TEL AVIV — With new allegations that more UNRWA employees participated in the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the Israeli government is trying to delegitimize and work around the principal U.N. agency for Palestinian aid, even as officials acknowledge it’s the main distributor of emergency supplies for besieged Gazans facing mass starvation.
In the past week, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency sent about 80 truckloads of aid into Gaza, but it was in collaboration with the World Food Program, one of the organizations Israel has suggested could replace it. That’s about half the volume UNRWA was delivering to the enclave last month, spokeswoman Tamara Alrifai said.
A month’s worth of flour, rice, chickpeas and cooking oil from Turkey has been stuck for weeks at Israel’s Ashdod port, where authorities have been instructed not to release it, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said Feb. 9. The processing fees for unloading the containers had been “impacted,” he said, because an Israeli bank froze the agency’s account.
Video is said to show U.N. relief worker taking Israeli shot on Oct. 7
Aid organizations say Gaza, with its food supplies sharply limited and its hospital system battered by three months of war, is approaching famine. The majority of its 2.2 million residents do not have access to sufficient food or water.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Friday that 30 additional UNRWA employees participated in the Hamas attack, which Israeli authorities say killed about 1,200 people in communities near Gaza and took more than 253 more hostage. That was in addition to the 12 employees Israel accused last month.
“UNRWA has lost legitimacy and can no longer function as a U.N. body,” Gallant told reporters Friday. “I have instructed the defense establishment to begin transferring responsibilities related to the delivery of aid to additional organizations.”
Gallant said 12 percent of UNRWA’s staff of 13,000 are affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
UNRWA has denied knowledge of its employees’ alleged involvement in the Oct. 7 assault.
“The government of Israel has indicated that even with its highly professional intelligence services and security forces, the planning of the attack went undetected by them, implying that all involved, including people who allegedly work for UNRWA, participated illicitly in ways that UNRWA also would have been unable to detect,” spokesman Jonathan Fowler said.
U.N. agency struggles to serve Gaza as scrutiny mounts over alleged Hamas links
The allegations have led the United States, UNRWA’s largest supporter, and 15 other governments to suspend funding for the agency pending the findings of multiple investigations. The Biden administration says it’s exploring other ways to deliver aid to Gaza.
Israel responded to the Oct. 7 assault by launching a military campaign that authorities say is aimed at eradicating Hamas. The fighting has killed more than 28,900 people in Gaza, the Health Ministry there says, and forced more than 80 percent of the survivors from their homes. The dead include at least 258 UNRWA workers, the agency says.
As the IDF has expanded its campaign, it says it has uncovered new details of UNRWA collaboration with Hamas.
The army released video this month of what it said was a subterranean Hamas server complex 65 feet beneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters. On Tuesday, the army released video of what it said was the hideout of Hamas leader Yehiya Sinwar under Khan Younis with UNRWA packages among the stash.
Lazzarini has denied that the group knew about “all the situations where U.N. premises have been blatantly disrespected.” He has ordered an internal investigation.
Israel is proceeding cautiously. Officials familiar with the strategy say the country’s defense establishment is reluctant to shut the group down immediately, given its role providing food and shelter to Gazans.
“In the short term, the idea is to find alternate providers that are not connected to Hamas,” said an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential government discussions. “In the long term, the idea is that UNRWA will not be part of the ‘day after’ in Gaza.”
“Israel has long believed that UNRWA is in bed with Hamas, but what has changed is that the red lines crossed are clear for the international community, too,” said another Israeli familiar with the discussions. “No taxpayers abroad are going to want to support that.”
In Washington, the Biden administration continues to back UNRWA’s work but believes it’s unlikely to find support for further funding any time soon. With congressional Republicans firmly opposed and Democrats divided, few see UNRWA funding as an issue worth burning political capital on in an election year. A Senate-approved version of the supplemental bill to fund aid to Ukraine, Israel and other allies contained a passage barring funding for the agency. It received significant bipartisan support.
“As a general principle, we support the work that UNRWA does,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters last week. “We support delivering humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people in Gaza. The United States has been the largest funder of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians, and we expect to continue funding humanitarian assistance to Palestinians.”
But the administration is exploring other ways to fund some of the work that UNRWA has done in Gaza and elsewhere, including possibly redirecting money to the World Food Program.
There’s also the potential for a budgetary workaround, Miller said. U.S. allies could increase their own funding for UNRWA with money diverted from other programs, which Washington could then backfill.
Ireland pledged 20 million euros on Thursday to help UNRWA address the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza and said the agency, as the “backbone of the humanitarian response, … urgently needs support from all U.N. members states.”
Norway accelerated payment this month of its planned contribution of $26 million for the year, and officials have spoken of boosting the amount.
But Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide cautioned that budgetary workarounds aside, the agency’s stability depends on a broad base of support.
“It’s unfortunate not to have the U.S. as one of the donors, even if we could make up for the money, so it doesn’t solve the whole problem,” he told The Washington Post.
“There is no replacement for UNRWA’s role in the absence of a genuine political solution,” Lazzarini, the UNRWA head, tweeted Thursday. “Claiming otherwise not only puts the lives of desperate people at risk but also compromise chances of a successful transition.”
Alrifai, the UNRWA spokeswoman, told The Post that the agency has and would continue to work alongside other aid organizations, but the question of being dismantled “is something the General Assembly should decide on, as that’s where we get our mandate from.”
Since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it has seen UNRWA as a means of managing humanitarian issues for Palestinians. The agency attends to the needs of the civilian population — food distribution, shelter, health care, schooling, salaries — promoting stability.
“It was important for the security establishment to have a point of contact that was not Hamas, especially during the rounds of conflict, so that Israel wouldn’t need to work directly with Hamas at the same time that it was fighting Hamas,” said Michael Kobi, a former deputy director general and head of the Palestinian desk at Israel’s Ministry for Strategic Affairs.
When the Trump administration ended U.S. funding for UNRWA in 2018, the Israeli official said, “there was a lot of pushback from the Israeli defense community, warning [president Donald] Trump not to rock the boat.”
When the Biden administration resumed the funding in 2022, the official said, “behind closed doors, there was a sigh of relief in Israel, which is very much a status quo country.”
“For Israel, like Hamas, UNRWA was convenient,” said Kobi, now a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “But it was a terrible mistake.”
Birnbaum reported from Washington. Miriam Berger in Jerusalem and Itay Stern in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.