Israel and the US have accused the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) of being an ‘obstacle to peace’. But many of UNRWA’s shortcomings are a deliberate product of its original set-up – which was engineered by the US itself and supported by Israel. As the Israeli government pursues the ethnic cleansing of Gaza today, it is important to understand contemporary attacks on the agency within the broader setting of policy in Palestine.
After operating for decades with little coverage, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East – better known by its acronym UNRWA – has rarely been out of the news over the last two years. In early 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government alleged that 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gaza employees were involved in the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, in which 1,195 people were killed and 251 kidnapped. The Israeli government went on to smear UNRWA as a ‘terrorist’ organisation, claiming that hundreds of its employees belonged to either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini responded quickly, firing nine of the accused 12 even before the allegations had been investigated (of the other three employees, two were dead and one missing). But despite his immediate action, the damage was done. In response to Netanyahu’s claims, seventeen governments suspended funding to the already-cash-strapped agency, plunging it into crisis. An independent investigation subsequently found no evidence of the Israeli allegations and most governments eventually reinstated funding – except the US, as both the Biden and the Trump administrations continued to block all financial support for the agency, despite expert warnings in early 2024 that doing so would make famine in Gaza inevitable.
It is impossible to understate the impact of these political and financial attacks. UNRWA forms the ‘backbone’ of the humanitarian response to the catastrophe in Gaza, where Israel has killed at least 64,000 Palestinians since October 2023 in what is now widely recognised as a genocide. With virtually the entire population displaced and most of the Strip rendered ‘uninhabitable’, it was confirmed earlier this year that famine now imperils at least half a million people there, including children, pregnant women and nursing mothers, and the elderly. Beyond Gaza, UNRWA also provides essential services to millions of refugees in other crisis-stricken parts of the region: the West Bank, where Palestinians suffer intensifying settler attacks, military occupation and de facto annexation; Lebanon, struggling amidst political and economic crisis; Syria, which has been devastated by more than a decade of brutal civil war; and Jordan, which has absorbed repeated waves of refugees over the decades from Palestine, Iraq, Kuwait, and Syria.
Yet despite UNRWA’s critical humanitarian importance across the region, Israeli attacks on the agency have not just continued but expanded, taking forms that are financial, political, legal and even physical. In May 2024, an Israeli group carried out an arson attack on UNRWA’s Jerusalem headquarters – an operation openly endorsed by Deputy Mayor Arieh King, who called for further assaults on the agency’s other sites. Later that month, the Israeli government issued an eviction notice to UNRWA ordering it to evacuate its Jerusalem offices. And in October 2024, the Knesset (Israeli parliament) passed a law banning UNRWA from operating on its territory and prohibiting any contact with the organisation. Coming at a time of genocide and catastrophe, all this inevitably raises the question: what actually is UNRWA and why is it so beset by controversies?
UNRWA’s origins
UNRWA was established at the end of 1949 through a UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution. It was one of several strands of the newly-created UN’s response to the Palestinian refugee crisis, which was caused by the establishment of the state of Israel on 78% of Palestine and the accompanying expulsion and displacement of at least 750,000 Palestinians (events known in Arabic as the nakba or ‘catastrophe’). In December 1948, UNGA Resolution 194 had affirmed the refugees’ right to return to their homes, and created the Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) to pursue political solutions to the crisis. Yet as Israel continued to deny the Palestinians’ right of return, the Western-dominated international community quietly turned to other possibilities. Twelve months after adopting Resolution 194, the UNGA created UNRWA to provide ‘relief and works services’ to refugees from Palestine. Strikingly, this included Jewish refugees, 17,000 of whom received services from UNRWA inside Israel until 1952, when the agency ceased operations there at the request of the Israeli government. Thereafter, UNRWA’s operations were limited to the areas known as the ‘five fields’: the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
Unlike the more wide-ranging High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which was created a year later, UNRWA had no mandate for pursuing political solutions or protecting the refugees it served; these areas remained the domain of UNCCP. Yet with UNCCP inactive by the late 1950s, the Palestinians became victims of a ‘protection gap’, as the only refugees in the world unprotected by a UN body. The criticisms often logged against UNRWA today – that it perpetuates the Palestinian refugee crisis rather than finding solutions – often neglect this crucial point: that UNRWA was deliberately created with this lopsided mandate, at the behest of Western governments allied to Israel and with the support of Israel itself.
