Besieged UN relief outfit plots future in Gaza’s hellscape

For conservative Israeli and U.S. politicians, the war in Gaza offers more than an opportunity to destroy Hamas, which last month carried out the worst terror attack against Israeli civilians in a generation. It also provides a chance to dismantle or defund a massive United Nations relief agency at the forefront of international efforts to provide aid to more than 1 million Palestinians currently displaced in the Gaza Strip. “There will be a new reality in Gaza,” Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, predicted in a phone interview with Devex, proposing the relief agency be disbanded and replaced by another U.N. entity without the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency’s history and political baggage. For decades, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, in Gaza has been a political lightning rod, vilified by rightist Israeli and U.S. politicians as a witting or unwitting pawn of Hamas, which has governed the 45-kilometer stretch of land since 2007. In recent weeks, Republican presidential candidates, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, have called for cutting off humanitarian aid to Gaza. “The UN Relief & Works Agency is a corrupt organization that fuels hate against Israel,” Haley fumed on X, previously known as Twitter. “No more money to countries and orgs that hate America and our allies.” But forecasts of UNRWA’s demise may be premature. The Biden administration, European governments, and moderates within the U.S. and Israel national security community view the relief outfit as a vital, if not always beloved, source of stability and basic services for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, and across the Middle East. A portion of the $100 million President Joe Biden earmarked for humanitarian assistance in Gaza will go to the U.N. relief agency, which employs more than 13,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Washington has quietly been prodding other donors to increase funding for UNRWA. Biden, meanwhile, pressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday “to immediately and significantly increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to meet the needs of civilians in Gaza,” according to a White House statement. “No one thinks UNRWA can be replaced,” one U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Devex. “The U.S. knows it is [an] essential actor now and the day after.” The relief agency, which observes its 75th anniversary next year, has made the case to key donors in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East that it is well positioned to prevent a total collapse of Palestinian society in the event that Israel’s military offensive renders Hamas incapable of governing. But it needs resources to reverse years of underfunding. Lynne Hastings, U.N. deputy special coordinator for the Middle East peace and U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, urged the U.N. Security Council to “redouble funding” for UNRWA and other humanitarian agencies. In the weeks following Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, UNRWA has emerged as the main source of aid to Palestinian civilians, sheltering more than 670,000 people forced from their homes by Israel and supplying them with a dwindling supply of food and water; 67 UNRWA staffers — about half of whom were school teachers — have been killed during the Israeli bombardment. Others include a gynecologist, a psychologist, and an engineer. “No place in Gaza is safe,” Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s spokesperson in Jerusalem, told Devex in a telephone interview. “The crisis has proven that UNRWA is a lifeline for the people in Gaza. I mean the fact that we are hosting more than 600,000 people or more in our shelters is proof of that.” Victims and recriminations The latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict erupted on Oct. 7, when Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel, while thousands of armed Hamas’ commandos breached Israel’s border fences, opening fire on civilians, including women, children, the elderly, and soldiers. They seized more than 200 Israeli and other foreign nationals hostages who remain captive in Gaza. The bloody assault, launched by land, sea, and air, resulted in the murder of over 1,400 Israelis and other foreign residents — more than 30 of those killed were American citizens — and the injury of some 4,500. Israel has responded with a ferocious air bombing attack, driving more than 1 million Palestinians from their homes and killing more than 8,300 people as of Monday evening, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. The Israel Defense Forces are conducting a ground offensive in Gaza aimed at eliminating Hamas, raising concerns about an escalating civilian death toll. On Tuesday, Israel claimed responsibility for airstrikes in a heavily populated Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing and wounding hundreds, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Israel claimed it was targeting Hamas fighters, including a commander who participated in the planning of the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israeli civilians and security forces. Pressed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to explain why Israel launched its strike in an area with large numbers of Palestinians present, Israel Defence Forces spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht responded: “This is the tragedy of war, as you know we’ve been saying for days ‘move south.’” The Israeli military ordered 1 million Palestinians more than two weeks ago to evacuate their homes in northern Gaza to southern Gaza, despite U.N. protests that the move would be calamitous. Israel has continued to