Patrick Wintour
The Guardian / January 27, 2025
UN agency ordered to vacate HQ by Thursday – just as aid is being increased to Gaza after ceasefire.
Israel has insisted it will not back down over its plan to close down the Gaza operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the UN relief agency for Palestinians, even though critics say the move will jeopardise urgent humanitarian aid efforts.
Israel has ordered the UN agency to vacate its headquarters in East Jerusalem by Thursday, after the Israeli Knesset passed a law on 28 October banning its operations in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It has not yet said how it will implement a related law ending all Israeli government cooperation with UNRWA, which could come into force on the same day and strangle its operations in the West Bank and Gaza.
The move comes as UNRWA and other aid groups have been able, as part of the ceasefire agreement, to pour aid into the Gaza Strip after months of Israeli obstruction, amid warnings of imminent famine in some areas.
UNRWA has 7,000 trucks of supplies outside Gaza and 1,500 under procurement, according to Sam Rose, its acting director of emergency operations. He told The Guardian he expected it to have provided food parcels to 1 million people in the 10 days since the ceasefire, and was also primed to send stocks including tarpaulins and mattresses for 1.6 million people.
The Israeli government is adamant that UNRWA staff took part in the 7 October massacre, and that Hamas has infiltrated the organisation, compromising its neutrality. The UN commissioned two independent reports on aspects of the allegations, and says it acted to protect its neutrality where clear evidence was produced.
If the non-cooperation measures are implemented in full, Israel’s action would amount to the first forced eviction of a UN agency from a member state, an issue that led the UN’s general assembly in December to vote to ask the international court of justice to give an urgent advisory opinion.
In addition, two Palestinian human rights groups are seeking an Israeli supreme court injunction delaying the law on grounds that fundamental human rights of Palestinians would be violated.
Despite this, Danny Danon, the Israeli UN ambassador, wrote to UN officials last Friday to say the headquarters must be vacated by Thursday.
Israel has declined to spell out further how it will implement the Knesset votes. But UNRWA staff believe it will mean international employees will not be given visas, any aid with an UNRWA label will be blocked from crossing the borders into Gaza and liaison between it and Israel Defense Forces about security will end. UNRWA bank accounts are also likely to be frozen.
“We are going to be left with a gaping hole,” Rose said. Almost half of the food being sent into Gaza is organised through the UNRWA distribution network, even if not all of that food has an UNRWA label.
Rose added: “In the first three says since the ceasefire started, we distributed food parcels to just under 300,000 people south of the Wadi Gaza, roughly 15% of the people in this part of Gaza. At this rate UNRWA will have reached 1 million people in the next 10 days. It is a dramatic increase, and there is no other organisation with the breadth and size to undertake our work.”
Rose has always been sceptical about using the number of trucks entering Gaza as a reliable measure of the amount of aid entering the territory, since some trucks may enter half empty. But more than 2,400 trucks entered Gaza in the four days after the ceasefire, more than the number allowed into Gaza in the whole of October.
“The nature of UNRWA’s services – primary health care and education – is such that women and children will bear the brunt of any disruption and the overall humanitarian effort will be massively undermined,” he said.
Arguably, the effects of the ban amount to a breach of the ceasefire. With Donald Trump now ventilating plans for the deportation of millions from Gaza, some UN staff fear Israel and the US regard the closure of UNRWA as a precondition for persuading Palestinians to travel to Jordan and Egypt.
In a standoff about the legitimacy of Israel’s effort to close UNRWA, the UN declined to make contingency plans for other agencies to take over.
A report last week from the Peace Research Institute in Oslo warned: “The principled approach by the UN not to do contingency planning is understandable, but it is a train wreck waiting to happen. The suffering of the population, particularly in Gaza, will increase dramatically as the backbone of the humanitarian operation crumbles without an alternative structure being in place.”
Internal debates inside the UN about whether to accept Israel’s rulings have prompted some officials to argue privately that no option exists but to try to transfer UNRWA’s tasks to its other agencies. The most cited alternative is the World Food Programme, an agency that is by tradition led by Americans.
Others argue that the issues of international law involved are so important that the UN should not relent and must instead use the leverage provided by the strong political support for UNRWA across the world, especially in the Gulf and Europe.
UNRWA had 13,000 staff operating in Gaza but that number has fallen to about 5,000 during the war, partly due to Israel’s destruction of schools and health centres.
Rose warns that if aid stops flowing into Gaza, there is a risk of a political vacuum and Palestinians looking again to Hamas to deliver services.
Trump’s nominee as envoy to the UN, Elise Stefanik, told the Senate foreign relations committee that US policy was to defund UNRWA and that Israel had a biblical right to the entire West Bank.
The US provided $422m to UNRWA in 2023, double the donation of any other country. As a result, UNRWA faces a financial hole.
Patrick Wintour is diplomatic editor for The Guardian
