Israeli lawmakers passed two laws on Monday that could threaten the work of the main United Nations agency providing aid to people in Gaza by barring it from operating on Israeli soil, severing ties with it and labeling it a terror organization.
Although they have not yet come into force, the laws’ potential impact on Palestinians, as the humanitarian toll in Gaza worsens, cannot be underestimated.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East would be prevented from doing critical UN General Assembly-mandated work if the laws are implemented. “There is no alternative to UNRWA,” he said in a statement issued on Monday night.
UNRWA provides education, healthcare and other basic services to millions of Palestinian refugees across the region, including in the Israel-occupied West Bank.
The legislative move, which UNRWA’s chief, Philippe Lazzarini, called “a dangerous precedent”, risks collapsing the already fragile process for distributing aid in the Gaza Strip and represents Israel’s open challenge to the UN-centered multilateral system in international relations.
Lazzarini correctly pointed out that the new laws were part of an “ongoing campaign to discredit UNRWA”. Israel has smeared and attacked the UNRWA long before the Gaza war broke out in October last year. Since then, Israel has killed more than 200 UNRWA employees during its conflict with Hamas in Gaza.
The laws are by no means what Israeli lawmaker Boaz Bismuth, who cosponsored one of the bills, hailed as “a call for justice and a wake-up call” but a crucial move Tel Aviv has long envisioned taking to overcome domestic legal obstacles to actions to eliminate the UN agency from Gaza by force once and for all.
The legislative move is an integral part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s overall plan to annex the Palestinian enclave.
Israel has been trying to weaponize its control of the provision of humanitarian aid to the refugees in Gaza in the hope that the lack of food, water and medicines can spur the civilians to oppose Hamas. But in practice, the brutal actions have only served to deepen local people’s hatred against Israel.
As a UN member, Israel should “act consistently with its obligations” under the UN Charter and international law. “National legislation cannot alter those obligations,” Guterres said in his statement. That also explains why even Israel’s allies, including the United States, have strongly opposed the move. US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, speaking to reporters in Washington before the votes, said the administration was “deeply concerned” by the legislation. “There’s nobody that can replace them (the UNRWA) right now in the middle of the crisis.”