Controversies
From the outset, UNRWA’s work was beset by controversy. The US and UK, which provided the bulk of the agency’s financial and diplomatic backing, wanted it to focus on jobs creation schemes across the region – the works element of its mandate. While ostensibly supporting Resolution 194, behind the scenes both governments were pushing for the refugees’ permanent resettlement in the Arab host states, and saw mass employment programmes as a way to facilitate this. Yet the Palestinians themselves overwhelmingly refused to participate after correctly intuiting that the jobs schemes were designed to overturn their right of return. By the end of the 1950s, UNRWA had been forced to dispense with the programme – although it retains the ‘works’ in its title to this day.
Instead, and in line with the demands of Palestinian refugee communities, it shifted its focus to education, which quickly became the agency’s single biggest budgetary line. Establishing schools across the five fields, it adopted the curricula of the Arab host states (including those of Jordan in the West Bank and Egypt in Gaza), leading to continuous tensions with many Palestinian educators who lobbied for the teaching of Palestinian history and geography in UNRWA’s schools. UNRWA desisted, deferring to the wishes of both the Western governments that funded it and the Arab host states on whose cooperation it relied in order to operate.
The dynamics of UNRWA’s work gained added complications after 1967, when Israel began its lasting occupation of the two remaining parts of Palestine: the West Bank and Gaza Strip (thereafter the Occupied Palestinian Territory or OPT). Despite widespread Israeli suspicion of UNRWA, which was perceived as a Palestinian body, the occupying authorities quickly recognised the agency’s obvious value. In providing essential services to more than half a million registered refugees across the OPT, it significantly cheapened the cost of the occupation. Less than a week into the occupation, the Israeli government and UNRWA forged what became known as the Michelmore-Comay Agreement, under which UNRWA assented to continue its operations in the OPT, and the Israeli government agreed to facilitate its work. Enthusiastically supporting the agreement, Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan said shortly afterwards, ‘it was a huge achievement for us that UNRWA agreed to continue to see [the Palestine refugee] issue under its own responsibility.’
Dayan’s view remained the dominant approach in Israel’s interactions with UNRWA for the following half-century. While Israeli ministers often voiced complaints about the agency’s alleged bias, there was a general consensus in the mainstream political and security establishment that its work ultimately served the state’s interests. This was consistent with the unofficial decades-long Israeli approach of ‘managing the occupation’ in the OPT: establishing facts on the ground by gradually seizing more and more Palestinian land for illegal settlements, while avoiding formal annexation (except in East Jerusalem) and ostensibly claiming to favour peace. In this way, it is important to note that Israel’s attitude to UNRWA has always served as a harbinger of its broader approach to Palestine.
The current crisis
The turning point in Israeli relations with UNRWA came not in 2023, but in fact six years earlier. In 2017, Netanyahu departed from decades of Israeli policy by calling for UNRWA to be dissolved and its operations merged with UNHCR – a move that signalled a wider policy shift from occupation management to open plans for annexation. Netanyahu’s statement also paved the way for the first Trump administration’s own policy departure the following year, when it reversed longstanding US support for UNRWA by defunding the agency for the first time.
Simultaneously, both governments took a position of vocal opposition to UNRWA, accusing it of promoting antisemitism in its schools, spreading extremism, and violating UN neutrality norms. Despite the lack of evidence, the smear campaign did lasting damage. After the Biden administration took office in January 2021, it reinstated US funding for UNRWA but stopped short of providing full diplomatic support, instead demanding close monitoring of the agency’s work. At the same time, the agency struggled to remain solvent and effective amidst ongoing financial strain and mounting emergencies across the region. In September 2021, Lazzarini stated that, for the first time, UNRWA faced ‘severe crises’ in four of its five fields of operation: Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon. Meanwhile, Netanyahu continued to attack the agency for ‘perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem’, with the ultimate goal of seeking to delegitimise Palestinian refugee status.
The post-2023 attacks on UNRWA must be understood within this context, coming on the back of a years-long campaign to dismantle the agency as a proxy for attacking Palestinian refugee identity itself. While there has been an undoubted escalation in Israeli-UNRWA enmity since October 2023, its starting point predates the Hamas-led attacks of that month. Instead, it forms part of a longer-term shift in Israeli policy towards the formal annexation of the OPT.
What’s more, as Israel openly plans the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, it is especially pertinent to consider the state’s historical approach to Palestinian refugees. During the original Nakba, Gaza absorbed more than 200,000 refugees from the rest of Palestine – giving it the highest refugee population per capita of any territory in the Levant. Such demographics made Gaza central to the Palestinian national struggle, and a constant target of the Israeli military. With more than 90% of Gaza’s population displaced since October 2023 – many repeatedly – the Strip’s refugee demographics are being reinforced by the ongoing genocide. UNRWA is needed more than ever before – and the stakes of attacks on its work have never been higher.