Melanie Phillips: The UNRWA meltdown
In what conceivable moral universe is a country targeted for such a remorseless and genocidal attack expected to look after the welfare of its murderous attackers?Israel is right to shun UNRWA
The United Nations says that Jerusalem has an obligation under international law to provide humanitarian assistance in Gaza because Israel is the occupying power. But this is totally untrue. Israel is not occupying Gaza. It withdrew from it altogether in 2005.
It’s the United Nations that has failed to live up to its own international obligation not to fund and support violence. For years, the world body has turned a blind eye to UNRWA’s ties to terrorists. So have America, Britain and other countries. They still refuse to acknowledge this problem.
In a statement this week expressing “grave concern” over the Israeli ban, the foreign ministers of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom claimed that UNRWA was tackling its employees’ support for terrorism by pursuing the recommendations made in last April’s independent review by the former French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna.
That review was a travesty. Before the report was even written, Colonna said that her goal was to “enable donors … to regain confidence, when they have lost it or when they have doubts, in the way UNRWA operates.” Her report was drafted to achieve precisely that rather than stop the rot.
Far from tackling the agency’s terrorist ties, its commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, has batted them away. He claimed implausibly that UNRWA didn’t know about the Hamas data center underneath its Gaza headquarters.
He denied that it employed terrorists and said this claim was part of a “large-scale campaign aimed at undermining the agency.” Having suspended the teachers’ union head Abu el Amin under pressure over the revelation of his Hamas role, Lazzarini reinstated him three months later under pressure of a strike by UNRWA teachers supporting their union’s head.
As for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, he appeared to blame Israel for the Hamas Oct. 7 pogrom by saying it “did not happen in a vacuum” and has repeatedly parroted Hamas talking points.
Instead of holding the U.N.’s and UNRWA’s feet to the fire, Israel’s supposed allies in America and Britain have been threatening to cut off the Jewish state at the knees.
Having told Israel earlier this month that it must take steps within 30 days to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or face potential restrictions on U.S. military aid, the Biden-Harris administration threatened it with “consequences under U.S. law and U.S. policy” over its UNRWA ban.
In Britain, there have been reports that the government may suspend further arms sales to Israel as punishment. The U.K. ambassador to the United Nations, Dame Barbara Woodward, said that Israel must “ensure UNRWA can continue to provide essential services to those suffering in Gaza and the West Bank.”
But UNRWA’s role is not as a dispassionate provider of essential services. It was actually created in 1949 as a weapon to delegitimize the State of Israel. While refugee status for all other peoples is considered a temporary measure, it’s permanent for the Palestinian Arabs. Under UNRWA’s unique designation, it’s passed down from generation to generation.
That’s why the number of Palestinian Arab “refugees” has ludicrously increased from 700,000 in 1948 to 5.9 million today—an ever-growing running sore whose toxicity is vastly increased by the hatred of Israel taught in UNRWA schools.
The pretense that UNRWA exists to provide for the suffering was finally ripped apart by the part its employees played in the Oct. 7 atrocities and in the war that has followed.
Israelis are no longer prepared to tolerate people who are trying to kill them and destroy their country while parading as humanitarian relief workers. Yet the United States, Britain and the United Nations are pressuring Israel to continue to keep this malign farce going.
Such people aren’t appalled by UNRWA. They’re appalled by the ban on it. That tells you everything you need to know about the war against Israel by the so-called civilized world.
Even aside from the links to Hamas, Israel has a more fundamental reason to object to UNRWA. It is no exaggeration to say that its work is designed to delegitimise the state of Israel. It has also undoubtedly played a role in prolonging the Israel-Palestine conflict.The UN aid agency that can’t shake its terror links
For one thing, UNRWA is a UN agency dedicated solely to serving who it deems to be Palestinian refugees. All other refugees around the world are the responsibility of UNHCR (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). The UNHCR operates on the premise that refugee status is temporary. Its goal is to assist refugees until they can either, hopefully, return to their home country or settle permanently elsewhere.
In contrast, for UNRWA, Palestinians are considered permanent refugees. Uniquely, refugee status can be handed down from generation to generation. That explains why UNRWA estimates that there are 5.9million Palestinian refugees today, even though just 700,000 Palestinians were displaced when Israel was founded in 1948 – an event Palestinians call the Nakba (‘catastrophe’).
Curiously, many Palestinians classified as refugees today live in areas that even supporters of Palestinian statehood would consider to be part of historical Palestine. That includes East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. UNRWA counts them as ‘refugees’ despite the fact they say they are living in their own homeland.
The Arab regimes on Israel’s borders have compounded this problem. Today, many people of Palestinian heritage in countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Syria often have tenuous personal connections to their ancestors’ land. In many cases, it was their grandparents or great grandparents who fled what is Israel today in 1948. Yet the new generations are often not integrated into the countries where they were born and raised. Their permanent refugee status is used to keep them separate from the general population. For example, it is hard for Palestinians to get citizenship in Lebanon and Syria, even if they were born and brought up there. UNRWA insists that these millions of people have a right of return to lands that have been recognised as Israeli for decades. This essentially calls into question Israel’s right to exist.
Israel certainly has a duty to do its best to ensure Palestinians in Gaza receive sufficient food and other supplies. But it is highly doubtful that UNRWA, even if it was reformed, would be the best vehicle to achieve this goal. It seems far more focussed on undermining Israel than helping to provide Palestinians with their everyday needs. Indeed, if anything, UNRWA plays a key role in perpetuating the plight of the Palestinians.
To be frank, no other country would be expected to tolerate an organisation like UNRWA operating on its soil. As ever, the anti-Israel set is subjecting the Jewish State to extraordinary double standards.
In February the Israeli Defence Force announced the discovery of a subterranean Hamas data centre below the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the Rimal neighbourhood in Gaza.
“UNRWA provides cover for Hamas, UNRWA knows exactly what is happening underground, and UNRWA uses its budget to fund some of Hamas’s military capabilities, this is for certain,” Colonel Benny Aharon told the reporters accompanying him through the tunnels, including some that ran under an UNRWA school.
Also in February, a video was made public allegedly showing a UNRWA employee loading the body of an Israeli man into the back of an SUV and driving away from Kibbutz Be’eri during the Oct 7 attacks. The video was first reported by the Washington Post and also shared online by Israeli officials, who identified the man as Faisal Ali Mussalem Al Naami, a social worker from Gaza. Jonathan Fowler, an UNRWA spokesperson, said: “It is not possible for UNRWA to verify the footage or photographs and ascertain who the person is.”
These were further blows to the problematic and increasingly confrontational relationship between the UN aid agency and the Jewish state, which reached a new low this week with two bills passed by its parliament, the Knesset, that effectively ended Israel’s dealings with UNRWA and banned it from any Israeli-controlled territory. Now, more than a year on from the Oct 7 attack by Hamas, the largely Western-funded body is under the spotlight again, simultaneously defended as the only means of providing essential aid, healthcare and education for Palestinians enduring war and deprivation across the region but attacked as an organisation infiltrated by and protective of terrorists.
As the bills passed, Amir Ohana, the speaker of the Knesset, proclaimed: “The UNRWA, an organisation that has been proven beyond any doubt to be part of Hamas, took an active part during October 7, in the kidnapping, the murder, in all the actions that we know the Hamas organisation did in the state of Israel – UNRWA were an active part of it.”
Those proposing the new laws spoke of the longstanding antipathy towards UNRWA and increasingly towards the United Nations in general, which many in Israel believe embodies the failure of parts of the international community to recognise the role UNRWA has played in facilitating the actions and ideology of Hamas as well as being a platform for hostility towards Israel more broadly.
