Overhaul UNRWA—Just Not Right Now

There has hardly been a war, crisis, or peace process involving Israel and an adversary that has not involved a UN response of some kind. Despite the UN’s many shortcomings, the assumption that any situation would be far worse without its involvement has generally been an accepted principle. The war that began with Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 has challenged this assumption like never before, particularly for Israel. Despite years of working with the main UN agency that provides aid and services to Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, Israel is now seeking to dismantle it.

In January, Israeli officials alleged that as many as 12 of UNRWA’s staff members in Gaza participated in the October 7 attack. They further suggested that more than 1,000 of UNRWA’s employees in Gaza (out of a total of 13,000) are affiliated with Hamas or Islamic Jihad, both of which are considered terrorist organizations by Israel, the United States, and the European Union. Although UNRWA responded to the charges by terminating the contracts of some of its staff and launching an internal probe, it was not enough to deter the United States and a handful of other donors from suspending financial support pending a more thorough investigation. According to figures from 2022, the United States provided close to $343 million of UNRWA’s $1.2 billion operations budget, making it the agency’s largest single donor. But on March 23, the U.S. Congress took an even more drastic step, passing a bill that bans U.S. funding for UNRWA for a year, effectively postponing a decision on whether to resume support until after the U.S. election in November. Although the United States has already disbursed $121 million for UNRWA this fiscal year, the new ban is set to deprive the aid agency of millions more.

At the same time, the war in Gaza is causing a calamity of historic proportions for the Palestinians who live there. More than 30,000 have been killed, and famine is imminent, according to humanitarian officials. And although UNRWA’s existence is under threat, it remains a fundamental component of the international emergency relief effort in Gaza. It continues to provide emergency food and medical assistance. The UNRWA facilities that remain functional are serving as aid distribution points and shelters for a large portion of the more than 1.7 million displaced persons (75 percent of Gaza’s population). There are few, if any, other places for the population to turn. Although UNRWA is plagued with serious problems, many of which predate the current conflict, it is difficult to contemplate any alternative, and it would be even harder to put one in place, especially amid a war and ongoing humanitarian crisis.

ONE OF A KIND

UNRWA is in almost every respect an anomaly within the UN system. The UN General Assembly created it in 1949 to alleviate the dire conditions affecting Palestinian refugees from the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Today, it provides services for over 5.9 million Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Although part of the UN, it is a distinctly Palestinian entity. For the most part, it operates outside the UN frameworks established for the provision of humanitarian and development assistance worldwide, but its very existence also holds enormous symbolism and importance within the broader Palestinian political narrative. That is because UNRWA’s mandate is linked to the ongoing conflict, and the provision of its services, from the Palestinians’ perspective, represents an international guarantee of their rights, including the right to return to or be compensated for properties from which they fled or were forced to flee in 1948 and that are today in Israel. So, although UNRWA does not have a political mandate, its symbolism in the context of the conflict, and for Palestinians especially, cannot be overstated.

UNRWA has a relatively small cadre of international civil servants at its helm, but the bulk of its staff consists of around 30,000 Palestinians, including teachers, doctors, nurses, and engineers. In a place such as Gaza, where at least 70 percent of the 2.2 million population have refugee status, UNRWA looks and operates more like a state than a UN agency.

Indeed, even from a services perspective, to compare UNRWA to any other UN agency is almost impossible. For example, UNICEF, the UN Development Program, and the World Health Organization all typically have dozens of staff in a particular country office who provide technical and sometimes financial support for local nongovernmental organizations and state institutions to implement programs. They rarely engage in the direct implementation of services the way UNRWA does. Even the most comparable of the UN entities, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), bears little resemblance. For example, the UNHCR supports all other refugee populations across the globe with mostly emergency assistance and advocacy, and it has around 19,000 personnel in 137 countries supporting close to 90 million displaced people. Unlike UNRWA, the UNHCR works in accordance with the 1951 Convention on Refugees and therefore supports resettlement in third countries when possible, which, of course, UNRWA does not.

Through its operations, UNRWA has absolved the host countries (Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria) of taking responsibility for the Palestinian refugee populations living inside their borders. In a similar vein, UNRWA has relieved the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas in Gaza from a significant share of responsibility for service delivery. But each year, the list of beneficiaries continues to grow, and UNRWA’s ability to provide services depends on a constantly expanding budget funded by the United States and other international donors.

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Israel has always been clear that it would like to see UNRWA’s mandate end, given the agency’s advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and especially its registration of refugees’ descendants. Israel views this as perpetuating the conflict and even threatening Israel’s existence, as it lends support to the idea that these Palestinian refugees have the right to one day return to Israel, something Israel rejects in principle.

Even so, UNRWA’s relations with Israel are far more complex than many of the agency’s detractors in Israel and the United States often suggest. From an operational perspective, Israel—like Hamas, the PA, and the refugee host countries—has benefited tremendously from UNRWA’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank because the agency provides services that would have otherwise been Israel’s responsibility since it took these territories in 1967. Far from seeking to alter UNRWA’s operational mandate, Israel has for the most part cooperated closely with it.

Although some politicians in Israel have consistently called for an end to UNRWA, the Israeli security establishment has long relied on UNRWA’s stabilizing role and its ability to deliver aid. As a result, relations with the Israel Defense Forces have generally been productive, especially in facilitating the delivery of aid into Gaza since Hamas took over the strip in 2007. October 7 changed this calculation.

The allegations about UNRWA staff participating in Hamas’s October 7 attack are just the tip of the iceberg for Israel. The Israeli government believes Hamas has completely infiltrated the agency.

