On 28 October 2024, the Israeli parliament voted 92-10 to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the single largest provider of humanitarian aid in occupied Palestine.
The ban, if implemented, risks halting the delivery of already woefully insufficient lifesaving assistance to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Since 7 October 2023, Israel’s war on Gaza has killed over 43,000 people, displacing 90 percent of the population and meeting the threshold for genocide.
On 1 November 2024, the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the UN’s top humanitarian coordination body, responded to the vote to ban UNRWA by issuing one of its most severe warnings to date. It describes an “apocalyptic situation” in northern Gaza, calling on Israel to “cease its assault on Gaza and on the humanitarians trying to help” and end the “blatant disregard for basic humanity and the laws of war.”
What is UNRWA?
Established in 1949 by the UN General Assembly, UNRWA was initially mandated to aid, protect, and support Palestinian refugees displaced during the Nakba, Israel’s foundational act of ethnic cleansing. While UNRWA initially supported 700,000 people, that number has now risen to 5.9 million in occupied Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
UNRWA is a unique UN agency, embodying the reality of one of the world’s longest and most severe protracted crises, stemming itself from one of the most enduring and deadly military occupations in contemporary history.
The agency has evolved into, essentially, a surrogate Palestinian state. UNRWA’s schools offer education to half a million students, its health centres – only 7 of 27 of which are still operational as of 31 October 2024 – deliver primary care, maternal and child health services, and disease prevention. UNRWA also operates emergency assistance programs, distributing food, shelter, and cash assistance in response to crises in the region. Its social services include support for vulnerable groups, such as women, children, and persons with disabilities.
UNRWA employs over 30,000 Palestinian refugees who join other UNWRA staff operating in a highly unstable and insecure context, often at great personal risk. Since 7 October 2023, well over 200 UN workers, the majority of whom are employed by UNRWA, have been killed, mostly in Israeli bombardments.
Yet in the context of Israel’s assault on Gaza, UNRWA rightly describes itself as “the backbone” of the aid operation; as nearly two million people depend on it for emergency assistance. Other humanitarian organisations supporting Palestinian refugees work with and through UNRWA, harnessing its shelter management committees, schools, healthcare facilities, logistical reach and food distribution systems.
In the context of rising food insecurity, banning UNWRA will have immediate humanitarian repercussions, but also serious long-term legal consequences.
Immediate repercussions
On 8 October 2023, the State of Israel tightened its long-running blockade on the Gaza Strip that regulates the amount of humanitarian relief and commercial imports into Gaza. This has had a devastating impact on three-quarters of the 2.2 million residents who depend on international aid, much of it delivered by UNWRA. In the following months, agricultural land and orchards were heavily damaged or destroyed by bombing and shelling. As food supplies – from production, trade, and aid – dwindled, prices rose, with Gaza’s food price index doubling between October and December 2023.
By March 2024, when independent assessments predicted a full-blown famine in Gaza within a matter of weeks, the Israeli regime temporarily allowed more commercial and humanitarian food trucks into Gaza. A new IDS Working Paper concludes that, by some definitions, a famine did occur in northern Gaza during April and May, and that this was entirely attributable to Israel’s use of hunger and starvation as a weapon in its genocidal war against the people of Palestine.
After May 2024, the number of people facing the threat of famine fell back to pre-7 October levels but in October, northern Gaza was blockaded for a second time. No food trucks entered Gaza for two weeks, and the cycle of escalating food crisis started again. The number of people living in conditions of catastrophic food insecurity in Gaza is projected to triple, as independent assessments are again warning of a heightened risk of famine in the coming three-six months.
Israeli politicians have consistently defended the use of food as a weapon against the people of Palestine, notwithstanding the fact that starving civilians is a war crime and a crime against humanity under international law. In October 2023, a Knesset member said: “without hunger and thirst among the Gaza population… we will not be able to bribe people with food”. In August 2024, the Finance Minister complained: “No-one in the world will allow us to starve two million people, even though it might be justified and moral”.
If the reason for the first blockade was ostensibly related to Israel’s campaign to eradicate Hamas, the motivation one year later was very different. A proposal known as the “Generals’ plan” aims to force all civilians to evacuate northern Gaza by literally starving them out. Then the Gaza Strip would be divided in two and vacated northern areas would be occupied by Israel, for either administrative use or illegal settlements.
Such forcible transfers of civilians in situations of occupation are prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention. Moreover, “the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population” (article 55). However, Israel’s actions in the last year have consistently demonstrated its callous disregard for the lives and wellbeing of all Palestinians, and for the humanity and empathy codified in international law.
Longer-term legal consequences
Israeli politicians have long opposed UNRWA, going back to the agency’s foundation. Already in January this year, Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, asserted that there will be no place for the agency on “the day after.” Underlying their campaign is a desire to end the legal regime that reflects the distinct nature of Palestinians as a people expelled by a settler-colonial project. As Jørgen Jensehaugen, a researcher on Palestine and Israel, told The New Humanitarian this means both Palestinians and Israelis believe that UNRWA “helps perpetuate the hopes of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to one day return to the lands they were forced to leave in 1948.”
This is because, although UNRWA’s mandate is limited to providing services and prevents it from taking a political stance on Palestine’s future, its founding resolutions are inherently but implicitly linked to the Right of Return, codified in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 1948, stating that refugees who wish to return to their homes and live peacefully should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date. For Palestinians, this right is non-negotiable, inalienable, and socio-culturally embodied in the existence of UNRWA, which acknowledges their initial dispossession and affirms their connection to ancestral lands.
Crucially, due to UNRWA, Palestinians are excluded from the 1951 Refugee Convention under Article 1(D), which states that the convention does not apply to individuals who are receiving protection or assistance from UN agencies other than the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
The ban would see Palestinian refugees fall under UNHCR’s mandate. This change would work to Israel’s advantage and against the interests of Palestinians. UNHCR is mandated to seek “durable solutions” for displaced people, taking three forms: voluntary repatriation, local integration or third-party resettlement. This would, in other words, further facilitate the removal of Palestinians from their lands.
Without a political solution, the de facto dismantling of UNRWA would not only compromise the delivery of the range of essential services that its 30,000 staff provide. It would also deal a potentially fatal blow to the Right of Return.
Stephen Devereux will be speaking in more detail about the food crisis in Gaza at the IDS event ‘Was there a famine in Gaza in 2024?’ on Thursday 14 November.
