Netanyahu’s ‘vendetta’ against UNRWA long predates ban: Analyst
Kenneth Roth, the former Human Rights Watch executive director and now visiting professor at Princeton, said Israel’s outlawing of UNRWA is designed to deny Palestinians their status as refugees and comes amid much antipathy towards the UN agency.
“Netanyahu has had a vendetta against UNRWA forever because he naively thinks that if you destroy UNRWA, then somehow Palestinian refugees will forget that they are Palestinian refugees,” Roth told Al Jazeera.
The flawed logic in Israel is, Roth said, that “refugees in the West Bank and Gaza won’t want to return to their ancestral homes in Israel. That refugees in Lebanon, or Syria or Jordan won’t even want to return to Palestine, which currently the Israeli government blocks them from doing.”
“Clearly, killing UNRWA is not going to stop refugees from thinking they are refugees. But this is a big part of the Israeli government’s motivation,” he said.
A second motivation for the ban is Gaza, Roth said, where Israel has starved the Palestinian population of aid.
“The Israeli government has been pursuing a starvation strategy. And the bits and pieces of food and other humanitarian aid that’s let into Gaza, the only real agency with the capacity to deliver that to the Palestinian civilians in need is UNRWA,” he said.
“So, if you kill UNRWA, aid doesn’t get to the people in Gaza who need it.”
“I think what’s going on here, ultimately, is that Netanyahu is pursuing the strategy articulated by some of the far-right members of his government, to make conditions so horrible in Gaza that ultimately Israel ‘solves this Palestinian problem’, Roth said.
“It solves the problem of apartheid. It solves the problem of Hamas by just getting rid of the Palestinians, forcing them to flee to Egypt. And I’m afraid that is a big part of what is going on right now,” he said.
UNRWA ban is latest in Israel’s attacks on ‘the UN as a whole’: Legal expert
UNRWA’s former General Counsel Lex Takkenberg told Al Jazeera that the move to ban the key UN agency assisting Palestinian refugees was the latest attack by Israel on the entire UN system and a strong response was now necessary.
“We should also consider that these legislative attacks come on top of numerous other attacks on the UN as a whole,” Takkenberg said, noting that Israel had attacked the UN secretary-general and had also urged the closure of the UN General Assembly.
“It’s really reaching a point that the principal organs of the United Nations – the Security Council and the General Assembly – have really no choice but to take strong action,” Takkenberg said.
“Under international humanitarian law, if Israel prevents UNRWA from operating its schools, its health centres and its other critical services – Israel is under a legal obligation to provide those services itself,” he said.
“This was one of the key reasons why, in 1967, Israel requested UNRWA to continue its operations in Gaza and West Bank, because Israel knew that otherwise, it would have to make provisions for this,” Takkenberg added.
“So I think Israel has moved itself into a very difficult political and legal corner and it will be very critical to see how the leadership in the UN, including the General Assembly and the Security Council, will deal with this.”
International community must stop Israel’s impunity, ban on UNRWA: Analyst
Mohamad Bazzi, of New York University, said that if Israel is permitted to “dismantle” UNRWA’s operations in Gaza and the occupied West bank, it will set a precedent for other countries to also target UN organisations and flout international law.
“This is an unprecedented ban because we have a member of the United Nations, a member state, Israel, that has decided to ban an organisation that is part of the United Nations,” Bazzi told Al Jazeera.
“If Israel is allowed to get away with this, if it is allowed to implement this ban and if the UN does not take steps to counter that, if the United States and the Biden administration continue to defend Israel at the Security Council, continue to prevent Israel from paying any costs for flouting international law, we will see other member states of the UN take up this kind of impunity,” Bazzi said.
“UNRWA has been in Israel’s sights for many years, and Israel has used the post-October 7 environment – the war on Gaza… and the widening regional war – to put even more pressure on UNRWA, and now we see this Israeli attempt to essentially dismantle UNRWA in the Palestinian territories.”
New Israeli laws will shut down UNRWA entirely
Tamara Alrifai, director of external relations and communications at UNRWA, says if the Knesset laws are implemented, they are likely to prevent the UNRWA from working in any part of the occupied Palestinian territory.
“What effectively this means is that most likely the international staff will no longer have visas to go to Israel or the occupied Palestinian territory,” she said. “No work permits will be given to our Palestinian colleagues and there will be no possibility to pass through Israeli checkpoints,” Alrifai added.
She also said the laws will prevent UNRWA trucks, convoys and humanitarian supplies from crossing into the occupied Palestinian territory, including Gaza, during the continuing humanitarian catastrophe.
She stressed no coordination on the safety of the UNRWA operations will be possible with the Israeli government, adding that the agency’s premises will be taken over.
UN agencies slam Israeli decision to ban UNRWA
UNICEF spokesperson James Elder says Israel’s decision to ban UNRWA could see the “collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza”. “So a decision such as this suddenly means that a new way has been found to kill children,” Elder said.
UN humanitarian office spokesperson Jens Laerke also said, “[UNRWA] is indispensable and there is no alternative to it at this point.”
In response to a question about whether the ban represented a form of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza, he said: “I think it is a fair description of what they have decided here, if implemented, that this would add to the acts of collective punishment that we have seen imposed on Gaza.”
