OPINION: It’s time to phase out the UN agency that’s an impediment to peace
Daniel Sugarman argues that's the agency should be folded into the UNHCR with view to moving towards a two-state solution as the only route to lasting peace
Late last month, days after her return from Hamas captivity, Emily Damari spoke by phone to the prime minister. We know from her mother, Mandy Damari, that one of the issues the British-Israeli dual citizen raised with Keir Starmer was her incarceration in UNRWA facilities while she was held hostage.
The Commissioner General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, responded by saying this was “deeply disturbing and shocking”. UNRWA, he stated, ‘was forced to vacate all its installations in the North of Gaza Strip, including Gaza City, on 13th October 2023 & has, since then, had no control over them’.
This raised more than a few eyebrows, because just last month UNRWA tweeted out a graphic which read ‘In Gaza, UNRWA runs all UN shelters.’ The language alongside this graphic read as follows: ‘UNRWA is the backbone of the UN humanitarian operation in Gaza. Despite challenging conditions, UNRWA teams run all UN shelters, providing lifesaving support to people in need. When the war began nearly 15 months ago, UNRWA turned its schools, health centres, and warehouses into shelters’.
Unsurprisingly – and correctly – it is now understood that the UK’s continued funding for UNRWA is now under review. The President of the organisation I work for, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, has commended this step, noting that the Board has repeatedly raised concerns about such funding with senior Government officials. If the UK does decide to pull the plug, it would follow a recent trend – in December, the Dutch Parliament voted to phase out aid to UNRWA, with the Swedish Government also announcing that they would cease funding the agency while boosting overall humanitarian aid to Gaza via other channels. Last week, Italy also announced that its funding of UNRWA would end.
It is not hard to see why. The idea that there are any serious mechanisms in place to separate UNRWA from Hamas is farcical. The connections between the two are not an open secret, mainly because they are not secret at all. We know that numerous UNRWA members took part in the October 7th massacre – UNRWA itself ultimately fired a number of these people, after protesting no knowledge of their terror affiliations.
The UNRWA-Hamas crossover is also by no means limited to rank-and-file members. In September 2024, for example, Fathi al-Sharif, the head of UNRWA’s teaching union, was killed in Lebanon. Hamas then publicly mourned his death, making it clear that he was their senior commander in Lebanon. While it is true that you cannot spell the word ‘unaware’ without the letters U, N, R, W and A, this stretches the limits of credibility well beyond breaking point.
But there is a far easier way to demonstrate how UNRWA has been responsible for Hamas’s ability to fund itself. In an article for The Times last year, Neta Heiman Mina, the daughter of one of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th, described this simple yet highly effective system. It goes like this: In other jurisdictions where UNRWA operates, such as Jordan, money to recipients is distributed in the local currency.
In Gaza, the local currency used is the Shekel, but in line with Hamas demands, UNRWA distributes payments in dollars, meaning all recipients then have to go to a moneychanger. Hamas controls all the moneychangers and the exchange rates, skimming a significant fee off the top. It is estimated to have made more than a billion dollars this way.
Increasingly, UNRWA’s Commissioner General has sounded an alarm about the agency’s future. On Monday he told an audience in Cairo that “The collapse of the Agency would create a vacuum in the occupied Palestinian territory and send shockwaves through neighbouring countries. An environment in which children are deprived of education, and people lack access to basic services, is fertile ground for exploitation and extremism.”
It would be laughable were it not so deeply tragic. On UNRWA’s watch – there’s enough information on the ‘education’ its schools have provided to fill another article – extremism has flourished to a grotesque degree. UNRWA’s current gambit is clearly to present itself as too big to fail, and hope that its utter cynicism masquerading as realpolitik will be enough to convince various countries – including our own – to maintain funding.
But Britain should not fall for this; instead, it should look at the Swedish government, which has made it clear that while cutting off money to UNRWA it will instead increase its Gaza funding to organisations including the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
UNRWA itself is an aberration – all other refugees in the world are administered by the UN’s official refugee agency, the UNHCR. UNRWA’s definition of a refugee also completely differs from the UN Refugee Convention. The latter defines a refugee as someone who has fled war, violence, conflict, or persecution and crossed an international border. Under UNRWA, a baby could be born in the UK today as a British citizen yet would still be categorised by the agency as a Palestinian refugee because their great-grandfather left the British Mandate during the 1948 War.
The Board of Deputies has called for ‘a Marshall Plan for Gaza’, invoking the economic assistance that allowed post-war Europe to rebuild its infrastructure. This clearly needs to happen, to enable the ordinary Palestinians living in Gaza to rebuild their lives. But it cannot happen via UNRWA. Hopelessly compromised, the agency has only exacerbated the extreme tensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is surely time to phase out UNRWA, folding it into the UNHCR with a view to moving towards a two-state solution as the only way to ensure a lasting peace.
UNRWA likes to present itself as the only game in town; to which the response should be: “then it’s time to change the game”. The UK has the chance to play a key role here in a once-in-a-generation move towards peace – it is an opportunity that should be grasped with both hands. Palestinians – and Israelis – deserve nothing less.
- Daniel Sugarman, director of public affairs at the Board of Deputies
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