Millions of Palestinians rely on UNRWA. Why is the US suspending funding based on Israeli accusations?

Twelve of the agency’s 13,000 Gaza employees were allegedly part of the 7 October attack – so the US and its allies are meting a horrific collective punishment, as I explain in The Guardian.

On Friday, the United States suspended funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main lifeline for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Multiple western countries then followed the US’s lead. The given reason? The Israeli government alleges that a dozen people working for UNRWA (which employs around 13,000 people in Gaza alone) were involved in the assaults of 7 October that killed around 1,200 people in Israel.

There should be no question that the 7 October attacks were atrocities. But to punish the UNRWA – and, by extension, the Palestinian people as a whole – because of accusations against 12 people is unconscionable. It is an act of political retaliation that puts the lives of millions of people needlessly at risk and an abdication on an international scale of the United States’ supposed western liberal values.

The decision is an insult to the most basic tenets of law and morality as understood by the US, international law and the legal systems of countless other countries, especially the principles that accusations are not facts; guilt is individual, not collective; and people are innocent until proven guilty. All of that has just been thrown in the trash with a lit match by the US and many other western powers.

Not only have the US and allies including Britain, Germany, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Australia and Canada abruptly suspended funding to an institution that provides millions of civilians with essential needs, they’ve done so on the basis of accusations leveled by Israel, which is hardly a disinterested party.

In fact, Axios, citing a senior Israeli official, reports that much of the intelligence underlying the accusations comes from Israeli interrogations of prisoners. Human rights groups frequently describe Israeli detention practices as rising to the level of “torture”, which is not only morally abhorrent but also a notoriously poor provider of actionable intelligence. That Israel would have its own agenda in making these accusations should be self-evident.

And even if we were to accept, purely for the sake of argument, that those accused did participate in the October attacks, what does that have to do with UNRWA? The New York Times has seen the dossier the Israeli government presented to the US, but the Times’s story reported no institutional collusion between UNRWA and Hamas, only that the accused had jobs with UNRWA.

As a point of comparison, the US army reservist Sabrina Harman was convicted in 2005 of maltreatment of detainees in connection with the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. Harman worked as an assistant manager for Papa John’s Pizza in Alexandria, Virginia, shortly before heading to Iraq. Should Papa John’s also have been prosecuted for maltreatment of detainees? Is Papa John’s responsible for Harman’s actions? Of course not. (If Papa John’s should be prosecuted for anything, it should be for their pizza.)

Context, rather than accusation, offers a much better explanation as to what’s going on here. First, there is the context of what this agency really is. UNRWA is certainly a necessary social service provider, but it’s also an international agency whose history imbues it with considerable symbolic and material weight. Solely by its continued existence after more than seven decades, UNRWA has become an abiding testament to the still unsolved refugee crisis at the heart of the Palestinian question.

Established by the UN general assembly in 1949, UNRWA began operations in 1950, immediately aiding the 750,000 Palestinians who had been displaced from their homes after the 1948 war. Initially, many considered UNRWA a temporary institution, as Palestinian refugees awaited the execution of UN Resolution 194, which stated that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date”.

Needless to say, that day has never come. UNRWA has continued to register Palestinian refugee after refugee after refugee (nearly 6 million of them now with UNRWA) in the five areas (Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) where it operates and to provide them with healthcare, education, job and loan assistance, and other basic infrastructural needs and some ability to live dignified lives under the most difficult of circumstances…

Read the rest here.