In the Media

Courier Mail – 5 February 2025

On January 30, two Israeli bills came into effect. One bars the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operations on Israeli territory. The other prohibits Israeli officials from working with the agency.

Meanwhile, UNRWA’s largest donor, the United States, cut off funds about a year ago, and certainly won’t renew that funding under the new Administration. Together, this creates a historic opportunity and Australia should be joining allies and partners to help transition aid delivery and social services for Palestinians away from this impossibly flawed and unreformable organisation, to other UN organisations, NGOs, and the Palestinian Authority.

There is no real reason for Palestinians to have their own dedicated aid agency, but unfortunately, this is not atypical for the United Nations, where the only country targeted by a dedicated agenda item in the Human Rights Council is Israel. The structural issues with UNRWA go even deeper, however.

Since the 1960s, long before the establishment of Hamas, it was well-known that UNRWA camps and facilities were being militarised by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), as was the fact that the Palestinian curriculum UNRWA insists it must use in its schools contains virulently anti-Israel, if not antisemitic, material and openly glorifies terrorist violence.

Despite several decades of documentation and countless NGO reports, UNRWA has parried or ignored all requests and demands in terms of vetting staff and beneficiaries for Palestinian terrorist ties, or ensuring that its textbooks don’t contain violent or antisemitic material.

After October 7, 2023, these issues have come to a head. Israel alleged in January 2024 that a dozen UNRWA staff directly participated in the October 7 attacks, with more than 30 involved indirectly. While the UN did fire nine of the employees accused by Israel – asserting it didn’t have evidence for others – no action has been taken since.

Israel further claims to have identified 1,468 UNRWA Gaza employees affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), with 236 of those being military operatives in these organisations.

It is now being reported that recently released Israeli hostages Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher were all held for part of their captivity in UNRWA compounds.

This should hardly be a surprise. UNRWA facilities have been routinely used to store rockets and other weapons, something UNRWA has itself occasionally, and half-heartedly, protested. A massive Hamas command and data centre was found directly under UNRWA’s primary Gaza headquarters, with electricity cables running from the headquarters into it.

A key issue is that UNRWA does not consider either Hamas or PIJ to be terrorist organisations, as they’re not on the UN’s terrorism list. It thus refuses to vet its staff for terrorist links, and sees no problem in openly cooperating with Hamas.

UN Watch recently released a report documenting meetings and agreements between multiple senior UNRWA officials and Hamas officials going back at least a decade – including one in which the UNRWA Secretary General hailed the “spirit of partnership” between UNRWA and Hamas.

Moreover, the organisation’s staff unions have long been run by senior Hamas officials. For instance, Fathi al-Sharif, the head of the UNRWA Teachers Union and an UNRWA school principal – killed by Israel in September – was the top leader of Hamas in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding widespread claims to the contrary, it is simply not true that UNRWA is vital for humanitarian aid delivery in Gaza. Rather, its primary role has been to provide services like education and healthcare to Palestinians classified as refugees. This is something that should be the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority, which provides these services for all Palestinians who do not fall under UNRWA’s unprecedented and ridiculously expansive definition of what constitutes a “refugee”. This definition includes anyone who is a descendant of a refugee, even if they’re citizens of another country – unlike any other refugee population. This is why, while some 700,000 Palestinians fled the 1948 war, UNRWA today counts some six million Palestinian refugees.

Urgent humanitarian aid should be the responsibility of the various agencies, such as the World Food Program and World Health Organisation, which perform these tasks for the 99.9% of the world’s population that is not Palestinian.

Following the current war, devastated Gaza will require massive international investment to enable reconstruction of civilian infrastructure. Australia and all our allies agree that Hamas should have no future role in governing Gaza. But given the numerous, intimate links that have been exposed between Hamas and UNRWA, allowing the latter to control those aid flows would virtually guarantee that Hamas will be a major beneficiary of them.

What’s more, by teaching radicalism and encouraging and facilitating terrorism, UNRWA has long been a significant barrier to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Any government that cares about either the future welfare of Gazans or finally achieving a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace should do everything in their power to seize the current opportunity to see UNRWA disbanded and its responsibilities assumed by less destructive organisations.

Dr Tzvi Fleischer is Director of Research and Policy at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).