Today, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency is on life support, after major donors suspended funding in January following allegations that a dozen of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza allegedly participated in the Hamas attacks on October 7.
The impact of what U.N. officials largely describe as an existential crisis for the agency will be felt most acutely in Gaza, where it forms the backbone of international efforts to stave off induced famine. by the man. But the unrest is also disrupting life and sparking fear among Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, where the agency provides health, education and sanitation services to refugee descendants.
UNRWA is now under attack on several fronts: Israeli officials are seeking to expel it from its headquarters in East Jerusalem, have blocked shipments of supplies, and are shortening and delaying visas for international staff. New restrictions have hampered the movement of employees across the West Bank. And a high-profile Israeli campaign has made UNRWA the target of harassment and protests, agency officials say.
“The pressure on our offices is very, very strong,” said Hanadi Abu Taqa, who leads the agency’s work in the northern West Bank.
Unable to plan, the agency was forced to transfer more workers to short-term contracts, accelerating a trend that has degraded the quality of education provided by UNRWA, according to Fathi Saleh, director of camp services. refugees from Shuafat, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
Israeli repression in the West Bank since October 7 has prevented hundreds of UNRWA employees from accessing their posts, according to Abu Taqa. Israeli soldiers harass and detain UNRWA personnel at checkpoints, sometimes for hours, she said, resulting in teachers late for class and medical teams missing appointments.
In a statement to the Washington Post, the Israeli military said “there has been a significant increase in terrorist attacks” in the West Bank since October 7. “As part of security operations in the region, dynamic checkpoints have been set up. in different places,” he added. “The IDF’s mission is to maintain the security of all residents of the region and to act to prevent terrorism and activities endangering the citizens of the State of Israel. »
Meanwhile, refugee needs have skyrocketed. The West Bank economy is collapsing and many Palestinians formerly employed in Israel find themselves unemployed. More families are relying on UNRWA’s free aid and medical services, agency officials said in Balata camp, the largest in the West Bank.
Israeli raids on the camps regularly damage infrastructure, which UNRWA is often called upon to repair. At the Balata health center, physiotherapist Najah Jibril has seen an influx of patients, many of them young men shot during street fights.
Military incursions have left children terrified and more dependent on psychological support from UNRWA schools, teachers and school principals said. Young girls in Balata wet their beds at night or cover their ears when they hear a loud noise. The academic performance of older girls has fallen. School supervisors say the girls have become more aggressive, taking out their classmates’ feelings of anger and helplessness.
UNRWA schools provide a refuge. The counselors hold group therapy sessions and try to channel the girls’ anxiety into gambling.
“At school, we are safe, me, the teachers and the students”, Wafaa Marahil, principal of the girls’ college, said. But on the outside, she adds, “we never know what might happen.”
Concern is growing: if UNRWA collapses, even this safe space could disappear. If her school was forced to close, Marahil, a graduate of the school, said there were no municipal schools nearby and most families would not be able to afford private schools. She worries that her students will be pressured to marry or enter the job market early.
Established in 1949 to assist Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the creation of the State of Israel, UNRWA is the only United Nations agency that provides direct government-style services to a population and region-specific – running schools, health care and food and shelter programs for millions of these refugees and their descendants in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
The agency receives very little core funding from the United Nations, relying instead on donations from member states, making it particularly vulnerable to geopolitical headwinds. When President Donald Trump cut funding in 2018, the agency was left with a deficit of more than $400 million.
But Trump “was a bit of an outlier globally at the time,” so other governments stepped in with additional funding, said Adam Bouloukos, UNRWA West Bank director. (President Biden reinstated U.S. contributions when he takes office in 2021.)
In January, Israel claimed that 12 of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the Hamas attacks on October 7, in which militants killed 1,200 people and took 253 hostages. UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini immediately fired the accused employees, even though Israel has not made public, or shared with the agency, the evidence supporting these claims.
