Daniel Meron, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said on Monday that Jerusalem is working to secure U.N. agencies and non-governmental organizations to replace the responsibilities of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the embattled agency whose mandate focuses only on Palestinians.
“We, the state of Israel, are working to find substitutes to the work of UNRWA inside Gaza,” Meron told reporters, noting that Israel is “encouraging U.N. agencies and NGOs to take over,” each assuming control “in its own field that they specialize in.”
Israel banned UNRWA from operating inside the country, including in Jerusalem, at the end of January and cut off communications with the U.N. agency. Those decisions, dictated by Israeli legislation, came about after Israel presented evidence of the agency’s deep ties to Gazan terror groups, including Hamas.
UNRWA officials, and those of other U.N. agencies, have said consistently that there is no other agency or combination of groups that could replace UNRWA’s infrastructure or breadth of services in Gaza, including providing humanitarian aid, medical care and education.
Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA commissioner-general, said that UNRWA will “stay and deliver” its mandate from the U.N. General Assembly “until it is no longer possible to do so in a principled manner.”
Meron said that “there has been serious work” conducted with other agencies to ensure that Gazans “will not suffer” as those agencies assume UNRWA’s responsibilities.
Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, told JNS in a Monday press briefing that he was unaware of any conversations between U.N. agencies and Israeli officials about assuming UNRWA’s responsibilities.
“Generally, we do see U.N. agencies, organizations standing up and showing interest,” an Israeli diplomatic official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told JNS. “But, the thing is, the minute we were to give an example of an organization, it will be under strong pressure not to substitute for UNRWA.”
In his own briefing on Monday, Lazzarini accused Israel of operating a “disinformation campaign portraying the agency as a terrorist organization and our staff as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.”
Lazzarini also mentioned a recent UNRWA survey, which suggested that 70% of Palestinians in Lebanon rely on UNRWA cash assistance as its main source of income. The UNRWA head said that “socio-economic crises” were responsible for the increased aid dependence.
He did not mention the well-documented discrimination that Palestinians face in Lebanon, including banishment from nearly 40 professions and an inability to own property.
Since an Israel-Hamas ceasefire took hold in mid-January, UNRWA has “delivered food assistance to the entire population of the Gaza Strip” and provided “over 412,000 health consultations and reached more than half a million people with shelter and non-food items,” Lazzarini said.
Israel has stopped the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza since last week, as it attempts to pressure Hamas to release more hostages as negotiations continue over an extension or progression of the ceasefire arrangement.