That members of Hamas and other extremist groups have joined the ranks of UNRWA’s staff and used its facilities as cover for its attacks on Israel, especially since 2007, is not a new revelation. In fact, it is an issue that UNRWA has openly struggled to deal with for many years. Aside from undermining UNRWA’s neutrality, these associations also created serious concerns about the safety of UNRWA’s staff. UNRWA officials who have previously sought to expose this and remove employees with links to Hamas and other factions have faced threats or worse.

In Gaza, UNRWA looks and operates more like a state than a UN agency.

Today, Israel fears that Hamas could use UNRWA to reengage in civilian life. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for postwar Gaza, which he presented to his security cabinet earlier this month, includes the dismantling of UNRWA. But the notion that there is any viable alternative to UNRWA, at least in the short to medium term, is something with which the UN, most donors, and Palestinians would strongly disagree. Aside from UNRWA’s contribution to the emergency relief effort, replacing an entity that provides statelike services to millions of people across the region is not something that is easily done.

Aside from the obvious risks concerning Gaza and the West Bank, there is also the much less discussed issue of how changes to UNRWA’s mandate would affect Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The addition of hundreds of thousands of people who would qualify for state services in countries that are already barely coping with other refugee crises and experiencing varying degrees of internal strife, would surely add considerable strain. There would also be a tremendous political fallout, including for a country such as Jordan, which not only has a large Palestinian population but also a peace treaty with Israel.

Therefore, to contemplate what it might take to replace UNRWA requires facing significant political and logistical hurdles, not to mention risks. In Gaza alone, it would mean either curtailing or replacing the staff and administration at 22 health clinics. It would mean finding new staff for 183 schools that serve some 286,000 students. But across the region, it would affect more than 500,000 students and 140 health clinics that are directly serviced by UNRWA. No UN agency has ever carried out such a large-scale project on an urgent basis. Although possible in principle, in practice it would take enormous effort and time, and prove extremely costly. Even then, it would likely fall short unless additional support were brought in from local authorities and, in the case of Gaza, the PA and specifically its ministries of health, public works and housing, education, and social welfare.

But Netanyahu has also said he plans to exclude the PA from postwar Gaza, leaving only risky and haphazard alternatives for civil administration, such as clan leaders. In any case, a process to replace UNRWA could take years to properly put in place, and it would be fiercely resisted by the Palestinian leadership as well as the beneficiaries themselves, who would view it as an attempt to alter the legal contours of the conflict and the rights of the refugees outside of negotiations.

When one factors in the resources and levels of political will required from Israelis, Palestinians, and refugee host countries, it becomes clear why policymakers in the United States, Israel, the UN, and elsewhere have long understood that an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be easier to achieve than effective reform of UNRWA.

LEAST BAD OPTION

That UNRWA in its current form is unsustainable has been well understood by Israel, its donors, and many others for a long time. The linkage of its services to the persistence of a conflict that has eluded resolution for more than 75 years raises ethical questions about the agency’s continuation. Instead of working itself out of a job, like most UN humanitarian and development agencies are trying to do, it has managed to adjust to changing political realities and consistently—and correctly—presented itself as a stabilizing element in an otherwise unstable region. UNRWA is “needed”—partly because of a reality that it helps to sustain. This also leaves donors responsible for a growing list of services that could have and probably should have been financed or taken on by others, including the PA and the countries hosting Palestinian refugees.

Historically, the UN has also not taken as much responsibility for the agency as it should have. The last UN secretary-general to really try to address these issues was Dag Hammarskjold in 1959. His main concern was over refugees not being integrated into the economies of the host countries, something he feared would perpetuate the conflict. The Arab states rebuffed this approach, and since then, a lack of general oversight set in, letting UNRWA resist UN reforms and restructuring over the years. This lack of accountability allowed for freedom of maneuver but also left oversight voids with regard to ensuring that programming and services matched the standards and values of the UN system. One glaring example of this failure has been UNRWA’s use of locally produced textbooks in its schools, including some with overt anti-Semitic references.

The United States has already disbursed $121 million for UNRWA this fiscal year.

But for most donors that support reform, the question is more about the wisdom of doing so right now, in the middle of an epic humanitarian crisis. This is why UN Secretary-General António Guterres is desperately trying to avoid UNRWA running out of funding or being dismantled. On February 5, he appointed Catherine Colonna, the former foreign minister of France, to lead “an independent Review Group to assess whether the Agency is doing everything within its power to ensure neutrality and to respond to allegations of serious breaches when they are made.” On March 20, the review group presented its interim findings: UNRWA has procedures in place to ensure its neutrality, but there are “critical areas that still need to be addressed.” The brief statement was the latest signal that the UN is trying to win back donors.

History has shown that withholding funding has not forced UNRWA to change or caused its demise. When the Trump administration cut off funding, European and other donors made up for the U.S. shortfall. Today, responding to the rapidly deteriorating conditions in Gaza, Canada, Sweden, and Australia have so far resumed their funding. Ending U.S. funding to UNRWA permanently could also remove or weaken U.S. leverage, something to consider as it seeks to influence a new post-conflict reality for the region.

The Colonna report is not likely to be as far-reaching as most might want it to be, but it could present an opportunity to force a long overdue and more realistic approach to UNRWA’s future. A managed approach, in the context of a postwar arrangement for Gaza, is a more responsible and appropriate option for the overhaul of UNRWA that is so clearly required. And as remote as it might seem right now, the best way to address this on a more permanent basis is in the context of a renewed peace process and a resolution to this historic and increasingly deadly conflict.