Mother Jones; Yuri Gripas/Cnp/CNP/Zuma; Omar Ishaq/picture-alliance/dpa/AP
In mid-January, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations’ agency responsible for Palestinian refugees—known as UNRWA—received the names of 12 employees who had allegedly participated in the October 7 attack by Hamas. The Israeli diplomat who shared the information provided no evidence to support the claim. Nevertheless, Lazzarini flew to the United States from Israel to tell American officials about the disclosure and that he was responding by firing the workers on the list who remained alive and supporting a high-level independent investigation.
Lazzarini had traveled to Washington, DC, knowing it was vital to maintain the support of his agency’s largest donor, especially with Gaza on the brink of famine. If the US and its allies pulled support, UNRWA—the most important humanitarian organization in Gaza—would be crippled at the moment it was most needed.
Rather than accept Lazzarini’s assurances or offer to await the findings of the independent inquiry, the Biden administration quickly decided to temporarily pause funding for the agency, even though less than 0.1 percent of its employees in Gaza were accused of participating in the October 7 attack. In doing so, the administration imperiled the only organization capable of responding to the catastrophe caused by the Israeli assault: Scott Paul, a humanitarian policy expert at Oxfam, described the agency as the “backbone” of the response in Gaza and explained that up to 80 percent of aid to the area is dependent on it in some form. The organization has been feeding and sheltering more than 1 million people in Gaza.
More than a dozen US allies, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, followed America’s lead. Lazzarini has warned that the “rash” decisions by these countries, which led to about $450 million of donations being put on hold, have pushed UNRWA to its “breaking point.” William Deere, UNRWA’s senior congressional adviser in Washington, said nearly 70 percent of the agency’s funding was paused in some form. “We’re living month to month,” Deere explained in February. “We can muddle through March, but after that we have to shut our doors.” The organization received a reprieve last week when the European Union decided to provide about $54 million in funding, but a massive shortfall remains.
The Biden administration’s decision to suspend funding for UNRWA is emblematic of the biases that have plagued its response to the war in Gaza. Israel has gotten almost everything it wants from the United States: thousands of bombs, vetoes of UN ceasefire resolutions, and bipartisan support for billions of security assistance making its way through Congress. This is happening even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defies his most important ally, refusing to allow enough aid into Gaza to prevent famine and declining to back away from a potential invasion of Rafah. Yet there are no signs the Biden administration will impose real consequences in response.
Netanyahu and others in Israel have long hoped to get rid of the UNRWA, which they see as a reminder to the world that, under international law, millions of Palestinians are refugees who have a right of return to their former homes. The United States has long supported the agency, contributing more than $7 billion since it began operations in 1950, but even Israeli officials were reportedly surprised by how quickly the US pulled its backing. An Israeli official told the New York Times that Israelis had tried to undermine UNRWA so many times that no one expected the latest allegation to have much impact.
Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and the director of its program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs, said that the decision to suspend funding for UNRWA showed that “unproven allegations can destroy the only thing that is keeping Palestinians in Gaza alive.” He continued, “But daily evidence of Israeli war crimes is not sufficient to produce any change or actionable response from the United States like even slowing down the weapons pipeline.”
A former Biden official shared a similar view, saying, “I think what is very clear is that there are double standards at play.” The official noted that the many credible allegations that Israel has violated international human rights law since October 7 have not led to any real conditions on US military aid to Israel—much less a suspension of that aid. Nor did the ruling from the International Court of Justice that it is plausible that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. (The decision, which stopped short of ordering Israel to halt the war, came out the same day the United States suspended aid to UNRWA.) The former official pointed out that it took only allegations against 12 of 13,000 UNRWA workers to prompt a funding halt. “It’s not weapons,” the official stressed. “It’s actual humanitarian assistance that is necessary to forestall a literal famine.”
More than 30,000 people—mostly women and children—have now been killed in Gaza, according to the local health ministry. Palestinian officials said that more than 100 people died last week after Israeli soldiers opened fire on people trying to remove flour and other food from trucks. Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, and others have made clear that Israel is responsible for the dire shortage of aid that has put Gazans at risk of imminent famine. Over the weekend, the United States took the surreal step of airdropping food to the people in Gaza its own ally is starving.
The former Biden official said that current members of the administration privately argued that they needed to act quickly in response to the UNRWA allegations since some members of Congress would be sure to call for cutting funding to the agency. Temporarily suspending funding and demanding an investigation was seen as a way of “being proactive and getting ahead” of UNRWA’s critics.
