UNRWA

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East   (International organisation)
"Perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace" (Jared Kushner)
Abbreviation	UNRWA
Parent organization	UN
UN IGO for Palestinians.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a relief and human development agency, founded in December 1949, which supports more than 5 million registered Palestinian refugees, and their patrilineal descendants, who fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Palestine war as well as those who fled or were expelled during and following the 1967 Six-Day War. Originally intended to provide jobs on public works projects and direct relief, today UNRWA provides education, health care, and social services to the population it supports. Aid is provided in five areas of operation: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; aid for Palestinian refugees outside these five areas is provided by UNHCR.

UNRWA also provided relief to Jewish and Arab Palestine refugees inside the state of Israel following the 1948 conflict until the Israeli government took over responsibility for Jewish refugees in 1952. In the absence of a solution to the Palestine refugee problem, the UN General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWA's mandate, most recently extending it until 30 June 2026.

UNRWA is the only UN agency dedicated to helping refugees from a specific region or conflict and is separate from UNHCR. Formed in 1950, UNHCR is the main UN refugee agency, which is responsible for aiding other refugees all over the world. Unlike UNRWA, UNHCR has a specific mandate to aid its refugees to eliminate their refugee status by local integration in current country, resettlement in a third country or repatriation when possible. UNRWA allows refugee status to be inherited by some descendants.

UNRWA at a glance

Who funds UNRWA?

US effort to disrupt UNRWA

Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to the former President of the United States and former US broker for peace talks, has advocated a "sincere effort to disrupt" UNRWA as part of the Trump administration's proposals for the Middle East, since according to Kushner it "perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace".

Funding cuts

Chris Gunness, a former UNRWA spokesman, said the UN agency has weeks only before it runs out of money for its crucial aid work to save Palestinian lives in Gaza.

“My message to the Arab world, particularly to the Gulf, is where are you? Because they’re making billions each day on oil revenues. A tiny fraction of those oil revenues would see UNRWA’s financial problems disappear overnight. This unconscionable gap inflicted by these Western countries would be filled very quickly,” Gunness told Al Jazeera.

“Some of the most desperate people in the Middle East are now facing starvation, they’re facing famine, and the Arab states need to step up to the plate.”

UN Watch accused UNRWA of supporting Hamas

Hillel Neuer appeared on ABC News with Linsey Davis to discuss the U.N. workers accused of helping Hamas in the October 7th attacks on Israel, and new evidence that he presented in the US Congress on 30 January 2024.

After the cutting of funds for the IGO, some critics from the UN themselves gave interviews arguing accusations against UNWRA already were known, even in the UN. A recent example resulted in UNWRA suspending up to 120 teachers working for UNWRA for teaching Gazan children to violently act against Israeli targets.

A director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer, a Geneva based NGO whose mission is to monitor the United Nations, UN Watch increasingly warned the UN since 2015 about UNWRA. Neuer called for an absolute end to UNWRA as he accused UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierres of purposely only allowing UNWRA to work alongside western countries keeping the strategy of tension alive in the Gaza-Israel conflict by quickly giving UNWRA dozens of monthly payments in advance. Even though UNWRA was accused to be infiltrated by Hamas employees.

“UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said after a key Hamas operations center was discovered right beneath his headquarters that he had no idea. That's absurd. There was a very advanced tunnel with electrical cables, which supplied a Hamas server center with power. That came directly from UNRWA's electricity grid. Moreover, a few years ago, UNRWA staff noticed that an entire parking lot above it was starting to subside. So what do you mean, we couldn't have known anything?”
Hillel Neuer (2024) 

Canada cut funding without seeing evidence

On 7 February 2024, CBC News reported that the Trudeau government cut funding without seeing evidence to back Israel's claims of UNRWA-Hamas collusion. Government sources told CBC that Israel still hadn't shared evidence with Canada to substantiate its claim that 12 employees of UNRWA were involved in some capacity in the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and the affiliated group Islamic Jihad.

