When the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, voted overwhelmingly on October 28 to bar the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating in Israel and Palestinian territories within ninety days, it declared UNRWA a “terror group.”
The next day, Washington, D.C.-based UNRWA-USA National Committee condemned the Knesset’s vote, calling for immediate U.S. “action to protect [the] humanitarian lifeline for Palestine refugees” and stand “in solidarity with Palestine refugees and declare: Hands off UNRWA.” At least 232 UNRWA staff members have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war.
A legally independent nongovernmental organization, UNRWA-USA works closely with UNRWA. The United States-based organization raises public awareness about the plight of Palestine refugees (all those displaced from Palestine, including Jewish inhabitants who were displaced until 1952) and collects financial support from Americans to subsidize UNRWA’s dire funding needs for critical life-saving programs providing education, healthcare, social services, and emergency humanitarian aid across Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
“It is not Israel’s decision whether UNRWA continues or not. This is a world decision—and the global community of nations, via the United Nations, has uniformly renewed the agency’s mandate each of the multiple times it has come up for discussion over the last seventy-five years, declaring it essential,” says Mara Kronenfeld, executive director of UNRWA-USA. As recently as this July, 118 U.N. member nations—including the United States—reaffirmed UNRWA’s vital role stating that “UNRWA is the backbone of all humanitarian response in Gaza” and that “no organization can replace or substitute UNRWA’s capacity.”
This summer, UNRWA-USA was the world’s fourth largest donor to UNRWA’s Gaza Emergency response fund, having given $50 million since October 2023. Its donor base spiked from nearly 7,000 last October to 76,000 by the end of 2023. By September 2024, it had collected more than 130,000 new donors.
The organization supports the UNRWA Funding Emergency Restoration Act of 2024 (H.R. 9649)—introduced in September by Representatives Andre Carson, Democrat of Indiana, and Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington)—urging the United States to honor the mandate as the humanitarian crisis of two million Palestinian civilians has reached a “catastrophic emergency level.” Cosigners, which include seventy Representatives from the House, more than 100 nongovernmental organizations (including UNRWA-USA), and 10,000 grassroots advocates, urged the Secretary of State to rescind the United States’s temporary pause (set until March 2025) in UNRWA funding.
Kronenfeld says banning one of the largest humanitarian agencies in the world from working in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory “is not something that can be done unilaterally by Israel given UNRWA’s U.N. Mandate to serve the humanitarian needs in the occupied Palestinian territory up to, and until, there is a just political solution by the relevant parties themselves to the plight of Palestine refugees.”
“People will perish. I cannot overstate the dire consequences of Israel’s ban on UNRWA,” says Kronenfeld. “The global community, including the governments of the United Kingdom, Norway, Ireland, Slovenia, Spain, and over fifty NGOs around the world have strongly condemned this. I wish I knew of the kind of pressure some country, multilateral institution, or individual could apply to remedy this. I don’t know who has the moral clarity, the will, and the power to do what’s right. I hope somebody or some entity does.”
In disrupting UNRWA’s mission, Israel’s ban highlights the mistaken belief by the agency’s detractors that eliminating UNRWA will dissolve the right of return of Palestine refugees—when an international law guarantees this right, not UNRWA.
“As UNRWA’s Commissioner General, Philippe Lazzarini, has stated, Israel’s declaration that a U.N.-mandated humanitarian organization cannot carry out its essential humanitarian [work] in the land that Israel occupies is outrageous,” Kronenfeld says. The vote by the Israeli Knesset against UNRWA is “unprecedented,” she adds, and “opposes the U.N. Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law. This is the latest in the ongoing campaign to discredit UNRWA and delegitimize its role towards providing human-development assistance and services to Palestine refugees.”
Following the October 7 attacks by Hamas, Israel accused UNRWA of having employees who took part in the attacks. UNRWA investigated the accusations and eventually severed ties with nine employees who may have been involved. As a result, the United States, the agency’s top funder, paused its annual $300 to $400 million funding in January, leading fifteen other donor countries to suspend their funding as well. (The United States has previously stopped and started its funding to UNRWA; in 2018 it suspended funds and called the organization “irredeemably flawed,” but restored funding in 2021.) While all donor countries except the United States have since resumed funding, the gap left by the United States—compounded by the man-made humanitarian catastrophe expanding into the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Lebanon—has strained the agency’s budget. UNRWA projects an approximately $80 million deficit that will carry into 2025.
“When the U.S. government stepped down from its moral responsibility of funding the primary humanitarian provider to 2.1 million people facing brutal assault, widespread food insecurity, spreading communicable disease, and no safe place to seek refuge, the American people have stepped up,” Kronenfeld says. She hails her eleven-person team as the “best staff members on Earth,” who garnered donations from Americans across all religious backgrounds and age groups—including Jewish donors who last Passover donated in honor of Passover’s true meaning of “freeing the oppressed from affliction.”
Kronenfeld has visited Gaza and recalls her “deep fears” when she encountered the border crossing from Israel and saw the sixty-foot walls surrounding Gaza. She relaxed only after meeting the “most welcoming smiles and hospitality in Gaza.”
“The beauty of what life was like in Gaza, despite the restrictions that 2.1 million people faced, was inspiring,” Kronenfeld says, recalling a memorable visit to the Jabalia refugee camp in 2022. “Life before October 7 was horrific for the Palestinians—and post-October 7 is beyond words, beyond any pale.”
Like Americans, Kronenfeld says, Palestinians desire “to live in freedom, have enough money to feed their family, have ownership over their future, be able to come and go, own their nationality, own their country, their home, and their space.” She says the U.S. government has failed to do “the bare minimum” in convincingly calling for an end to hostilities.
Since its inception in December 1949, following the 1948 founding of Israel, UNRWA has provided Palestine refugees with cost-effective, humanitarian services “in anticipation of a just and lasting political solution,” as Lazzarini said at a United Nations meeting in October 2024.
Since October 7, the world has witnessed what experts call the first live-streamed genocide against Palestinians. The United States and its allies offer platitudes while arming Israel, whose humanitarian aid blockade has imposed forced starvation and halted the third phase of the polio vaccination campaign for nearly 120,000 children across northern Gaza, administered by UNRWA and other groups. After being polio-free for twenty-five years, the disease reappeared in the Gaza Strip in August. At the same time, nearly two million starving Palestinians are continually forced to march elsewhere in Gaza as Israel rains 2,000-ton bombs that leave craters of more than forty feet in diameter. Meanwhile, 101 Israeli hostages remain captive as cease-fire negotiations continue to fail.
“We will continue to lead grassroots efforts to help the world community while asserting pressure on the powers be,” Kronenfeld says. “With 233 UNRWA staff members already killed by the Israeli army, the Knesset decision is a total ‘gloves off’ action and puts thousands of UNRWA’s humanitarian workers, nearly all of whom are refugees themselves, directly in harm’s way.”