Israeli laws breaking up the United Nations Relief and Works Agency threaten the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire and hostage release agreement, Philippe Lazzarini, the U.N. agency’s commissioner-general, said on Friday.
“The disintegration of the agency will intensify the breakdown of social order,” Lazzarini told reporters after a closed U.N. Security Council meeting on Friday. “Dismantling UNRWA now, outside a political process, will undermine the ceasefire agreement and sabotage Gaza’s recovery and political transition.”
The agency head told reporters that UNRWA—which has employed many staff members with Hamas ties, including those who participated directly in the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Israel has said—remains in the dark about how new Israeli laws, set to go into effect on Jan. 30, will impact its operations.
“We haven’t received any directive, any guidance on how this will be implemented,” he said of the laws. “We keep hearing that they might be implemented in different ways depending on whether we talk about the West Bank, east Jerusalem or Gaza. But we have absolutely no clarity, because nothing has been issued yet.” (The United Nations, the Biden administration and some others refer to Judea and Samaria as the “West Bank.”)
In late October, the Knesset passed laws cutting off communication between Israeli authorities and UNRWA and preventing the U.N. agency from operating in Israel, including in Jerusalem where the agency has a field office.
UNRWA fired at least nine employees as a result of Israel’s charges about their ties to Hamas. The terror group has said publicly that Fathi al-Sharif, who ran an UNRWA teacher union in Lebanon, was a Hamas commander, and Israel killed an Oct. 7 attacker while the terrorist was driving a U.N. vehicle.
JNS has asked U.N. officials several times whether the global body has contacted Israel—or plans to do so—to discuss the implementation of the laws and their impact. U.N. officials have not confirmed to JNS that they have contacted the Jewish state, and they have said that Israel must be responsible for the agency’s mandate should it be prevented from operating in Israel.

‘Case by case’
Some 16 countries suspended donations to UNRWA in the wake of allegations that agency staffers participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. All but the United States, by far the largest donor to UNRWA, have resumed aid.
Sweden pulled its funding last month, and Switzerland—which cut its contribution in half last year—and others are debating whether to cut off aid to the agency completely.
Lazzarini told reporters that Gulf countries and private donors stepped up contributions last year, but those monies weren’t sufficient to fill the void.
JNS asked if UNRWA funding is fungible and can move to other agencies if necessary and if staff could be reassigned should the agency be unable to operate.
“Technically, money can be moved with the authorization of a donor. Obviously, we have to agree,” Lazzarini told JNS. (He added that staff could also move.)
“I’m looking at sometimes seconding some function to make sure that the activity can properly continue, but from a different agency,” he said. “So all this is doable, but needs to be looked at case by case.”
JNS also asked Lazzarini on Friday if his efforts to discredit reporting from the nonprofit U.N. Watch about the agency’s terror ties aim to shirk responsibility for his failure to detect and punish terrorists among the agency’s ranks.
Lazzarini insisted to JNS that he had taken action, including suspending the Hamas commander who ran the Lebanese union.
“When it has been brought to my attention, the person has been suspended—no pay out of the agency, and an investigation was ongoing,” Lazzarini told JNS.
The process was halted when Israel eliminated Sharif in a September 2024 airstrike.
U.N. Watch had provided evidence months earlier of Sharif’s terror ties, but Lazzarini dismissed them at the time as “completely wrong” and “deliberately dishonest.”
Lazzarini rejected the premise of a JNS question about why he had only disciplined Sharif after external pressure, rather than having discovered the employee’s terror ties, including more than a decade of publishing terror incitement, via internal investigation.
“I refute the fact that we have reacted based on external pressure,” Lazzarini told JNS.
The UNRWA head told reporters that he threatened to take educational responsibilities in Lebanon away from UNRWA if the union didn’t call off a strike that it held in response to Sharif’s suspension.
Under the deal with Hamas, some 6,000 aid trucks are supposed to enter Gaza daily.
“UNRWA is ready to support the international response by scaling up aid delivery,” Lazzarini told reporters.