Israel’s parliament passed two laws that would designate United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) a terror organization and ban it from operating within Israel and in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
Israel's parliament has voted to pass legislation banning the UN's Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) from operating within Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, accusing the organisation of colluding with Hamas in Gaza.
Contact between Unrwa employees and Israeli officials will be banned within three months, severely limiting the agency's ability to operate in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Co-operation with the Israeli military - which controls all crossings into Gaza - is essential for Unrwa to transfer aid into the territory. It is the main UN organisation working on the ground there.
The move to ban UNRWA has been criticized by countries all around the world, including every permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
UNRWA was founded in 1949 to provide humanitarian aid, healthcare, education and other social services to all refugees who fled or were expelled during the war of 1948 in Mandatory Palestine.
UNRWA was established in 1949 by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to provide relief to all refugees resulting from the 1948 conflict; this initially included Jewish and Arab Palestine refugees inside the State of Israel until the Israeli government took over this responsibility in 1952.[7][8][9] As a subsidiary body of the UNGA, UNRWA's mandate is subject to periodic renewal every three years; it has consistently been extended since its founding, most recently until 30 June 2026.[10]
UNRWA has been providing Palestinian refugees with humanitarian assistance and social services in camps throughout the region in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria since the Nabka. Israel’s government has always to tried to discredit the UN-mandate relief agency because its mandate supports the establishment of a future Palestinian state. However after October 7 attacks by Hamas last year, Israel was successful in getting Western donor countries to withdraw vital funding just as Israel laid siege on the entirety of Gaza and its people.
The UN investigated 19 members of UNRWA staff in all, after Israel alleged that 12 took part in the attack.
Israel later claimed that more than 450 UNRWA staff were members of terrorist groups, but a UN review published in April found Israel had not provided evidence for its claims.
Aside from the nine employees who the UN said may have had links to the 7 October attack, its report found no evidence of involvement in one case, and insufficient evidence in the case of nine others.
UNRWA, which employs 13,000 people in Gaza, said in March that some of its employees reported being pressured by Israeli authorities into making false statements while in detention.
Most major donor countries restored funding after the UN completed its investigation, except for the US. Congress even passed a law to ban UNRWA funding in a budget deal in March and the American nonprofit UNRWA-USA is currently being sued in a federal court.
And it’s not just UNRWA Israel is trying to discredit and or attack by force. The UN’s multinational peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) has come under repeated attacks by the IDF over the past weeks and Netanyahu’s government has shown nothing but total contempt for the ICJ, the ICC and the UN system as a whole over the decades.
“The UN matters to people in Israel. That the country was founded by UN charter [in 1948] is part of the collective memory,” analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said from Tel Aviv.
“However, we’ve been seeing a gradual process of delegitimisation of the UN throughout the last few decades, when it has been portrayed as a bastion of anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic sentiment by Israel’s leaders.”
Ironically, one of the leading critics of the UN is Netanyahu, himself Israel’s former ambassador to the body from 1984 to 1988.
In March the International Court of Justice issued a preliminary ruling that Israel must allow humanitarian into Gaza and Biden has given Israel a 30-day deadline to increase aid into Gaza or face a slim chance of losing a little diplomatic and military support at some point in the future.
The letter, sent on Sunday, amounts to the strongest known written warning from the US to its ally and comes amid a new Israeli offensive in northern Gaza that has reportedly caused a large number of civilian casualties.
It says the US has deep concerns about the deteriorating humanitarian situation, adding that Israel denied or impeded nearly 90% of humanitarian movements between the north and south last month.
Israel is reviewing the letter, an Israeli official was reported as saying, adding the country "takes this matter seriously" and intends to "address the concerns raised" with US counterparts.
Israel has previously said it is targeting Hamas operatives in the north and not stopping the entry of humanitarian aid.
Meanwhile, Vice President Harris repeated her calls for an immediate ceasefire yesterday and Senator Sanders is helping her campaign by reaching out to critics of the Biden administration’s inability to mediate a ceasefire, enforce a corridor for humanitarian aid deliveries and stop the daily carnage and dehumanization of Palestinian and Arab civilians.
“I promise you, after Kamala wins, we will together do everything that we can to change US policy toward Netanyahu,” Sanders beseeched his viewers. “An immediate ceasefire, the return of all hostages, a surge of massive humanitarian aid, the stopping of settler attacks on the West Bank, and the rebuilding of Gaza for the Palestinian people.”
Before he spoke about Harris, though, Sanders asked voters to consider their options – starting with Trump.
“Donald Trump and his right-wing friends are worse,” Sanders said. “Trump has said Netanyahu is doing a good job and has said Biden is ‘holding him back.’ He has suggested that the Gaza Strip would make excellent beachfront property for development. And it is no wonder Netanyahu prefers to have Donald Trump in office.”