carry out military strikes across Gaza, including in the south. Another Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Jonathan Cornicus, told reporters late Tuesday night that the commander, Ibrahim Biari, had been organizing attacks against Israeli targets from “a vast underground tunnel complex” and that dozens of Hamas fighters were killed alongside him when the complex exploded, The New York Times reported. The crisis is unfolding against deepening stress in relations between the U.N. and Israel. In a speech to the U.N. Security Council, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres infuriated Israel by suggesting the spasm of violence carried out by Hamas, while “horrifying and unprecedented,” may have been fueled by decades of Israeli military control over the lives of Palestinians. “The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he told the organ. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” “But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” he added. “And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” Israel’s U.N. ambassador fired back, saying that because Guterres expressed “understanding for the campaign of mass murder of children, women, and the elderly, [he] is not fit to lead the UN. I call on him to resign immediately.” Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, piled on, agreeing that Guterres should resign over his remarks, and contending in an interview with Fox News that “Many aspects of the U.N., like the Human Rights Council and UNRWA, are either antisemitic or give cover for terrorism or both.” The conflict has also hit UNRWA hard, resulting in the deaths of 67 staffers, and strikes against 40 UNRWA buildings and installations. The agency has been the target of online attacks, including the posting of a video cartoon depicting Hamas fighters carting a massive fuel barrel out of a UNRWA installation. “Our own staff have become displaced themselves,” said Touma, adding that it’s one of the few humanitarian crises where the frontline relief workers face the same hardships as the population they are serving. “There are thousands who show up to work in this brutal situation and continue to serve,” she said. Touma said UNRWA is hosting refugees in 150 facilities across Gaza and that more than 40 have been damaged, some directly hit. UNRWA has not named those responsible. She said the U.S.-brokered agreement to resume aid shipments on trucks across the border from Egypt has done little to resolve the humanitarian crisis. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s peanuts and its crumbs, and there is no fuel. Without fuel, we will not be able to operate.” Filling the void UNRWA was established after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war with a mandate from the U.N. General Assembly to aid the more than 700,000 Palestinians displaced as a result of the conflict. Today, UNRWA provides health care, education, and other basic services to more than 5 million refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The relief outfit employs over 30,000 school teachers and educates over half a million Palestinian children. In Gaza, UNRWA is the largest employer, with about 13,000 workers on the payroll. The U.S. has traditionally been UNRWA’s largest financial support, contributing some $300 million a year to the relief outfit, whose annual budget is typically over $1 billion. But during the Trump administration, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, backed by then U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Haley, led an effort to halt funding to the aid agency. The gap in funding was temporarily filled by other donors, including Germany and Saudi Arabia, which stepped up their own commitments until the Biden administration resumed funding. But UNRWA, like many other U.N. agencies, has faced a severe shortfall during the latest financial crisis. “Before this conflict, we were already telling our donors that by November we will no longer be able to pay our staff, and for us, this means an implosion,” Tamara Alrifai, UNRWA’s director of external relations and communications, told Devex. “The current conflict has really put UNRWA under pressure in Gaza as a relief and humanitarian agency.” “UNRWA has in place an infrastructure and a structure that can enable it to offer public-like services, with our schools, and social safety net for the most vulnerable in the community. But we need to be strengthened to be able to truly play that role in the case of a vacuum, as we are now weakened by years of underfunding that has forced us to take austerity measures that then affected our services,” Alrifai said. The fate of humanitarian aid since that Oct. 7 attack by Hamas against Israel has surfaced in the 2024 election campaign, with House Republicans and key presidential candidates calling for an end to humanitarian assistance to Gaza. On Oct. 18, DeSantis posted a video on X calling for a total halt to funding for humanitarian operations in Gaza, claiming the assistance would be “commandeered” by Hamas. “No U.S. tax dollars to the Gaza Strip,” DeSantis said. “I challenge every Republican running to step up to the plate and oppose Biden’s $100 million gift to Hamas.” The post prompted a reply by Haley, who boasted that she had already cut funding to UNRWA back in 2018. “Welcome to the fight,” she wrote. The Israeli government and the Trump administration have previously explored the possibility of dismantling UNRWA and handing over its responsibilities to other U.N. agencies, particularly the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. One of Israel’s chief gripes with UNRWA is that it has perpetuated the Palestinian crisis by recognizing the descendants of those Palestinians displaced in 1948 as refugees, a population that has grown to more than 5 million. It has offered false hopes to Palestinian families spread across the Middle East that they can one day return to their ancestors’ homes. But ending UNRWA’s mandate would require a decision by the U.N. General Assembly, which is not likely to happen until there is a durable agreement creating a Palestinian state. Former Ambassador Danon acknowledged that the U.N. has a critical role in addressing the humanitarian fallout of the war, but that it would be better if UNRWA were out of the picture.