Replacement of the UNRWA relief agency will be your responsibility.

Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The United Nations says replacing the Palestinian aid agency UNRWA in Gaza and the West Bank is not the world body’s responsibility, signaling it is Israel’s problem, according to an excerpt from the letter seen by Reuters.

The UN has formally responded in a letter to Israel’s decision to sever ties with the UN Relief and Works Agency. The move, UNRWA said, puts its operations in Gaza and the West Bank at risk of collapse.

Under the new law, Israel told the UN on Sunday it was ending a 1967 cooperation agreement with UNRWA that covered its protection, movement and diplomatic immunity. The law will also ban UNRWA operations in Israel from the end of January.

“I would like to point out generally that we are not obligated to replace UNRWA, nor do we have the capacity to do so,” Courtney Rattray, chief of staff to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, wrote to a senior Israeli official. Foreign Affairs spokesman late Tuesday evening.

The reference to responsibility is a veiled reference to Israel’s obligations as an occupying power.

The UN considers the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to be Israeli-occupied territory. International humanitarian law requires that an occupying power agree to programs to assist people in need and assist them “by all means at its disposal,” as well as provide food, medical care, hygiene and public health standards.

Israel’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Rattray’s letter.

“If UNRWA can no longer function, the Israeli authorities will be obliged to replace the services it provides to the civilian population in education, health and all other areas,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric later explained to reporters. .

Top UN officials and the Security Council describe UNRWA as the mainstay of relief efforts in Gaza, where Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants have been fighting for the past year, leaving the enclave in ruins and on the brink of famine.

“UNRWA can be defined in one word: failure,” Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon said at a General Assembly meeting on UNRWA on Wednesday. “The idea that UNRWA cannot be supplemented is absurd.”

“GABOTIC CONSEQUENCES”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long called for the dissolution of UNRWA, accusing it of anti-Israel incitement. Israel also says UNRWA personnel took part in the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which sparked the war in the Gaza Strip.

The UN said nine UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the incident and were fired. It was later revealed that a Hamas commander in Lebanon killed by Israel in September worked for UNRWA.

UNRWA was created in 1949 after the war surrounding the founding of Israel. It provides aid, health care and education to millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and neighboring Arab countries Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

The UN has repeatedly stated that there is no alternative to UNRWA.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that implementing the Israeli law would have “catastrophic consequences,” adding: “Millions of Palestinian refugees fear that the government services on which they depend for their lives will soon disappear.”

“They fear that their children will be deprived of education, that illnesses will go untreated and that social support will cease,” Lazzarini said. “The entire population of Gaza is afraid that their only remaining lifeline will be cut off.”

In a letter to Netanyahu last week after Israel’s parliament approved the new UNRWA law, Guterres raised a number of legal issues surrounding the decision.

Rattray reinforced this message by calling on Israel to “act consistently” in accordance with its obligations under the UN Charter and international law, emphasizing in his letter: “National legislation cannot change these obligations.”

Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – areas the Palestinians want to establish as a state – in a 1967 war. It withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 but, along with neighboring Egypt, controls the enclave’s borders.

Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour told the General Assembly: “This agency is indispensable and indispensable.”

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Don Durfee, Sharon Singleton and Rod Nickel)