Jerusalem (AP) – In Shuafat refugee Camp, a harscrabble district to the east Jerusalem Surrounded by a concrete wall, cars have headed for an Israeli checkpoint.
Intense security to venture the exasperating camp. But Areej Taha, 42, didn’t need to leave on Monday for medical treatment. She had treated her teeth ailments and took her insulin photos in a neighborhood clinic not managed at a pâté of houses from where her children ended their day in an unmanaged school.
In the absence of municipal services, the The United Nations The Agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, is the main provider of decent healthy health care and education to residents of the Shuafat camp. If a UNRWA leftTaha said, “I don’t want to have to think about what we would do.”
But these services and everything, from the collection of garbage to the maintenance of the water system could begin to disappear after the entry into force of a pair of Israeli laws which prohibiting UNRWA from operating on Israeli territory and prohibiting Israeli officials from all contact with the agency.
The most immediate impact will be in East Jerusalem, which Israel seized during the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in a decision not recognized by most of the world. UNRWA’s seat there faces an immediate closure. The prohibitions adopted by Israeli legislature in October also threaten UNRWA operations through occupied West Bank and GazaWhere it is the life buoy of some 2 million Palestinians, most of whom are homeless of the 15-month-old War of Israel.
Israel has long criticized a UNRWA, saying that it perpetuates the Palestinians’ refugee status. The agency campaign has intensified by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other right -wing politicians since the October 7, 2023 attack in Hamas against South Israel. Israeli says that about a dozen 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza participated in the attack and that many others support or sympathize with Hamas.
The agency denies knowingly helped armed groups and says that it acts quickly to serve alleged activists among its staff.
Palestinian parents are amazed
The way the legislation will be implemented and if UNRWA’s operations will have to stop were not clear on Wednesday, a few hours before the entry into force of the laws. Even UNRWA officials said they didn’t know what was going to happen.
Israeli government spokesman David Mencer said on Wednesday that UNRWA would be forbidden to operate in Israel “in 48 hours”.
Leeron Iflah, Deputy Managing Director of the Bureau of Israel of Jerusalem, told the Associated Press that “from next week, all children in UNRWA schools will be placed in all kinds of schools East Jerusalem ”.
But an head of the Israeli government knowing the details of the law said that there was no intention to physically close the institutions, but it will become more difficult for the agency to operate without coordinating with the Israeli authorities. The manager spoke under the cover of anonymity to discuss the plans.
A total closure would end primary health care up to 80,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem in about two dozen medical centers, according to UNRWA officials. This would also stop education and vocational training up to 1,000 children in the middle of a school year.
“Now is he supposed to leave school?” Go where? How? He just started to love school, “said municipal worker Karim Hawash, looking at her 13 -year -old son who kicked a football ball against the wall of the Shuafat camp. “The schools here are so overcrowded.”
There are no municipal schools inside the camp, which means that children who leave UNRWA schools should enter and go out daily through Israeli control points to still unknown destinations.
Start of the end?
The immediate effect on UNRWA’s work in the West Bank or in Gaza Strip is unknown, but the workers in the haven say that repression threatens the role of UNRWA as a skeleton of humanitarian logistics in the region.
The closure of the headquarters “will have an impact on everything we are able to do,” said Jonathan Fowler, director of communications for UNRWA, of the East Jerusalem complex.
The agency provides a large sweeping of basic services at 1.1 million Palestinians in the West Bank and 2 million in Gaza. During the War of Israel-Hamas, he was the main agency ensuring the delivery of food, medical supplies and other aid on which the Gaza population relies to survive.
UNRWA uses storage facilities in Israel for assistant convoys related to Gaza and must contact the Israeli authorities who control access to Gaza to bring and out of equipment – now threatened by repression.
Mercence said that “aid must be redirected” to other UN agencies and other NGOs operating in Gaza.
Also in the West Bank, UNRWA employees “will not have freedom of movement as they have done before,” said Arieh King, deputy mayor of Jerusalem. “They cannot enter and get out of Israel through the borders, the control points.”
Controversial agency
Born from one of the most sensitive problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fate of Palestinian refugees, UNRWA is no stranger to controversy.
When about 700,000 Palestinians fled or forced their home during the 1948 war on the creation of Israel, an Arab event called Nakba, or “disaster”, Israel refused to let them return. Arab governments have resisted their integration.
In 1949, the United Nations General Assembly created UNRWA to help this population sleep in the open air and grasp their keys to the house. He had to be temporary, until a political end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be reached. But the system has become permanent.
The approximately 1 million Palestinians who landed on UNRWA rollers after fled the wars in 1948 and 1967 became nearly 6 million, in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The dozens of tent camps that UNRWA installed decades ago through the Middle East were built in dense areas of apartment buildings and buzzing markets.
“The international community has repeatedly decided that we should continue to do what we are doing because there has not been a fair and lasting solution,” said Fowler. “There is not the type of functional state structures that can provide this type of service.”
Israel has long argued that the agency will perpetuate the conflict by maintaining a population of refugees in constant growth. President Donald Trump was also hostile to the agency, reducing funding during his first mandate.
UNRWA defenders believe that Israel’s efforts to eliminate the agency have to do with the fact that Palestinian refugees will hope to return to old houses in what is now Israel. Hosting 7 million Jews, Israel says that a large scale of Palestinian refugees would end his Jewish majority.
In the Shuafat refugee camp, the Palestinians whose families fled in 1948 have the coveted blue IDs of the residents of Jerusalem, allowing them to travel wherever Israeli citizens can go. They pay taxes to the Israeli municipality and are subject to Israeli law.
But in 2002, when Israel erected its separation barrier in order to keep the suicide bomber, the Shuafat camp was left outside the wall, cut off from the rest of the city by checkpoints and blocked in a political and bureaucratic limmbe.
The population of the camp exploded while the Palestinians of West Bank, although they are not allowed to live there, realized that no one applied the rules.
Israeli officials insist that they are committed to improving the services of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, but say that it is a long road.
“This cannot work in one day,” said Iflah when it was asked how the municipality planned to replace UNRWA in the Shuafat camp.
In a few days, however, Taha will need more insulin.
Without blue ID – which means that she cannot enter Jerusalem – she does not know what she will do.
