The head of the United Nation agency for Palestinian refugees has warned that pending Israeli legislation could see humanitarian operations in Gaza and the West Bank “disintegrate”.
Philippe Lazzarini told the UN Security Council on Wednesday that senior Israeli officials are bent on destroying the agency known as UNRWA, which is the main provider of humanitarian aid in Gaza, which would leave hundreds of thousands of people in dire need as war rages.
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 UN agency. The bill needs final approval from the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
Mr Lazzarini said in a video briefing that “legally, the Knesset legislation violates Israel’s obligation under the United Nations Charter and international law”.
Today, I told the @UN Security Council that now is the time to decide to which extent it will tolerate acts that strike at the heart of multilateralism and compromise international peace and security.
After a year of profound loss and suffering, and with no end in sight to the…
— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) October 9, 2024
Israel has alleged some of UNRWA’s thousands of staff participated in the October 7 2023 Hamas’ attacks which sparked the war in Gaza.
The UN 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 UN 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 organisation is simply beyond repair”.
Mr 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 UN 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. It provides such services to about six million Palestinian refugees and their descendants in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Mr Lazzarini stressed that the entire humanitarian response in Gaza rests on the agency’s infrastructure and that it “may disintegrate” if the Israeli legislation is adopted.
The halt to co-ordination 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”, he 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”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters on Tuesday that he has written to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to express “profound concern” about the legislation.
Lisa Doughten, a director in the UN 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 more than 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 more than half of the dead.
Ms Doughten said “nearly every one of the more than two million people in Gaza receives some form of aid or service provision from UNRWA”.
US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield expressed concern at 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.
Ms 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”.
