UNITED NATIONS — The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned on Wednesday that if pending Israeli legislation is passed, all humanitarian operations in Gaza and the West Bank could “disintegrate,” leaving hundreds of thousands of people in dire need as the war rages.
Philippe Lazzarini told the UN Security Council that senior Israeli officials are determined to destroy the UN body known as UNRWA, the main provider of humanitarian aid in Gaza, the Palestinian territory rocked by a year of war between Israel and Hamas.
An Israeli parliamentary committee this week approved a pair of bills banning UNRWA from operating on Israeli soil and ending all contacts between the government and the UN agency. The bill needs final approval from the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
Lazzarini said in a video briefing that “the Knesset’s legislation is legally inconsistent with Israel’s obligations under the United Nations Charter and international law.”
Israel has claimed that some of UNRWA’s thousands of personnel participated in the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 that caused the war in Gaza. The UN did that laid off more than a dozen staffers after an internal investigation revealed that they may have participated in the attacks that killed 1,200 people in Israel.
Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon told the Security Council that UNRWA has allowed Hamas to infiltrate its ranks and that “this infiltration is so deep-rooted and so institutional, that the organization is simply beyond repair.”
Danon noted that the head of the Gaza teachers union was recently assassinated in Lebanon revealed as Hamas commanderThis saying showed that UNRWA has been infiltrated “to the point where terrorists are running classrooms, indoctrinating future generations and hiding in plain sight under the flag of the United Nations.”
UNRWA had suspended the union leader in March when allegations of his ties to Hamas emerged and launched an investigation.
Lazzarini urged the Security Council to protect the agency “against attempts to arbitrarily and prematurely end its mandate in the absence of a long-promised political solution.”
When UNRWA was established by the UN General Assembly in 1949, it was intended to provide health, education and welfare services to approximately 700,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 conflict with Israel. Today it provides such services to approximately 6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Lazzarini stressed that the entire humanitarian response in Gaza relies on UNRWA’s infrastructure and that it “could fall apart” if Israeli legislation is passed.
Ceasing coordination with Israel, he said, would further disrupt the provision of shelter, food and health care to Palestinians as winter approaches. More than 650,000 children would lose all hope of resuming their education “and an entire generation would be sacrificed,” Lazzarini said.
In the West Bank, he said, “the delivery of education, basic health care and emergency aid to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees would come to a standstill.”
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres told reporters on Tuesday that he has written a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to express his “deep concerns” about the legislation.
Lisa Doughten, director of the UN’s humanitarian agency, told the council that “few times in recent history have we witnessed suffering and destruction of the magnitude, scale and scope that we are seeing in Gaza.”
The Israeli offensive has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many fighters there were. It is said that women and children make up more than half of the deaths.
Doughten said that “almost every one of the more than two million people in Gaza receives some form of assistance or services from UNRWA.”
US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield expressed concern about the Israeli government’s recent actions to restrict the supply of goods to Gaza. These restrictions, combined with new bureaucratic restrictions on humanitarian goods arriving from Jordan and the closure of most border crossings in recent weeks, will only increase suffering in Gaza, she said.
Thomas-Greenfield said the United States, a close ally of Israel, is watching Israel’s proposed legislation “with great concern,” saying it “reflects the significant mistrust between Israel and UNRWA.”