In responding to the war in Gaza for more than eight months, President Biden has often seemed weak — upset over the humanitarian toll but not acting firmly to reduce it.
But in one case, Biden was uncharacteristically decisive: After Israel alleged involvement in terrorism by staff members of the United Nations agency at the center of efforts to avert starvation in Gaza, Biden swiftly suspended funding for the agency. Congress then extended the funding freeze.
Yet it now appears that Biden blew it, for the factual basis behind accusations against the agency has proved elusive. It pains me that in a misguided effort to impose accountability, the United States instead appears to have layered additional misery on hungry people.
Far-right Israeli politicians are pushing to abolish the agency in question, UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which provides schools, clinics and other services in the region. A bill in the Israeli Parliament that would ban UNRWA as a terrorist organization easily passed a first reading, leading to international condemnation. Doctors Without Borders called the move “an outrageous attack on humanitarian assistance,” and the European Union described UNRWA as “crucial and irreplaceable.”
I spent a day in the West Bank with an UNRWA team, largely in the Jalazone refugee camp, and it’s clear that the agency provides critical health and education services — and is embattled.
“UNRWA is staggering under the weight of relentless attacks,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the Swiss Italian humanitarian who leads the agency. He warned that it may “crumble” in ways that “sow the seeds of hatred, resentment and future conflict.”
The ground around the U.N. agency’s headquarters in East Jerusalem is charred where violent Israeli protesters attacked the compound and twice set it on fire. During the arson attacks, a crowd chanted in Hebrew, “Let the U.N. burn.”
While I was in an UNRWA vehicle, we were turned back at an Israeli checkpoint as other vehicles were allowed through. Israel has delayed visas for UNRWA officials, in effect blocking them from their work. Most tragically, nearly 200 UNRWA aid workers have been killed by bombings and shootings in Gaza.
Israel has long been hostile to UNRWA, but accusations rose to a new level after the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7.
“UNRWA is Hamas with a face-lift,” alleged Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
In January, Israeli officials claimed that 12 of the agency’s 30,000 employees participated in the brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel. UNRWA acted responsibly: It terminated 10 of the accused employees (the two others were dead), called for independent investigations and repeated its “condemnation in the strongest possible terms of the abhorrent attacks of Oct. 7.”
Israel made other accusations, including that about 10 percent of the 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza are Hamas members and that UNRWA schools incite hatred. “UNRWA in Gaza is beyond repair,” the Israeli government alleged in one of its broadsides.
Since then, two independent investigations have been undertaken, and they suggest a pattern of Israel’s making wild accusations against UNRWA and failing to back them with significant evidence. One investigation, led by a former French foreign minister, recommended reforms but exonerated UNRWA of allegations that it was complicit with Hamas; it added that “UNRWA is irreplaceable and indispensable” and “pivotal in providing lifesaving humanitarian aid.”
The other investigation has looked at the 12 employees who supposedly had joined the terrorist attack; it found there was insufficient evidence against four of them and is still investigating the eight others, plus six more who have been accused since.
Investigators have noted that the U.N. provides lists of all its employees in Gaza to Israel. If U.N. background checks failed to detect Hamas extremists, Israeli intelligence also missed them.
One senior UNRWA figure definitely has military ties, but these aren’t with Hamas: The Gaza director of UNRWA is Scott Anderson, an American who retired from the U.S. Army after a 21-year career.
In my visits to the West Bank and Gaza over the years, UNRWA has seemed to me a force for reducing unrest, not inflaming it. Its schools are one reason Palestinians are relatively well educated in the Arab world. Its programs empower women, and its payroll helps keep the Palestinian economy afloat.
“UNRWA helps financially, gives education and medicines and makes an area more stable,” Manar Bsharat, an UNRWA coordinator in the Jalazone refugee camp told me on this visit. She added, “If we didn’t have UNRWA schools, it would be a nightmare for everyone.”
In an enormously polarized region, with a staff that is overwhelmingly Palestinian, UNRWA has tried to uphold principles of neutrality. Even UNRWA sanitation employees told me that they took seriously instructions not to publicly comment about politics even on their own Facebook pages.
Given that UNRWA seems to be a force for stability, it’s hard to see the Israeli campaign against it as anything but one more effort to silence voices for Palestinians. That’s how Lazzarini sees the campaign against the organization he runs.
“Ultimately, there is a political objective to strip the Palestinians of their refugee status, to weaken their further aspirations for self-determination,” he told me. “It’s also a way to undermine the two-state political solution.”
It’s difficult for humanitarian organizations to navigate in places like Hamas-run Gaza, and over the years I’ve seen similar challenges in North Korea, Sudan, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Congo. There’s a legitimate problem of malefactors exploiting humanitarian efforts.
Likewise, it’s worth asking pointed questions about UNRWA: Does it make sense to have a separate agency supporting Palestinian refugees when there is also a United Nations Refugee Agency supporting everyone else? Should an agency created on a temporary basis 75 years ago exist indefinitely to serve descendants of refugees? Is this favoritism for one set of displaced people, Palestinians, when others from Sudan, South Sudan or Eritrea are sometimes even worse off?
But the campaign of harassment by Israel’s far right against UNRWA doesn’t settle for honest questions. Israel should either release evidence of misconduct or move on.
It’s perhaps understandable that Israelis, traumatized by the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, would aim to destroy a U.N. agency serving Palestinians. But that would help neither Israel nor anyone else, and the United States’ defunding of UNRWA exacerbates the humanitarian crisis in the occupied territories.
So Biden should acknowledge his misstep. As famine threatens Gaza, the United States should be backing the agency at the center of efforts to fight starvation, not undermining it.
