Israel strangles UNRWA in occupied Jerusalem, escalating assault on Palestinian survival

By targeting UNRWA, Israel is attempting to extinguish the legal, historical, and material foundations of Palestinian refugeehood.

Escalating its decades-long war against UNRWA, the Israeli state on Tuesday approved legislation to cut electricity and water supplies to the refugee agency’s offices in occupied Jerusalem, a move that will severely impact its ability to function.

Simultaneous with its barbaric assault on Gaza, now in its third year, the Israelis have attempted to strangle all sources of relief for the besieged Palestinians in the blockaded enclave as well as in the occupied Palestinian territories. To that end, they have launched coordinated efforts to smear the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) as an employer of “terrorists.” Israel claimed that several UNRWA employees participated in the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7. It never provided any credible evidence to back its claims.

But it went to great lengths to legitimise its vile propaganda. In February 2024, UNRWA said that some of its “employees released into Gaza from Israeli detention reported having been pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the Oct. 7 attacks.”

But facts posed no hindrance to Israel’s so-called rule-of-law-abiding Western allies. Mere Israeli claims were enough for several Western states to promptly block or cut funding for the agency, depriving it of resources to meet its mandate in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. The funding cuts — some of which were later reversed — emboldened the Israelis to go further in their mission to dismantle a long-standing institution that has played a vital role in sustaining Palestinian refugee life.

The latest law, passed by a large majority in the Israeli Knesset, orders the immediate cutoff of electricity and water to a UN agency operating under an international mandate. The bill passed its second and third readings with 59 votes in favour and seven against, following earlier approval in November and review by the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee.

UNRWA has played a pivotal role in the lives of the Palestinians. It provides education, healthcare, food assistance, and social services to nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. In Jerusalem alone, it serves more than 110,000 refugees, including in the Shuafat and Qalandia camps, operating schools and clinics that Israel has now deliberately rendered inoperable by cutting off water and electricity.

Established in December 1949 by UN General Assembly Resolution 302, UNRWA was created after the international community failed to enforce Palestinian refugees’ right of return under Resolution 194. Its mandate is renewed regularly by the UN General Assembly, giving it clear legal standing under international law.

Israel’s move to strangle the agency in a territory it illegally occupies is a direct assault on the authority of the United Nations itself. However, such behaviour from Israel has long been accepted as normal by its Western partners in crime. While Israel’s flagrant violations of legal norms previously went largely unnoticed globally, its egregious actions over the past two years have revealed to the world its unbridled criminality and contempt for international law and acceptable norms — a true blight unto the nations.

Take, for example, the International Court of Justice advisory opinion from July 2024, when it declared Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) unlawful under international law. The court said that it violates the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and the prohibition on acquiring territory by force. The court went further and held that Israel must end the occupation as rapidly as possible, cease building settlements, dismantle unlawful structures, and provide reparations for harm caused, including restitution and compensation. The ICJ also stated that all other states have a legal obligation not to recognise, aid, or assist the unlawful situation created by the occupation.

In direct contravention of the opinion of the world’s highest international court, the Israelis have gone on to tighten their grip on the Palestinian neck further while their allies — the most powerful states in the world — continue to look the other way.

Israel has long viewed UNRWA as an enemy precisely because it embodies the unresolved reality of Palestinian dispossession. By maintaining refugee records, providing services, and affirming refugee status across generations — as international law requires — UNRWA keeps alive the Palestinian right of return. For Israel, whose illegitimate “founding” was the result of years-long terrorism against the natives and which has since attempted to artificially engineer a Jewish squatter majority, this is unacceptable.

How the Zionists brought terrorism to the Middle East

Israel has bombed UNRWA schools with total impunity during its ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Accordingly, Israel has spent decades smearing UNRWA, lobbying donors to defund it, restricting its operations, and repeatedly attacking its facilities. The Israelis have routinely bombed UNRWA schools and shelters in Gaza, killed dozens of staff members, and accused the agency of “incitement” as a pretext to undermine its legitimacy. The current move to cut utilities marks another serious escalation: the open use of state power to physically incapacitate a UN agency.

This attack on UNRWA must be seen as part of Israel’s project of erasing Palestinian existence — through its ongoing genocide in Gaza, mass displacement in the West Bank, and the escalating, systematic dismantling of humanitarian lifelines. While Israel runs at full pelt in implementing its murderous project, its Western allies have all but handed it a blank check through their complicity, silence, or active participation in its brutality.

By targeting UNRWA, Israel is attempting to extinguish the legal, historical, and material foundations of Palestinian refugeehood.

When Israel is unwilling to recognise the mandate of a UN agency, is it any wonder that it labels all resistance to its illegitimate occupation of the Palestinians — a legal right of the occupied people — as terrorism?

While the imminent closure of the UNRWA offices appears to be a mere blip in the mountain of atrocities heaped on the Palestinians, especially since October 7, it nevertheless constitutes a landmark moment, demonstrating that even international agencies providing humanitarian relief to an occupied people are unacceptable to the Israelis. They will be content with nothing short of the total erasure of the Palestinians. It is hard to overstate the evil of the Israeli project.

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