Defunding UNRWA Was Never About Hamas

By Yousef Aljamal / In These Times

Ahmad Alhaaj, a 90-year old Palestinian, was displaced from his village of Al-Sawafir Al-Sharqiya at gunpoint by a Zionist militia in 1948. He lived his entire life in a rental house in the hope that he would one day return, but passed away on January 17 in the north of Gaza under Israel’s siege. 

Alhaaj was among the 70% of Palestinians, including my family, who remain refugees of the 1947 – 1948 war. The UN created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in 1949 to support those refugees, after Israel refused to implement UN Resolution 194 mandating Palestinian refugees’ return and it became clear to the world that the their plight would not end soon. Today, 4.7 million refugees like Alhaaj turn to the UNRWA for basic necessities like shelter, food and education. I attended UNRWA schools, and without the free access to schooling and healthcare UNRWA gave me and my family, I would not be holding a PhD today. 

The agency is now under a fierce attack by the Israeli government, which aims to dismantle it based on allegations that Israeli intelligence has so far failed to prove. 

It is no surprise that the Israeli government launched this latest attack on UNRWA, an agency it has long smeared as an arm of Hamas. It wants to eradicate UNRWA because it sustains millions of refugees who are living on Israel’s doorstep and demanding the right to return — or, in the words of the Israeli foreign minister to the UN, because UNRWA ​“perpetuates the refugee problem.” 

UNRWA says some of its employees were forced to confess to taking part in the attacks.

The Israeli government claims that a dozen UNRWA employees played a role in Hamas’ October 7 attacks. Once Israel officially announced the accusations on January 26, countries such as the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom rushed to suspend their funds to UNRWA. These countries didn’t stop their arms to Israel, however, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on the same day that Israel is plausibly engaging in genocide in the Gaza Strip. 

The way these countries jumped to cut UNRWA aid, even before investigating the Israeli government’s claims, suggest that they did so under Israeli pressure. According to news outlets that obtained copies of an Israeli intelligence dossier shared with donor nations, the dossier contained no evidence, only allegations. UNRWA says some of its employees were forced to confess to taking part in the attacks. A UN investigation has released no findings yet.

Even if the Israeli intelligence claims are proven to be true, this should in no way justify defunding UNRWA. No country with a sound foreign policy would cut aid from a people who are starving to death. Instead, UNRWA should be allowed to proceed according to its own policy on neutrality, which bans political membership. And similarly, if the ICJ finds that Israel is committing genocide, Western countries should proceed according to international law, under which they are obliged to prevent genocide and punish those who commit it.

Israel has been lobbying for years to dismantle the agency and has targeted it during the attacks on Gaza.

For Palestinians, attacks against UNRWA are not new. Israel has been lobbying for years to dismantle the agency and has targeted it during the attacks on Gaza. Israel ordered UNRWA employees to move to the south of Gaza when it issued a one-day evacuation order, instead of letting the agency remain to provide much-needed aid. Despite UN statutes protecting UN facilities and workers, Israel has killed 168 UNRWA staff, damaged 157 UNRWA facilities — many of them schools converted to shelters — and destroyed the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City. In February, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed the Israel Defense Forces to begin replacing UNRWA with another international aid organization or a local one.

Why the focus on UNRWA? Part of the current attack on UNRWA is related to the larger attack on Palestinian education. Israeli forces have destroyed all Gaza universities and killed hundreds of its educators. UNRWA runs 183 schools and employs 9,443 teachers in Gaza, educating 291,000 students. Without Gaza’s schools and universities, the Israeli government seeks to plant a new narrative and erase any possibility of objection to its rule in Gaza.

But more importantly, the Israeli government wants to erase the question of Palestinian refugees. The destruction of Gaza, which hosts eight refugee camps, is part of this. 1.7 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are refugees, and Israel does not feel comfortable with their presence very close to its borders. 

1.7 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are refugees, and Israel does not feel comfortable with their presence very close to its borders. Some of them can see what used to be their towns and villages across the border.

A good number of these refugees come from towns and villages in the Gaza envelope that now lie within Israel. Some of them, in fact, can see what used to be their towns and villages across the border.

UNRWA operates in these refugee camps and many of its staff live in them. The Israeli government has always seen the densely populated refugee camps as a threat, and it has targeted them countless times, starting with the Rafah and Khan Younis massacres of 1956. In 1969, Israel failed to implement a secret plan to send 60,000 people out of Gaza to Paraguay. Now, the Israeli government is intentionally destroying Gaza to make it unlivable for these refugees in an attempt to push them out. 

Allowing the United States to build a floating seaport off the coast of Gaza and allowing France, Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to airdrop aid are part of the same Israeli government plan: getting rid of UNRWA, which oversees aid delivery. Instead of airdrops, some of which killed starving Palestinians, Israel could simply allow thousands of aid trucks to pass through the Egyptian border.

The whole point of the sea corridor is to create an alternative to UNRWA; it is the U.S. actualizing Netanyahu’s plan.

The seaport will be constructed in the middle area of Gaza, where UNRWA no longer operates and Israel will not allow it to.

It is the responsibility of free people around the world to keep UNRWA functioning as long as the situation of Palestinian refugees, the most important issue for the Palestinian people, is not resolved. Countries that pledged more aid to UNRWA, such as Ireland, or restored it, like Canada, should be recognized. Countries that continue to withhold UNRWA funds, like the United States, should change their policy, because they are preventing much-needed aid from reaching the Palestinian people who are subjected to genocide in Gaza. Last, the UN should move to include UNRWA’s funding in its own budget to erase pressure by donor nations.

Palestinians like me, too, want to see an end to UNRWA, but only after the issue of Palestinian refugees is resolved according to international law and UN resolutions, and not before that. Dismantling the agency will not make us forget who we are and how we ended up in refugee camps in Gaza in 1948, just as Ahmad Alhaaj, who lived his entire life as a refugee in a rental house and participated in the 2018 Great March of Return, never forgot.

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By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp

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