The United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), is an integral part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She was born with him and they live parallel lives.
UNRWA employs around 13,000 people in Gaza And last week it was revealed that about 1,200 of them have ties to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, that about half have close relatives who belong to these organizations, which are considered terrorist in most Western countries, at least Twelve of his associates were linked to the October 7 Hamas-led attack against Israel. It was published by The Wall Street Journal and is based on intelligence reports verified by the medium.
Six temporary workers were part of the wave of Palestinians who killed about 1,200 people in the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Two assisted in kidnappings and two others were present at some points where dozens of civilians were shot. Others coordinated the logistics of the attack, including the procurement of weapons.
Of the 12 UNRWA staff linked to the attacks, seven were primary or secondary school teachersincluding two mathematics teachers, two Arabic teachers and a primary school teacher.
This information, investigated by Israel and presented to the United States, prompted Washington and other countries to temporarily halt aid to the agency.
It’s raining, it’s pouring
“But This is not a surprising revelation.“Neither in Israel nor in anything that perpetuates this problem of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians,” says the sociologist and academic Luis Fleischmann.
Hamas rules its territory in a totalitarian manner and is also the largest political-social-religious movement, dominating all aspects of life in the coastal enclave for almost 17 years. “It is not surprising that UNRWA is plagued by Hamas, it could not have been otherwise,” says the sociologist.
For this reason, the decision of the Commissioner General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, to sever the employment relationship with these employees appears as an empty gesture and the decision of some of the main donors to suspend their funding after the revelation of the open secret as problematic.
Actually two problems. Firstly, that diplomats, politicians and people involved, although they knew or suspected this connection, had to wait for Lazzarini’s statement to speak out, and secondly, that Without UNRWA’s help, the people of Gaza will suffer even more.
dilemma
After a cascade of governments froze funding for the Palestinian refugee agency (USA, Germany, Austria, Italy, Australia, UK, Canada and more), Israel is the only country that maintains a daily relationship with UNRWA as part of its humanitarian activities in Gaza.
The Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) unit monitors every supply truck entering the Strip through Israel’s Kerem Shalom and Egyptian Rafa border crossings and coordinates the distribution of aid with UNRWA.
“Israel cooperates with them for obvious reasons”explains Fleischman. “You cannot cut ties with this humanitarian aid organization; If UNRWA does not distribute this food, water and medicine to the more than two million Palestinians in the Strip, who will? The Israeli army?” After the International Court of Justice in The Hague also warned Israel that denying humanitarian aid to Gaza could constitute an act of genocide, now is not the time to stop cooperation.
UNRWA is crucial to alleviating the misery of so many Gazans, but just because it is important does not mean it is unproblematic, Flesichman stresses. “Because it is actually the symptom of a larger problem: that of lto maintain the status of Palestinian refugees. People who are refugees generation after generation, wherever they are, in Gaza, New York, Paris or Abu Dhabi. “They are demanding the right of return like those expelled in the 1948 war, which Israel refuses to grant them.”
Years of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians over the status of Palestinian refugees have been met with intransigence from politicians on both sides.
Many, like Fleischman, view UNRWA as an anachronistic anomaly because it is the only UN agency dealing with a specific group of refugees, while all other refugee crises in the world are handled by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. UN for refugees.
“It is a self-sustaining organization, a bureaucracy, its existence (which depends on a fourth generation of Palestinians being granted refugee status, 75 years after their great-grandparents became refugees) has become an end in itself rather than a means to solving a problem,” the journalist wrote Anshel Pfeffer in the Haaretz newspaper.
However, according to the author, wishing UNRWA away will not solve the problem: “Israel is not the root cause of this problem. Israel accepted the United Nations’ Palestine Partition Plan in 1947, when the Jews and Arabs living in what was then British Mandate Palestine were all called “Palestinians.” Arabs living in Palestine became refugees because they rejected the partition plan and with the support of the Arab nations, they started a war the day after the UN voted for it.”
Israel’s Arab neighbors then continued the problem. In fact, it was Egypt that imprisoned those Palestinians who tried to flee to its country in a small strip of its territory long before Israel occupied the area in 1967. And as the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat When Israel signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1978, it demanded that all of Sinai, with the exception of Gaza, return to Egyptian control. Israel accepted the deal.
And while it is clear that no one in the world wants to do business with Gaza, with the exception of UNRWA, which exists thanks to Gaza, strangling it economically is a collective punishment. Those who ask A viable solution to the enclave’s problems through diplomatic channels is increasingly attracting attention in Israel. The government rejects this for the time being.