‘No plan B’ to aid Palestinian refugees: UNRWA chief

GENEVA: There is no alternative to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, its chief insisted Monday, following Israel’s order to ban the organisation that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza.

“There is no plan B,” head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters in Geneva.

Within the UN family, “there is no other agency geared to provide the same activities”, providing not only aid in Gaza, but also primary health care and education to hundreds of thousands of children,“ he said.

“If you are talking about bringing in a truck with food, you will surely find alternative,” he said, but “the answer is no” when it comes to education and primary healthcare.

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He has called on the UN, which created UNRWA in 1949, to prevent the implementation of a ban on the organisation in Israel and occupied east Jerusalem, which was approved by the Israeli parliament last month.

The ban is due to take effect at the end of January.

The ordered suspension of the agency sparked global condemnation, including from key Israeli backer the United States.

UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Lazzarini cautioned that a halt to UNRWA’s activities in Israel and East Jerusalem would block it from coordinating massive aid efforts inside Gaza.

“This would mean we could not operate in Gaza … and thus the environment would be much too dangerous,” he said.

If UNRWA ceases to operate, he warned, the responsibility for providing all the services it has provided until now “will come back to the occupying power, being Israel”.

He voiced concern over how UNRWA’s employees could be impacted by the ban, saying there was a “real fear that any of them could be harassed, could be arrested, investigated, convicted for belonging (to) an organisation which in this context is considered as being a terrorist organisation”.

Tensions between UNRWA and Israel escalated after Israel in January accused about a dozen of the agency’s staff of taking part in Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

A series of probes found some “neutrality related issues” at UNRWA, and determined that nine employees “may have been involved” in the October 7 attack, but found no evidence for Israel’s central allegations.