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By Lazar Berman,
FM Katz dismisses idea that no other agency can do UNRWA work, says it handles only 13% of Gaza aid; Israel’s UN envoy says Israel won’t cooperate with groups that promote terror
The Foreign Ministry on Monday officially informed the United Nations that Israel is withdrawing from the 1967 agreement recognizing the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA after the Knesset passed legislation to severely limit the operations of the agency in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Foreign Ministry Director-General Jacob Blitshtein sent the letter to UN General Assembly President Philemon Yang of Cameroon, informing him that “Israel will continue to work with international partners, including other United Nations agencies, to ensure the facilitation of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not undermine Israel’s security. Israel expects the United Nations to contribute to and cooperate in this effort.”
Last week, the Knesset passed a bill banning UNRWA from operating from Israeli territory and prohibiting Israeli government agencies from working with UNRWA. The bill takes effect in three months.
“UNRWA — the organization whose employees participated in the October 7th massacre and many of whose employees are Hamas operatives — is part of the problem in the Gaza Strip and not part of the solution,” Foreign Minister Israel Katz said. “The UN was presented with endless evidence about Hamas operatives working at UNRWA and about the use of UNRWA facilities for terror purposes and nothing was done about it.”
Katz also noted that only 13 percent of the aid to Gaza currently goes through UNRWA, and argued the idea that there is no alternative to UNRWA is a fiction.
Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon welcomed Monday’s move, slamming the UN for not taking action after Israel submitted evidence of Hamas’s infiltration of the refugee agency.
“The State of Israel will continue to cooperate with humanitarian organizations but not with organizations that promote terrorism against us,” he wrote on X.
The legislation has alarmed the United Nations and some of Israel’s Western allies who fear it will further worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, where Israel has been fighting Hamas terrorists since they carried out the October 7, 2023, massacre.
While Israel has worked to gradually limit UNRWA’s role in the delivery of humanitarian aid, in favor of the World Food Program, UNICEF, and other agencies, UNRWA is still heavily involved in the Strip’s humanitarian operation, running shelters, clinics, and warehouses.
And despite pledges by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Foreign Ministry to make sure that the flow of aid remains uninterrupted, representatives of the International Organization for Migration and UNICEF have both stated that they would be unable to fill the gap left behind when UNRWA has to cut back or halt operations in Gaza.
Israel has long had a combative relationship with UNRWA, which it argues has perpetuated the Palestinian refugee crisis by allowing the status to be passed down through generations. Frustration with UNRWA in Jerusalem has picked up over the past decade as Israel has found the Gaza-ruling Hamas terror group embedded within the agency’s infrastructure.
That anger has peaked since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, in which a number of UNRWA staffers were found to have participated, including kidnapping and killing Israelis. Israel has alleged that 10 percent of the UN agency’s staff have ties to Hamas — a charge the agency has denied.
Ahead of the passage of the legislation, UNRWA confirmed that a Hamas Nukbha commander killed in an Israeli strike, who led the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7 last year, had been employed by the agency since July 2022.
Against this backdrop, the two bills swiftly made their way through the Knesset, with sponsorship from both coalition and opposition lawmakers.
Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com
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