’t attempt to resettle Palestinians,” he said. “Unlike UNHCR, it also continues to count them as refugees even if they’ve received citizenship or similar rights from a third country. Instead, it automatically extends the refugee status to all descendants.”
“Palestinians are still considered refugees in Jordan, where they are citizens,” he added.
Schwammenthal said the ban isn’t about stopping aid, which he believes can be handed to other U.N. agencies or nongovernmental organizations. In the long term, Schwammenthal added, education, health care and other services could be handled by the local governing authorities—the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and whoever eventually takes charge in Gaza once the conflict has subsided.
“Just give it to the Jordanian government; they have schools and hospitals. The PA in the West Bank has schools and hospitals. You can just transfer the funds and give it to the PA,” he said.
But many Western officials and U.N. officials believe that there is no alternative to UNRWA, at least in the short to mid term, since no other organization currently matches its aid infrastructure and expertise.
Before the war, UNRWA ran more than 300 schools, warehouses, health centers, and other facilities in Gaza and had 13,000 employees there—more than 30,000 when staff in neighboring countries are included. The agency reports that nearly half of Gaza’s population—that is, a million people—has taken shelter in UNRWA facilities at points in the recent conflict.
Rosenfeld said that UNRWA’s necessity expanded its mandate over time as Israelis and Palestinians witnessed cycles of violence and no resolution to the conflict was achieved.
“Since UNRWA was immersed in the region with schools, clinics, [and] warehouses, these edifices turned into emergency shelters in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021,” whenever Israel and Hamas exchanged fire, she said, adding: “It was the international community that wanted UNRWA to do more.”
In its essence, the war for UNRWA’s survival is between Israel and the United Nations, which represents the international community. The UN wants to keep its promise to the Palestinian refugees—not just regarding the provision of emergency aid, but also concerning a future and a state of their own. Meanwhile, even among Israelis who back an independent Palestinian state—and many don’t—there is a sense that peace cannot be achieved if millions of Palestinians demand a right to return to where Israelis are now living and in effect become the largest group in the territory demographically.
UNRWA’s former officials believe that it is possible that the agency may have been infiltrated by Hamas—a majority of its employees are Palestinians, and some possibly support Hamas or have a soft spot for armed resistance against Israel. But no one seems to think that the numbers can be as high as Israel claims, particularly since Israel has failed to provide sufficient evidence. Canada, Australia, Finland, Germany, Estonia, and Japan had suspended donations to the agency when the accusations first surfaced but soon unfroze millions in aid.
The U.N. has told Israel that if it implements the two new laws, then it will be responsible for taking care of Palestinians all on its own—a huge expense currently undertaken by international donors.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is perhaps banking on the return of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump—who agreed with the Israeli interpretation on UNRWA and cut aid to the agency back in 2018. Trump’s pick to be the new U.S. ambassador to Israel is a man who has said in 2008 that there was “no such thing as a Palestinian.”