UNRWA

The humanitarian crisis at the Gaza Strip is bound to get worse.

Major contributors to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) have suspended payments indefinitely. The suspension of funding happens after Israel submitted evidence that 13 UNRWA workers were involved in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli communities. These attacks led to the killing of 1,200 Israelis.

In addition, Israel claims that several hostages were moved through UNRWA facilities by employees of the agency. The claims are based on the recounting of freed hostages.

We now know that the Hamas terrorist group used hospitals to hide the hostages they took during the Oct. 7 attacks. They also built their tunnels under mosques and schools, even under cemeteries, using both the living and the dead as shields. The claim that the terrorists also used UNRWA facilities to conceal hostages is believable.

Israel is demanding that the UNRWA be disbanded. A few other countries are carefully studying this possibility.

The UNRWA is the only functioning network for distributing relief to two million beleaguered people in Gaza. Without this agency, relief cannot be distributed in the besieged territory. Even as most of the major contributors announced suspension of support for UNRWA, the agency is making an urgent plea for nearly half a billion dollars worth of relief assistance.

The urgent role currently being played by UNRWA in Gaza does not, however, clear the slate. An increasing number now see the UN agency as an anomaly whose resources helped the terrorists.

The UNRWA was established shortly after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The war was initiated by the Arab countries immediately after the UN mandated the establishment of the State of Israel. Although poorly armed and vastly outnumbered, the Israelis were able to fight off the Arab armies and march up to Jerusalem.

None of the UN policymakers in 1948 could have foreseen that, more than seven decades later, the UNRWA would still be existing. The agency subsists on the generosity of the US (the biggest contributor), the European countries and Japan. Although the Palestinian refugees survived on the charity of the western powers through the UNRWA, they continuously attacked the donor countries.

Today, the UNRWA employs 30,000 people at the Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon. In Gaza, the agency employs 13,000 locals. It is easy to see that this agency, totally dependent on Western charity, is the largest employer in the areas inhabited by the Palestinian Arabs. It is, perhaps, the only “industry” in these areas.

The UNRWA is a unique agency. It is the only one dedicated to support a specific group of refugees in a specified area. Refugees elsewhere in Africa and Asia do not enjoy the same specialized UN attention. Last year, this agency had a budget of $1.6 billion intended for education and health care.

The agency’s budget, now threatened by the suspension of contributions by the major donors, will surely be insufficient to meet the dire demands for relief. Nearly two million people in Gaza have been displaced by Israel’s war against Hamas. Over 26,000 have been killed. A recent satellite survey shows that half of all buildings in the territory have been damaged or destroyed. The displaced have no homes to go back to.

The UNRWA had a glaring design flaw from the very start. While it delivers relief and operates schools (some of which teach jihadism), it has no mandate to resettle the refugees.

Resettlement is the work of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). But this other agency has no mandate to operate in the areas covered by the UNRWA. As a result, the original 700,000 refugees UNRWA was mandated to serve in 1948 has now grown to about four million.

The UNRWA, therefore, has become like a piece of shrapnel lodged in the flesh. Tissue simply grew around it. The whole social order of the displaced Palestinian community relies on this agency being there to deliver food supplies, run schools and operate medical facilities. Take out the embedded shrapnel and the whole body convulses.

Because of the strange delineation between the UNRWA and the UNHCR, the Palestinians have become permanent refugees dependent on global charity. The present Palestinian population served by UNRWA are third or fourth generation “refugees.” This is an anomaly created by the UN’s bureaucracy.

In other places, refugees are eventually resettled. They find work and blend with the surrounding economy. Among the Palestinian communities, being refugees has become a way of life. Young men do not train for jobs; they train in the radical militias.

With the suspension of contributions to the UNRWA, the situation will become even more desperate for the people of Gaza. Right now, according to reports, some of them are learning to eat grass and drink dirty water. Starvation and disease loom very large.

The postwar arrangement in Palestine must seriously reinvent the role of the UNRWA. It has become an umbilical cord encouraging dependence in an ungrateful population.

But a postwar arrangement might not come soon. The Hamas continues to hold hostages even as this is key to achieving a cessation of hostilities. According to recent reports, Israel has begun moving its best fighting units from Gaza to the north, to confront the Hezbollah.

Worse, the recent drone attack on a US outpost in Jordan threatens to create a region-wide conflagration that might even draw Iran into the vortex of war.