The charges brought by Israel against employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza are extremely serious. If it turns out that the 12 people implicated did indeed participate, in one form or another, in the attack on Israeli civilians perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, the UN agency will have to take measures commensurate with the damage done to its credibility. Sackings have already been announced and legal proceedings mooted.
For the last three months, UNRWA has been faced, in Gaza, with the worst situation in its history. The Israeli response to the tragedy of October 7 has precipitated a food and health crisis, putting the agency on the front line. The number of Palestinian victims has already reached unprecedented levels, and UNRWA's employees have not been spared. Dozens have been killed in Israeli strikes. On January 25, the organization announced that one of its shelters, overcrowded due to the massive displacement caused by the fighting, had been the target of a direct hit by the Israeli army. Thirteen people were killed.
The already execrable relations between Israel and the UN can only deteriorate further as a result of these recent accusations. Since the beginning of the current crisis, the Israeli authorities have shown increasing signs of mistrust in the agency, which has in turn continually denounced the ongoing humanitarian disaster. Israel has also repeatedly accused UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres of playing into the hands of those responsible for the massacres, and has called for his resignation – notably when he provoked a meeting of the Security Council in December 2023, in the hope of obtaining a halt to the fighting.
Political underpinning
This exacerbated hostility has a political underpinning. A number of Israeli political leaders consider the continuation of UNRWA, created in 1949 after the first of the Israeli-Arab wars, which led to the exodus of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the territories conquered by the Israel, to be illegitimate. Israel believes that the agency artificially maintains one of the main disputes in the conflict: the fate of the refugees from the 1948-1949 and 1967 Israeli-Arab wars, in addition to the fate of the territories conquered by force during the second conflict, particularly the eastern part of Jerusalem.
Several countries, foremost among them the United States, have responded to the accusations by suspending their financial participation in the agency. A precautionary measure may be understandable until UNRWA can respond in detail to the accusations, but it poses a real dilemma given the conditions Palestinians fighting to survive in Gaza are facing right now. The actions of a dozen or so employees must not be exploited and weaponized against an entire agency, whose work is essential to avert an even greater humanitarian catastrophe than the one currently unfolding.