UNRWA offers much more than humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip. In this impoverished enclave, the United Nations Agency for Palestinian refugees behaves almost as a state and offers essential services such as health care, education and even psychological support.
That is why there was an eruption of horror of Palestinians, countries around the world and aid organizations when the parliament of Israel voted to ban any contact between itself and UNRWA – a movement that will seriously hinder the controversial humanitarian agency.
Israel says that the organization was infiltrated by Hamas ‘Wide and Deep’, accused its employees of participating in the terror attack of 7 October in which 1,200 people died and another 250 were kidnapped. In response, URRWA fired at least 10 people.
Much of the rest of the world says that although it is not perfect, UNRWA is the only thing that stands between the humanitarian disaster that takes place in Gaza and a lot more Hellish.
In Gaza: “The humanitarian community as a whole fulfills the functions of the state,” said Scott Paul, director of Peace and Security at the Oxfam America’s anti-poverty charity. “UNRWA is by far the central actor in that device. And get the carpet from UNRWA essentially pulls the rug from the most basic needs of people. ”
The result of UNRWAs that cannot work “is that in the Gaza Strip, where more than 2.2 million people hardly hold – and many of them are already dying – their support system disappears,” he said.
Many Palestinians see dark motifs, who look at the UNRWA ban as the last attempt by Israel to make their lives unlivable, to lock it up and bomb them, now take away their most important lifeline.
“The impact on the ground will be terrible,” Mustafa Barghhouti, head of the Palestinian National Initiative Political Party, told NBC News.
Some believe that the relocation would endanger the refugee status of Palestinians – and thus the hope of returning to the houses in Israel that they fled during the “Nakba” of 1948.
That conflict led to the UNRWA establishment in 1949, with the aim of helping the desecration of 700,000 Palestinian refugees. Nowadays the mandate of the agency is enormous and also supports Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon-De Most of them the children, grandchildren and, in some cases, great-grandchildren of the people who have fled Israel.
UNRWA is a unique organization within the U.N., something that has been taken by Israel and its supporters. According to them, it not only focuses exclusively on Palestinian refugees, in contrast to the United Nations refugee office, UNHCR, but the mandate also has no end date. According to his critics, as a powerful force in maintaining a separate Palestinian identity in the countries in which it is active, it strengthens refugee status instead of promoting integration and resettlement.
Before the war, UNRWA says that it has led nearly 400 schools in Gaza and the occupied Westelijke Jordoever, who train around 350,000 children and employ 12,000 employees. These are now closed in Gaza, where the buildings become improvised bomb places and the staff who take on other roles, such as shelter managers or auxiliary distributors, says UNRWA.
Although many medical facilities are damaged or destroyed by Israeli strikes, about half of the 22 health care sites of UNRWA are still open, says it. And most of the 1500 health workers are still active in their roles such as doctors, nurses and pharmacists.
Almost all 2 million population of the enclave has been moved at least once; 60% of the buildings have been damaged or destroyed, says the U.N. On top of the 43,000 people killed, about 17,000 of them children, 95,000 more is injured, according to local officials.
UNRWA says that it was still successful to offer flour, rice, chickpeas, cheese, hummus and canned fish to more than 1 million people in Gaza. It has rehabilitated and maintained eight wells, which offers water to 600,000 displaced persons and collected 6000 tons of solid waste, says it.
All the while the war has killed at least 237 of its own staff, says it.
This help is far from sufficient – the risk of famine looms. But without UNRWA, the situation would be much worse than it is, humanitarian employees and countries all over the world agree.
If UNRWA disappeared, “you see citizens – including children, including babies – unable to gain access to food and water and medicines they have to live,” spokesperson Matthew Miller of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said a briefing Monday. “We honestly find that unacceptable.”
The Israeli laws, which earned worldwide conviction, were called David Lammy ‘completely wrong’ by the British Foreign Minister David Lammy in a joint explanation of Ireland, Norway, Slovenia and Spain.
Despite his notes, the United States must resume financing to UNRWA after the allegations of Israel of 7 October. All other dozens of plus countries that have been paused since then have continued.
The US was UNRWA’s biggest donor. Now the agency says that it is confronted for an annual shortage of $ 80 million.
Israel is now deeply critical of the U.N. as a whole.
The Pro-Israel Monitoring Group U.N. Watch says that the General Meeting last year sentenced Israel 14 times with seven for the rest of the world, including people like North Korea.
Israel claims that more than 100 Hamas agents are employed by UNRWA and that the agency has the ties with the militant group that seized power in Gaza in 2007.
It claims that UNRWA hospitals and schools are used as militant positions and has accused UNRWA classrooms of the use of anti -Semitic textbooks that demonize Israel and promote radicalism.
“The terrorist organization of Hamas has infiltrated in Gaza in Gaza on large and deep UNRWA,” spokesperson for Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Marmorstein to News. “It’s not just a few rotten apples,” he added. “UNRWA in Gaza is a rotten tree that is fully infected with terrorist agents.”
UNRWA has issued a point-by-point reaction to these allegations, pointing out that only 0.2% of its 30,000 employees were investigated for ties with Hamas, and that it has publicly protested against the use of his buildings by Palestinian militant and the Israeli army.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres gave an investigation into UNRWA, which discovered in April that it had to “do more to implement a zero tolerance policy”, for example in cases of anti-Semitic textbooks used in his schools.
The laws adopted by the Parliament of Israel, the Knesset, prohibited all UNRWA operations on his soil or contact between the Agency and Israeli officers on Monday. In the course of three months, it will probably make UNRWA impossible to use its current headquarters in Oost -Jerusalem, so that the work in Gaza and the West Bank is seriously impeded – if not prevent – the access to which Israel is largely controlled .
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that it will use other agencies, such as the World Food Program and the World Health Organization, to spread help. For many, including the US, that is not realistic.
“Unrwa has so far contributed to the survival of Gaza, maintaining the hope for a political solution,” UNRWA -Head Philippe Lazzarini wrote to the general meeting on Tuesday. “My staff has given much more than we have the right to ask them.”