Earlier in February, Britain's Channel 4 News obtained a copy of a dossier that the government of Israel shared with the UK government, which also cut funding to UNRWA. Channel Four reported that the dossier was only six pages long. The news service said it rehashes long-standing Israeli government complaints about UNRWA and alleges the involvement of UNRWA staff in the Oct 7 attack, but "provides no evidence" to back up Israel's explosive allegations against the agency.

Britain's Sky News also reviewed the dossier and reached a similar conclusion:

"The Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA," the news channel reported.

French public broadcaster France 24 also had access to the Israeli report, which it compared to the notorious "dodgy dossier" of intelligence claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that led the UK government to join the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Israel's dodgy dossier exposed

Peter Oborne EXPOSES Israel’s dodgy dossier

On 8 February 2024, Oliver Tickell posted on Facebook:

"So. It turns out that all those governments (including UK) that abruptly cut some $700 million in funding to UNWRA (the UN’s humanitarian agency for Gaza) after Israel alleged that a few staff members joined in the October 7 attack, did so based on a four-page dossier that contained no supporting evidence.

"The funding cuts, taking place in the middle of the greatest humanitarian crisis of the 21st century, which the ICJ has determined to plausibly constitute a Genocide by Israel, can only exacerbate the crisis and may constitute a participation in Genocide."

In a Double Down News video, Peter Oborne exposed Israel's dodgy dossier and was particularly critical of the positions adopted by Lord Cameron, Andrew Mitchell, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer in aligning themselves with Israel's plan to starve 2 million Palestinian people.

Counter narrative to the ICJ ruling

On 9 February 2024, Craig Murray posted on X:

"It is now crystal clear that not a single one of the countries that cut aid to UNRWA has anything amounting to evidence against one single UNRWA employee.

"They just wanted a counter narrative to the ICJ ruling and to speed up the genocide by starvation.

Israel refuses to provide proof

Israel has refused to provide the intelligence it says backs up its allegations, either to UNRWA or to the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the UN body assigned to investigate.

"I don't think we need to give intelligence information. This would reveal sources in the operation," Lior Haiat, a spokesperson for Israel's foreign ministry, told France 24.

 

Employees on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End	Description
Peter Ford		2006	2015	Working with refugees
Philippe Lazzarini	Commissioner-General	2020

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Has International Law Survived, or Has the Western Political Class Killed It?	blog post	28 January 2024	Craig Murray	Now think of this: the very next day after President Herzog made a genocidal statement, as determined by the International Court of Justice, he was met and offered “full support” by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament
Document:Outside In: The Trump Administration’s Plan to Remake the Middle East	Article	10 October 2018	Ted Snider	Benjamin Netanyahu refers to his doctrine as Outside In: first you pacify the Outside and ally with the Sunni Arab states (Egypt and Saudi Arabia) outside of Israel, then, in exchange, you extract a peace plan out of them that you then impose Inside on a Palestine now devoid of allies and leave it helpless to hold out against a peace plan forced on the Palestinians by Donald Trump.
Document:Pulling no punches at yesterday's rally for Palestine in Bath	Speech	17 November 2024	Jonathan Cook	"From their own mouths, Lammy and Starmer have told us who they are. They are genocide deniers. They are enablers of genocide. They are conspirators in genocide, just like those who preceded them in the British government."
Document:Simply No Red Lines At All	blog post	11 October 2024	Craig Murray	I am simply unable to begin to understand, on a personal basis, the politicians who can condone, support and in fact participate in what Israel is doing. It is simply beyond me. Every time I worry that public interest is faltering and people have become inured to genocide, the Israelis manage to do soemthing still more outrageous. Thankfully social media makes it very hard to hide this.
Document:Worse Than You Can Imagine	blog post	26 April 2024	Craig Murray	The political class, across the Western world and the Arab world, is utterly divorced from its people over Gaza. We are seeing worldwide repression, as peaceful conferences are stormed by police in Germany, students are beaten by police on American campuses, and in the UK old white people like me suffer the kind of continual harassment long suffered by young Muslim men.

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 21 October 2018.
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