Over the past 15 months, the international community has failed to prevent genocidal atrocities in Gaza. Dismantling the UN refugee agency would perfect the nightmare.
New York (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Early in the year, State Department officials briefed Joel Rayburn from the Trump transition team there could be a humanitarian “catastrophe” in Gaza when a new Israeli law barring contact with the UN refugee agency for Palestinians takes effect at the end of the month.
The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is the primary aid agency operating in the Gaza Strip. After more than a year of war, the UN and other aid organizations warn Gaza is close to uninhabitable. Tens of thousands of houses have been destroyed. More than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 107,000 injured. In the future, these numbers are likely to prove three to four times higher. And still worse could be ahead.
During President Trump’s first term, his administration gradually cut all U.S. assistance to UNRWA. The Biden administration later resumed U.S. aid to the agency. Last March, Congress passed a law that bans the U.S. from funding UNRWA until at least 2025.
Why should the horrific policy errors of the past be compounded with monstrous new policy mistakes?
The origins
The fate of UNRWA is one of the many dilemmas I scrutinized while working on The Fall of Israel (2025). After achieving an initial truce in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, used it to lay the groundwork for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Bernadotte tried to balance the different interests of the Israelis and Palestinians, the major powers in the region and the UN Partition Plan. Having witnessed the horrible outcome of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe and hoping to avert a catastrophe in Palestine, he also proposed that the UN should establish a Palestine conciliation commission and Arab refugees would have a full right to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory.
Just hours after his proposal, Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Jewish paramilitary Stern group, while pursuing his official duties. One of those who planned the killing was Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister of Israel, and the predecessor and onetime mentor of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current PM.
Ever since then, UNRWA has been a lifeline to generations of Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the adjacent Arab countries. Created as a purely temporary measure, UNRWA’s mandate has been subject to renewal every three years ever since.
Historically, the United States has been UNRWA’s largest financial contributor, with more than $7.3 billion since 1950. From the start, these contributions have been subject to a variety of legislative conditions and oversight measures, however.
Funding threats
Decades of U.S. policy toward Israel and the occupied territories, however ambiguous, was reversed almost overnight, when the Trump administration executed a series of dramatic policy changes in 2018 and canceled nearly all U.S. aid to the West Bank and Gaza, plus $360 million in annual aid previously given to the UNRWA. Subsequently, the Biden administration restored much of the funding, yet provided Israel weapons and financing for the mass atrocities of those the UNRWA funding was supposed to help.
After allegations surfaced connecting a few of the 30,000 UNRWA employees with the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks against Israel, the Agency fired nine staff members following a UN investigation. While it denied allegations that the agency has widespread links to Hamas, Congress enacted a March 2024 prohibition on U.S. funding to UNRWA (P.L. 118-47), which is set to last until late March, 2025.
To put things into context: The Empire State Building is said to have 21,000 employees. Imagine what would happen if six of them would be suspected of terrorism and therefore the entire building would have to be dismantled and all employees fired? It would be an absurd collective punishment for the alleged crimes of a few.
Worse, the Israeli laws passed on October 28, 2024 and scheduled to take effect 90 days later, would endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.
Millions of lives threatened
The new U.S. and Israeli legal measures emboldened Jewish settlers, particularly the Messianic far-right. In May 2024 they launched several attacks on the UNRWA headquarters, setting fire to the perimeter of the building in East Jerusalem. The attacks against UNRWA came after months of far-right settler protests outside of the building, following Israeli claims of UNRWA-Hamas links; accusations that lacked verification, according to U.S. intelligence.
Among the protesters was Aryeh King, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem and a prominent advocate for settlements, who called Palestinian Gazans “Muslim Nazis,” described them as “sub-human” calling for captured Palestinians to be “buried alive” in December 2023.
By the year-end of 2024, some 265 UNRWA staff had been killed in hostilities since October 7, 2023. Despite a record-high number that suggests intentional targeting, those behind the Israeli strikes have not been prosecuted.
More than 5.9 million Palestinians, including three of four in Gaza, are registered with UNRWA as refugees.
The stakes
In Gaza, nearly two million Palestinians are displaced and dependent on aid for food, water and medical services. U.S. officials say there’s no serious backup plan for providing humanitarian supplies and services to Palestinians. With the new U.S.-Israeli laws, senior UNRWA emergency officers presage social order in the Strip could collapse.
Here are some ways to preempt such disasters:
- The White House should pressure Israel to suspend and nullify the impending adverse acts against UNRWA
- S. Congress should lift current prohibition on UNRWA funding through March 2025
- UNRWA’s funding should be broadened by the U.S. and internationally in light of the devastation and genocidal atrocities caused in Gaza
- The Agency’s existence should be premised on the implementation of all relevant and existing UN resolutions both the U.S. and the international community have voted for.
How probable are such measures in the conceivable future? Highly unlikely.
What’s the alternative? Far worse, far worse.
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