Juan Cole
Informed Comment / October 29, 2024
Ann Arbor – The Israeli parliament on Monday passed legislation declaring the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), authorized by the UN General Assembly in 1949, to be a terrorist organization. It is an extraordinary and dangerous step for a UN member state. The legislation has the effect of preventing the Israeli government from dealing with UNRWA, which in turn results in a ban on it operating in Israel and the illegally Israeli-occupied territories of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.
This move underlines yet again that the Israelis are deliberately harming the health and well-being of Palestinian civilians because they are Palestinians. That is the technical definition of genocide in International Humanitarian Law. It has nothing to do with numbers. Under the Genocide Convention or the Rome Statute you do not need to kill millions to be guilty of genocide. You just have to destroy a people “wholly or in part” because of their ethnic identity. The attempt to destroy UNRWA will now become part of the case brought against Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice by South Africa.
South Africa submitted a 5,000-page report on Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza to the ICJ on Monday. It seeks to show a specific intent on the part of the Netanyahu government to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza.
The Israeli government routinely labels groups that get in the way of its aggressive expansionism as “terrorists,” so the charge against UNRWA should not be taken at all seriously. It is outrageous and would be laughable if its implications were not so tragic. We are talking about 30,000 dedicated aid workers, 13,000 of them working in extremely dangerous conditions in Israeli-occupied Gaza.
Israeli authorities tried to brand human rights groups in the West Bank “terrorists,” but no one bought it, not Human Rights Watch and not even the CIA. I tell some of this story in my new book, Gaza Yet Stands, available at Amazon.
Then in early 2024 the Israelis declared that UNRWA had terrorists on its staff and 17 European countries and the US immediately ceased funding it. Both the European Union and the United Nations found the charges completely baseless, and everyone restored UNRWA funding except for the United States, which halted it until March 2025.
That’s right, the Biden administration is no better on UNRWA than was Trump, who cut off funding to the organization. The US denial of funding by Joe Biden and Tony Blinken has certainly killed large numbers of Palestinian children, women and male noncombatants.
The current Knesset attack on UNRWA will also damage the lives of large numbers of Palestinians. UNRWA was only made necessary in the first place by the Israeli expulsion of over half of all Palestinian families from their homes in what is now Israel, after which Israelis seized their homes, farms, and other property for themselves and left the refugees penniless and exiled to places like Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. In some of these places of exile the dispossessed Palestinians had no means of earning a living, and they had no schools or other basic infrastructure. UNRWA educated the children, delivered aid, and did some job training where possible.
During the brutal Israeli campaign against the civilians of Gaza during the past year, UNRWA was one of the few lifelines for most people, and the Israelis are determined to end it.
The UN has declared the Israeli war on Gaza a “war on women’s health.” This allegation is important because one of the elements of genocide in the law is the attempt to prevent a people from reproducing themselves. The Rome Statute defines genocide in Article 6 as:
“(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Any policies that deliberately harm the health of expectant mothers would fall under 6 (d).
Here is what the UN said in September about maternal health in Gaza under sustained Israeli assault. First, it quotes an expectant Palestinian mother in Gaza:
“I have not prioritized my health because I am the primary caregiver for my children, assuming the roles of both father and mother. I didn’t undergo any medical examinations. Today, I am nine months pregnant, and I have not done any screenings or medical tests to make sure that the baby is healthy and okay.” — pregnant mother of three children, 27 years old, Khan Younis
Seeing a doctor while pregnant significantly increases the chances of the birth of a healthy baby. If not, then not.
Here is the rest of the report on mothers in war-torn Gaza:
“Maternal Health and Mortality
There is little to no medical treatment capacity for women’s sexual and reproductive health given extensive damages to medical facilities and the lack of medication and medical staff. Residing in overcrowded housing, shelters or makeshift tents comprises the privacy and dignity of displaced women and girls and raises protection risks.
Attacks on health-care facilities have severely disrupted maternal health care. Without sufficient and high quality services women are increasingly vulnerable to serious and life-threatening health complications during pregnancy, birth and post- partum. Deteriorating childbirth, antenatal and postnatal services pose risks of higher rates of maternal, neonatal and stillbirth deaths. Essential medications for newborns are in short supply, and many women have undergone caesarean deliveries without anaesthesia. If a mother dies giving birth, her newborn has an increased risk of hospitalization or death.
Among pregnant women interviewed, 68 per cent had experienced complications: 92 per cent reported urinary tract infections, 76 per cent anaemia, 28 per cent pre-term labour and 44 per cent hypertensive disorders. Other concerns included bleeding (20 per cent), haemorrhage (16 per cent) and stillbirth (12 per cent).
Food insecurity and limited nutritional supplements worsen maternal risks. According to the United Nations Population Fund, among 155,000 pregnant women and new mothers in Gaza, 15,000 pregnant women are on the brink of famine. Of all survey respondents who were either recently pregnant or had a pregnant woman in their household, 99 percent indicated that they struggle to obtain nutritional products and supplements; 78.4 per cent could not take tests to assess their nutritional and health status.
A further concern is that stress and a lack of privacy in war zones severely disrupt breastfeeding. Of 175 survey respondents from a household with a breastfeeding mother, 55 per cent described an inability to breastfeed, either exclusively or with the support of formula milk.
Hunger and malnutrition among mothers and babies will have irreversible consequences for children’s survival, growth and development. Acute malnutrition rates among children have doubled since January 2024. One in three children under age 2 suffers from malnutrition. The Ministry of Health reported that as of 1 April 2024, 28 children (16 boys and 12 girls) had died of malnutrition and dehydration at hospitals in northern Gaza. More than 90 per cent of children under age 5 had caught at least one infectious disease.”
UNRWA was one of the few organizations standing between expectant mothers and even worse health outcomes. Banning it will certainly cause a further spike in the deaths of mothers and their babies.
That is, banning UNRWA is a further element of Israeli genocide against Gaza.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