After these allegations, 16 donors, including the United States, suspended their funding.
A U.N. watchdog has opened an investigation into the allegations, and a separate independent review panel is expected to present its findings this month on the agency’s protocols and practices.
Most donors have since funding restored, even if their contributions are significantly lower than those of the United States. The agency also received new public and private donations, allowing it to continue operating until the end of May, Lazzarini told Reuters last month. But the United States, which funds 30% of the agency’s budget, passed a law last month banning contributions until at least March 2025, leaving UNRWA short hundreds of millions of dollars and an uncertain future.
Without a significant influx of cash, the agency faces a “slow implosion,” Lazzarini told reporters in Jerusalem in February. UNRWA leaders are discussing internally which services to prioritize in this case, Bouloukos said.
The debate over the future of UNRWA is inextricably linked to intractable questions around the rights of Palestinian refugees.
“This is why the Israelis want us to leave: UNRWA represents the refugee problem. If UNRWA disappears, then one way or another, the refugees will disappear, and all the support given to this population will also disappear,” Bouloukos said.
Israel is pursuing what UNRWA officials describe as a large-scale administrative attack on an agency it claims is an arm of Hamas. (UNRWA officials reject this claim.)
An Israeli bank has frozen an UNRWA account containing $3 million. Israel also stopped issuing one-year residency permits to international staff, keeping them on two-month visas, resulting in some key positions going unfilled for months, Bouloukos said. The Jerusalem municipality and a coalition of Israeli lawmakers are seeking to expel the agency from its headquarters in Jerusalem – the site of frequent protests in recent months by right-wing Israelis calling for the abolition of UNRWA.
“What we know and have discovered about UNRWA is actually shocking, because we feel like the blood of people who have been murdered and kidnapped is on our hands,” Debby Sharon, 60, said during of a demonstration she helped organize in front of UNRWA. the headquarters.
Jerusalem’s right-wing deputy mayor, Arieh King, said the city was ready to take responsibility for schools and sanitation in East Jerusalem refugee camps. UNRWA “does not provide any service that we cannot provide,” he said.
King is outspoken about his desire to undermine an agency that he says aims “to maintain (Palestinians’) refugee status.”
UNRWA was supposed to be temporary, built to one day hand over its activities to a Palestinian government. Its schools are based on the curriculum of the Palestinian Authority, the Ramallah-based body with limited governing powers over the West Bank. On a technical level, UNRWA could transfer its West Bank facilities to the Palestinian Authority “overnight,” Bouloukos said.
But the authority itself is bankrupt and struggling to pay staff salaries.
As Bouloukos, the occupying power in the West Bank, said, “it should be the Israelis who clean up the trash and provide all these other social services.”
Israel has shown no desire to do so in the West Bank.
“Israel is not an occupying power,” said a senior Israeli government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “UNRWA is completely tainted by terror and perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem. The enormous budget allocated to it, thanks in large part to American taxpayers, will hopefully be allocated to genuine humanitarian organizations that will sincerely respond to humanitarian needs.
But other U.N. agencies do not have the capacity to easily support the services provided by UNRWA, U.N. officials say; UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, for example, does not operate schools anywhere in the world, and changing its mandate would be complicated.
The nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA in the region see the agency as a guarantor of their political cause.
“We never manage to separate the provision of services from the right of return,” Bouloukos said.
Refugees in Jerusalem and the West Bank are closely following each twist, fearing the immediate impacts they say UNRWA’s shutdown would have on their lives.
When UNRWA workers in the West Bank went on strike last year, Ibtissam Khattab, 36, was unable to bring his son Omar, now 2 1/2 years old, to the Balata health center for treatment. the daily physiotherapy he needs. The toddler’s nervous state subsided, she said, and she could tell he was in more pain.
“If the agency is closed, where will he go? If I have to go to a private clinic, I have to pay for transportation and treatment,” she said.
Lorenzo Tugnoli and Sufian Taha in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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