In isolation, the administration’s move did not have major immediate financial consequences for UNRWA. The United States budgeted about $370 million for UNRWA in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years. After the pause took effect, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller explained that only about $300,000 was being withheld, since the next major batch of funding was still months away from being provided. He noted that the administration considers UNRWA “critical,” saying that there was “no other humanitarian player in Gaza who can provide food and water and medicine at the scale that UNRWA does.” (UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield made the same point in late January, adding that the agency has “literally saved thousands of lives.”)
But the administration’s funding suspension helped set off a chain reaction among US allies. As a result, roughly two-thirds of UNRWA’s funding ended up being paused in some form. This should not have been hard to anticipate. The former Biden official stressed that other countries often follow the United States’ lead on Israel. As a result, the official said, “The US has a moral burden for being very careful about its choices, and it doesn’t really seem like that’s what they’re doing.” Asked if the administration was surprised by the speed at which other nations paused their own contributions to UNRWA, a current official said, “We would leave it to other countries to speak to their own sovereign decisions.”
The independent UN investigation of UNRWA remains ongoing, and the White House continues to oppose restoring funding until it is completed. A current administration official said that while UNRWA “does critical, life-saving work,” there will need to be “fundamental changes before we can resume funding to UNRWA.” The United States has not said what those fundamental changes are, nor how UNRWA would be able to implement them quickly during a war that has killed more than 150 of its staff members.
For now, the administration is bypassing UNRWA. The official noted that the administration recently announced $53 million in humanitarian aid for Palestinians that will be channeled through the World Food Program and other organizations.
Oxfam’s Paul said the attempts to work around UNRWA are not feasible. He added that “for any agency to do the work that UNRWA is doing, it would have to become UNRWA” but with “less institutional continuity, oversight, quality control, and an awful lot of transaction costs.” Oxfam, he noted, has 29 staffers remaining in Gaza, compared to the thousands at UNRWA. Beyond Gaza, the agency works with refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. In total, it operates 58 refugee camps and educates more than 500,000 students.
More than a month later, it remains unclear how accurate the Israeli allegations are. When Miller announced the pause in January, he said that the United States was seeking more information about the charges. In the following days, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal published stories based on Israeli intelligence. The Journal went further than the Times by including a new and unsubstantiated Israeli claim that about 10 percent of all UNRWA workers in Gaza had ties to what the paper described as “Islamist militant groups.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he considered the Israeli claims “highly credible,” even though the United States had not yet been able to independently investigate them.
One source for the Israeli allegations is a six-page intelligence dossier that has been shared with a number of news outlets. After reviewing the dossier, the Financial Times reported that it “provides no evidence for the claims, which it says are based on smartphone intercepts and captured identity cards.” The reliability of Israeli intelligence was called further into question in February, when a different set of reporters at the Journal wrote that the United States’ National Intelligence Council had “low confidence” in the Israeli allegations about UNRWA staff involvement in the October 7 attacks because, while the claim is still considered “credible,” it has not been independently verified by the United States. A person familiar with the US report told the paper that there is a “specific section that mentions how Israeli bias serves to mischaracterize much of their assessments on UNRWA and says this has resulted in distortions.” (On Monday, the Israeli military released additional allegations against UNRWA employees that include what it says are audio recordings from the October 7 attack.)
When it comes to US funding, Congress may now pose a bigger problem for UNRWA. The supplemental national security funding bill that passed with bipartisan support by the Senate in February includes $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for security assistance for Israel, and $9 billion of humanitarian assistance that would be split between Palestine, Ukraine, and other areas. But the bill blocks these funds from going to UNRWA. The Biden administration has not been fighting to change that. (The current Biden administration official declined to say whether the administration opposes the UNRWA funding ban in the Senate bill, saying instead that the administration supports the bill as a whole.)
Elgindy places the latest Israeli allegations against UNRWA within a much longer history of Israel trying to undermine the organization. These efforts have usually failed, although the Trump administration did defund the agency in the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years. Still, Netanyahu and others hope that by undermining UNRWA, Israel will further obfuscate the reality that millions of Palestinians are the descendants of people forced off their land in what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (or catastrophe). “For a lot of Israelis, UNRWA’s very existence is a reminder that the Nakba happened. That Israel’s creation involved the dispossession of Palestinians. And so if they destroy UNRWA, they won’t have to think about it. The world won’t have to think about it,” Elgindy said. “UNRWA represents Israel’s original sin, which is the dispossession of the Palestinian people.”
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