Israel cancels agreement with UNRWA
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has informed the UN that it has ended the 1967 agreement that recognises the UN’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), according to The Times of Israel.
The move came after the Israeli Knesset passed several laws banning the agency from operating on Israeli-controlled territory.
Palestinian children stand near the damaged UNRWA headquarters in the Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Saturday after Israeli forces demolished most of the building
Israel’s UN envoy Danny Danon has posted on X the Foreign Ministry’s letter that notifies the global body of its decision to cut ties with UNRWA.
In the post, he claimed that the UN “did nothing to rectify the situation” despite the “overwhelming evidence” Israel submitted about Hamas’s alleged “infiltration” of UNRWA.
The UN said in August that it had fired nine UNRWA staff who may have been involved in Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7 of last year.
The agency, set up by the UN General Assembly, employs more than 30,000 people and provides education, healthcare and other aid to millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Israel’s UNRWA ban has drawn widespread international condemnation, including from the UN Security Council, which urged Israel “to abide by its international obligations, respect the privileges and immunities of UNRWA and live up to its responsibility to allow and facilitate full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian assistance in all its forms into and throughout the entire Gaza Strip”.
Did nothing? Overwhelming evidence?
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148821
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152841
https://www.unrwa.org/unrwa-claims-versus-facts-february-2024
UNRWA submits a list of ALL employees in a host country to each host government which then vets and approves each employee. Israel vetted and approved each UNRWA employee in the Palestinian territories last May. Those same employees are also checked against UN lists. https://t.co/rb5DkQf1oo
— Naheed Mustafa (@NaheedMustafa) February 5, 2024
Credibility of United Nations on the line
Israel has moved from the stage of threats and statements to the stage of action by ending the cooperation agreement with UNRWA.
The ball is in the camp of the UN. Its credibility is on the line now. If they don’t take action to counter the Israeli action, then their credibility may be in question for people observing this arm-twisting between Israel and the UN.
Israel has been looking at the UN with a lot of disregard and suspicion. Israel thinks the UN has ignored its warnings that UNRWA employees participated in the attacks on October 7 and that Israel has presented enough evidence to prove its claims, but the UN hasn’t taken any decision on that.
The UN conducted some investigation but it didn’t seem to have come to a final conclusion about this.
This is just the beginning of a long struggle of arm-twisting between the two sides.
Israel’s UNRWA ban an ‘attack on the very existence of the Palestinians’
Israel’s decision to ban UNRWA is part of the government’s plan to end the Palestinian cause, Tamer Qarmout, assistant professor in public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, has told Al Jazeera.
“It is a devastating attack on the very existence of the Palestinian people,” he said.
UNRWA was established by the UN General Assembly in 1949 after the 1948 Nakba to protect and assist Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homes. It provides education, healthcare, social services and emergency relief to people living in refugee camps in the Palestinian territory, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
“UNRWA is providing services similar to a state in the absence of a Palestinian state,” Qarmout said. “You shut down UNRWA’s operations so that Palestinians will have no services whatsoever and survival becomes so difficult. It’s as if you’re telling them: leave this place, you have no future here.”
Qarmout added he believed the US to be the only actor that can stop this decision from being implemented on the ground.
‘The question is: Who is going to replace UNRWA?’
Juliette Touma, global communications officer for UNRWA, says two million people depend on UNRWA for food assistance and healthcare.
“Who is going to replace UNRWA? When this brutal war finally comes to an end, who will provide education to 400,000 children who go to UNRWA schools, who? What is the plan? We don’t have any answer to that,” she told Al Jazeera from Amman.
Touma said that Israel’s ban on the agency will take place in 90 days, calling it a “race against time for member states around the world to work with Israel to not implement this ban.”
She added that even other UN agencies who have education within their mandate cannot manage teaching on this level or of this scale. “We are the only UN agency in the world that runs 700 schools … In the absence of a political solution for Palestinian refugees, there is no alternative to UNRWA.”
“It’s easy to talk. The question is what are you going to do about the ban and how are you going to fill the void? You meaning the State of Israel.”
UNRWA says Israel ban likely to cause ‘collapse’ of Gaza aid work
The UN agency for supporting Palestinian refugees has said that Israel’s ban on its operations would lead to the “collapse” of humanitarian work in the besieged Gaza Strip.
“If this law is implemented, it would be likely to cause the collapse of the international humanitarian operation in the Gaza Strip – an operation of which UNRWA is the backbone,” Jonathan Fowler, an UNRWA spokesman, told AFP.
