Future looks dire for UN Palestinian refugee agency, says UNRWA chief

A Palestinian boy sits beside an aid box provided by UNRWA outside a distribution point in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, February 4, 2025. (Reuters)

• Even in East Jerusalem, Lazzarini said, health care and other services provided by UNRWA “are continuing, though not necessarily at the same scope it used to be”

BEIRUT: The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said Thursday that while an Israeli ban has not yet forced the agency to cease operations, it faces an “existential threat” in the long run.
“I have been very clear that despite all the obstacles and the pressure the agency is under, our objective is to stay and deliver until we are prevented to do so,” Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency, also known as UNRWA, said in an interview with The Associated Press during a visit to Beirut.
Israel last week formally banned UNRWA from operating on its territory. As a result, Lazzarini said, international staff have had to leave East Jerusalem because their visas expired, but in Gaza and the West Bank there has been no immediate impact on operations.
Even in East Jerusalem, he said, health care and other services provided by UNRWA “are continuing, though not necessarily at the same scope it used to be.”
UNRWA is also likely to face increased pressure from the United States under the new Trump administration.
US President Donald Trump in recent days proposed permanently resettling the approximately 2 million Palestinians in Gaza in neighboring Arab countries and suggested the United States taking long-term control of Gaza.
Lazzarini called the proposal “totally unrealistic,” adding, “We are talking about forced displacement. Forced displacement is a crime, an international crime. It’s ethnic cleansing.”
Trump announced Tuesday that Washington will not resume funding for UNRWA — which had already been halted since January 2024 when the Biden administration stopped it following accusations by Israel that UNRWA staffers in Gaza took part in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.
Israel had alleged that 19 out of UNRWA’s approximately 13,000 staff in Gaza took part in the attack. UNRWA said it fired nine staffers after an internal UN investigation found evidence that they could have been involved.
While several other donor countries also suspended funding at the time, all but the US decided to resume funding.
Lazzarini called the loss of US support “a challenge,” but said the agency is appealing to Gulf Arab countries and other donors to increase their contributions. He described his agency as the target of a “massive disinformation campaign” with a politically motivated objective of dismantling it.
UNRWA’s opponents believe the agency has prolonged the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by giving refugee status to the descendants of Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced from their homes in what is now Israel in 1948, thus maintaining for them, in theory, the right of return.
Lazzarini said those who think that UNRWA can simply be dissolved and its responsibilities handed over to other institutions are mistaken.
UNRWA provides aid and services — including health and education — to some 2.5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, as well as 3 million more in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023, it has been the main lifeline for a population reliant on humanitarian aid in Gaza.
Lazzarini said that while replaceable by a functioning public institution, UNRWA provides essential public services that no other UN agency offers on such a scale. It has served as a “substitute in the absence of the state for the Palestinian refugees,” he said. He argued that the only way to end the agency’s mandate is as part of a political process resulting in a Palestinian state alongside Israel, so that “at the end of this process, the agency can hand over its services to an empowered Palestinian institution.”
The alternative, he said, is to “let the agency implode and abruptly end its activities, which would mean additional suffering for one of the most destitute populations in the region.”