The Knesset plenum was set to vote on Monday on two bills that would make it illegal for Israeli officials to cooperate with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and for it to operate in Jerusalem.
The United States, the United Nations, E.U. member states and Arab countries have expressed concern about the bills, which were nonetheless slated to come up for a vote on Monday morning following recent revelations about the complicity of UNRWA staff in terrorism. The bills may proceed to a second and third reading, depending on scheduling issues at the Knesset, which returned from recess on Sunday.
The bills, which were initially merged, were separated after passing committee earlier this month. The more restrictive bill, coauthored by Knesset member Yulia Malinovsky and others, proposes to ban all contact between Israeli officials and UNRWA, which would complicate the agency’s work in Gaza and Judea and Samaria.
The other, submitted by MK Boaz Bismut of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, would ban UNRWA from Jerusalem, potentially locking it out of the city’s east, where it operates several schools for Palestinians.
On Oct. 13, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a letter about the agency to Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Defense Minister Yoav Galant. In the letter, which demanded Israel increase the amount of aid being let into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, they noted that they were “deeply concerned” about the bills.
UNRWA provides aid and education, mainly through local staff, to Palestinians in Jordan, Syria, Gaza, Judea and Samaria as well as eastern Jerusalem. It operates under a U.N. definition of refugees that is exclusive to Palestinians and extends indefinitely to the descendants of those who fled what became Israel in 1948. For all other refugees, the United Nations uses a definition that does not apply to descendants.
Hundreds of UNRWA workers are believed to have engaged in terrorism in recent years, including during the Oct. 7, 2023 massacres perpetrated by Hamas in Israel.
On Saturday, the foreign ministers of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom expressed their “grave concern” about the legislation in a statement posted on a Canadian government website, and then on UNRWA’s website.
“UNRWA provides essential and life-saving humanitarian aid,” it read. If the bills pass, UNRWA’s work would be “severely hampered if not [made] impossible, with devastating consequences on an already critical and rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation, particularly in northern Gaza,” the statement said.