UN agency for Palestinians warns Gaza aid work may 'disintegrate' if Israeli legislation passes

UNITED NATIONS — The head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees warned Wednesday that if pending Israeli legislation is adopted, all humanitarian operations in Gaza and the West Bank may “disintegrate,” leaving hundreds of thousands of people in dire need as war rages.

Philippe Lazzarini told the U.N. Security Council that senior Israeli officials are bent on destroying the U.N. body known as UNRWA, which is 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 approved a pair of bills this week that would ban UNRWA from operating in Israeli territory and end all contact between the government and the U.N. agency. The bill needs final approval from the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

Lazzarini said in a video briefing that “legally, the Knesset legislation violates Israel’s obligation under the United Nations Charter and international law.’

Israel has alleged that some of UNRWA’s thousands of staff members participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas' attacks that sparked the war in Gaza. The U.N. has fired more than a dozen staffers after internal investigations found they may have participated in the attacks that killed 1,200 people in Israel.

Israeli U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon told the Security Council that UNRWA has allowed Hamas to infiltrate its ranks and that “this infiltration is so ingrained, so institutional, that the organization is simply beyond repair.”

Danon noted that the head of Gaza’s teachers union was recently killed in Lebanon and revealed as a Hamas commander, saying this showed that UNRWA has been infiltrated “to the point where terrorists are running classrooms, indoctrinating future generations and hiding in plain sight under the banner 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 shield the agency “from efforts to end its mandate arbitrarily and prematurely in the absence of a long-promised political solution.”

When UNRWA was created by the U.N. General Assembly in 1949, it was meant to provide health care, education and welfare services to about 700,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 conflict with Israel. Today, it provides such services to about 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 rests on UNRWA’s infrastructure and that it “may disintegrate” if the Israeli legislation is adopted.

The halt to 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 any hope of resuming their education “and an entire generation would be sacrificed,” Lazzarini said.

In the West Bank, he said, “the delivery of education, primary health care and emergency aid to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees would grind to a halt.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters Tuesday that he has written to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to express “profound concern” about the legislation.

Lisa Doughten, a director in the U.N. humanitarian office, told the council that “few times in recent history have we witnessed suffering and destruction of the size, scale and scope that we see in Gaza.”

Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters. It has said women and children make up over half of the dead.

Doughten said “nearly every one of the more than 2 million people in Gaza receives some form of aid or service provision from UNRWA.”

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield expressed concern at recent Israeli government actions limiting the delivery of goods into Gaza. These restrictions, combined with new bureaucratic limits on humanitarian goods arriving from Jordan and the closure of most border crossings in recent weeks, will only intensify the suffering in Gaza, she said.

Thomas-Greenfield said the United States, a close ally of Israel, is following “with deep concern” Israel’s proposed legislation, saying it reflects “the significant distrust between Israel and UNRWA.”