“Our intention is to eradicate Hamas. After we complete our mission here there will be challenges in Gaza and the U.N. is very important for the day after.” Humanitarian relief workers warned that any move to diminish UNRWA’s role would be counterproductive, creating a governance vacuum. “All this vitriol directed at UNRWA is shortsighted. You remove from the equation the more neutral actor then you leave the population more dependent on the de facto authorities,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, told Devex. “There is not some pristine alternative where you could have a different entity there that doesn’t have to deal with the political security reality of the territory.” Konyndyk said that the White House’s fervent support for the Israeli government — combined with its opposition to a humanitarian ceasefire — risks weakening its moral case against Russia, which has flagrantly violated international humanitarian law in its failed bid to overthrow the Ukrainian government. “I fear that the U.S. posture on Gaza is doing a lot in the eyes of the wider world to validate [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s argument that [our stance] on Ukraine is not about human rights, and respect for international humanitarian law, that this is about pure geopolitics,” he said. “Clearly many of the same things are happening in Gaza to utter silence.” Mutual mistrust Israel’s relations with the U.N. relief agency are marked by a history of mistrust. In previous conflicts, Israel has struck U.N. facilities, claiming that Hamas fighters have used U.N. schools to hide weapons, shelter its fighters, or launch rockets from the vicinity. During Operation Protective Edge in 2014, then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon accused Israel of conducting an “outrageous” and “unjustifiable” strike against a U.N. facility sheltering about 3,000 Palestinians. The strike killed 16 people. For its part, Israel has long charged that UNRWA schools — and the school texts — have fueled anti-Israeli sentiment and that Hamas members have long infiltrated the ranks of the U.N. agency. In an effort to counter those claims, Guterres produced a video highlighting the benefits of UNRWA’s schooling. “You can’t imagine what it is like to go to Gaza, and in the middle of all that mess, to be a school, a school that could be a school in my country,” he said. During the current crisis, Israel has charged that the U.N. has displayed bias against Israel, citing its criticism of Israel’s military tactics while remaining silent about Hamas’ conduct. Those suspicions were reinforced after UNRWA posted a series of Tweets reporting that individuals purportedly from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health breached a UNRWA facility and trucked away stores of medicine and fuel needed for humanitarian operations, but then quickly deleted the tweets. Asked to explain what happened, Touma told Devex, “It’s simple, we put out a tweet that did not have accurate information in it. When we verified the information we took out the tweet.” Touma and other U.N. officials say the agency has also been hit by cyberattacks to shut down its internet operations. “Yes, we are subject to disinformation,” said one senior U.N. official. “We do not have the capability to research the origin, but some is circulated on official Israeli websites/social media.” The Israel Foreign Ministry recently posted a video accusing the U.N.’s humanitarian relief coordinator, Lynne Hastings, of bias against Israel, criticizing her for failing to point out that Hamas has stockpiled massive amounts of fuel that could be used to run Palestinian hospitals, and suggesting that her criticism of Israel’s call for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes in northern Gaza and flee south aligned her with Hamas. “According to UN ethics, she is supposed to be impartial and objective, but unfortunately she is neither,” it stated. “Hastings’ dangerous rhetoric endangers innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians.” The posting followed a briefing Hastings provided to the U.N. Security Council, in which she warned that Israel’s cut-off in fuel deliveries into Gaza “means no hospitals functioning, no desalination of water and no baking.” "Many people are drinking saline groundwater, increasing the risks of diarrhea, cholera, and other health issues. We urge Israel to bring water and electricity supplies back to pre-conflict levels and to work with us to find a secure way of bringing fuel into Gaza," she said. The Israel Defense Forces — which claims Hamas is hoarding hundreds of thousands of liters of fuel to fire its rockets — responded: “Ask Hamas if you can have some.” But despite their differences, political observers in Israel and the U.S. believe the war will reinforce the need for UNRWA. “My sense is that despite all the downsides and imperfections of UNRWA this crisis has recentered its vital importance and will by necessity empower it with more authority and funds in the post-conflict Gaza environment, however that unfolds,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an adviser on Arab Israeli affairs for six Democratic and Republican presidents. Update, Nov. 1, 2023: This article has been updated with additional reporting from The New York Times.