Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images
Palestinians gather at UNRWA Logistics Base in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, December 17, 2023.
Israel’s systematic destruction of essential infrastructure has left the people of Gaza largely without food, clean water, and shelter. There is no functional health system. Famine and disease are spreading rapidly among the nearly two million Palestinians displaced from their homes, forced to bear the brunt of winter in densely packed camps. Even if and when the guns go silent, the future for Gaza is devastatingly dark: Israel has also demolished universities, mosques, churches, government buildings, libraries, bakeries, and countless other institutions.
Now, the political fight over humanitarian aid represents a new front in Israel’s war on Palestine.
Last week, the U.S. and at least eight other nations suspended funding to UNRWA, the U.N. agency that serves as the principal aid distributor and shelter provider amid the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis. The timing of the decision was unconscionable, coming the day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the U.N.’s highest court, issued preliminary measures against Israel requiring that it cease any violations of the Genocide Convention, and ordered Israel to “enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” A hollowed-out UNRWA will make that task impossible. By many accounts, the defunding of the U.N. agency represents an act of collective punishment against the Palestinian people.
UNRWA has provided Palestinians with essential humanitarian assistance since 1949, when the U.N. General Assembly tasked it with supporting a refugee population of 700,000 who were expelled by Israeli forces. Those numbers now exceed five million.
Always conceived of as a temporary agency, the U.N. has continued to extend UNRWA’s mandate until political conditions allow for the Palestinian right of return as codified in U.N. Resolution 194. In the interim, it has become an essential provider of education, health care, social services, shelter, and other emergency services to Palestinians. In the current war, it is the single entity capable of distributing the insufficient amount of aid entering Gaza and providing what little shelter is available to residents of the besieged and bombarded territory.
The decision to suspend funding to the agency now will have disastrous consequences.
The Biden administration continues to back Israel’s war in rhetoric, diplomacy, and financial and material aid, and is now directly impeding essential humanitarian relief.
The U.S. and the other donor nations supply the vast majority of the UNRWA budget, and it does not have any strategic reserves to draw down. With the suspensions in place, the agency will need to sunset operations in a matter of weeks, at a time when the humanitarian conditions are catastrophically bad. Accelerated starvation, disease, and exposure are all but guaranteed. Palestinians will face threats to life unfathomable at present.
The U.S. and other countries suspended funding in response to Israeli allegations that a dozen members of the U.N. agency had participated in various capacities in the October 7 attacks on Israel, claims that have not been independently corroborated. There is reason to be suspicious of these claims. Axios initially reported them as arising from Israeli interrogation of Hamas militants captured on October 7, and there is a strong possibility they provided such allegations under duress. (Israel later changed their story and claimed the intelligence came from surveillance, which The New York Times reported, though without acknowledging the contradiction.) Moreover, the intelligence was apparently weeks old, and there is good reason to believe it had already been shared with the U.S. Thus, many commentators view the actions as a form of retribution against the ICJ, which cited the UNRWA commissioner-general’s statement in its January 26 order. In any case, the move to suspend funding to an entire relief agency that employs tens of thousands of people based on the purported actions of a handful of individuals is plainly an act of collective punishment.
On Tuesday, a State Department spokesman downplayed the suspension of funding, pointing out that only $300,000 of the $121 million budgeted for the agency remained unallocated for this budget period, and that the administration hopes the matter can be resolved expeditiously. But this does not explain why the administration decided to halt funding critical aid on the basis of apparently uncorroborated Israeli intelligence, that even if true, is no systemic indictment of the massive relief agency. And it elides the critical fact that—like former President Trump—Biden has endorsed politicized Israeli smears of UNRWA that will certainly impact funding debates when the new budgeting process gets under way this summer. Indeed, U.S. discourse on UNRWA has already jumped from the thinly evidenced Israeli allegations to even more spurious conspiracy theories about the agency’s schools promoting violence as calls grow to defund the agency entirely.
The U.S., which has been the primary military and political backer of Israel’s war, is already in legal hot water domestically. Lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have initiated a lawsuit against top members of the Biden administration in federal court, arguing that they are complicit in a genocide against Palestinians and asking the court to order the government to pursue a cease-fire. In a hearing on the case last Friday, CCR called a number of witnesses, some of whom dialed in from Gaza, who recounted in harrowing detail the impacts of U.S.-backed Israeli aggression.
On Wednesday, the judge wrote that the “undisputed evidence” indicates Israel’s war “is intended to eradicate a whole people” and may plausibly constitute a genocide, and he implored the Biden administration to “examine the results of their unflagging support.” But he dismissed the case as involving a nonjusticiable political question.
The move to pull financing from UNRWA over unsubstantiated allegations made against a handful of its many thousands of employees may strengthen the legal arguments that the U.S. is violating the Genocide Convention. Top humanitarian groups and watchdogs recognize that Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from a humanitarian catastrophe, and that there is widespread risk to life as a result of limited access to essential food and aid. To be clear, the moral obligation to support the provision of aid to the Palestinians of Gaza now entering the fourth month of devastating warfare, and the 18th year of a stifling blockade, is stronger than any legal dictate. Withdrawing financial support foreseeably will suspend UNRWA operations at this critical juncture, and lead directly to more Palestinian deaths.
Gaza has been substantially destroyed by months of bombing and Israeli military incursion, and the people who have managed to survive the slaughter have been immiserated. Rebuilding the territory, and conditions for life there, will take years. It is high time that the U.S. face this reality and reorient its pressure on Israel and policy more broadly toward ending the war and limiting the ongoing devastation.
But as things stand, the Biden administration seems intent on the opposite: It continues to back Israel’s war in rhetoric, diplomacy, and financial and material aid, and is now directly impeding essential humanitarian relief. It may well also be laying the groundwork for future criminal prosecutions for the gravest possible breaches of international law. It is imperative that the White House reverses course. This nightmare, for the Palestinians of Gaza—and for the world—must end.
