Defunding UNRWA is another heinous act of genocide.

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2024/01/31/defunding-unrwa-is-genocide/

International grassroots and legal pressure continues to mount for Israel to end its genocide of Palestinians. But the Israeli and U.S. governments are seeking to deflect from the demand for accountability and continue to massacre Palestinians by any means necessary.

On Friday, the International Court of Justice found that South Africa made a plausible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians — requiring the Israeli government to do everything in its power to avoid acts of genocide, and to allow the immediate entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza. 

Just hours later, the Biden administration announced that it was instead cutting its funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA. It was quickly followed by Germany, Canada, the UK, and more than a dozen other Western countries.

UNRWA holds the entire UN mandate for serving Palestinian refugees, and is currently the single largest provider of humanitarian assistance to Gaza. The agency’s position is particularly crucial because Israel’s ongoing siege of Gaza restricts many other aid agencies from crossing the border.

More than 700,000 people in Gaza are currently facing life-threatening diseases — which are treatable with medical aid. The entire 2.3 million population of Gaza, more than half of whom are children, faces the risk of starvation. These threats are cascading: for instance, no clean water and no medical aid will lead to crisis levels of preventable deaths from diarrhea and water-borne illness.

As a result, the World Health Organization stated that even more Palestinians could die from hunger and disease than have been killed by the war so far — marking another stage of Israel’s genocide, conducted with the backing of the U.S. and Western nations.

The dubious accusations against UNRWA

In making these sudden cuts, the U.S. and more than a dozen other Western other countries cited the Israeli military’s claims that 13 UNRWA employees may have participated in the October 7 Hamas attacks. These allegations were made public on Friday, as the media was expected to cover two separate court cases accusing Israel of genocide and the U.S. of complicity. There are several problems with the accusations against UNRWA.

1.   The Israeli government has sought to undermine UNRWA for decades, recently accusing it of “perpetuating the refugee problem” — in other words, keeping Palestinians alive.

2.   The Israeli state has a long history of making false claims to distract media attention from its crimes against Palestinians.

3.   None of the evidence against the 13 UNRWA employees has been made public. The Israeli military has already changed its story around how it obtained its evidence for these most recent allegations against the 13 employees. And CNN reported that the claims are so far unsubstantiated.

4.   Accusations against 13 UNRWA employees, 0.0004% of their total workforce, hardly indicts the entire organization to the point of immediately cutting funding. By contrast, at least 153 UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military in the last few months — a war crime, one to which the U.S. government has yet to respond. 

5.   The Biden administration refuses to even place conditions on the billions of dollars in weapons and aid to the Israeli state and military — despite mountains of evidence in international court that Israel is committing genocide.

Collective punishment of Palestinians is a war crime

UNRWA does not have financial reserves. It has been chronically underfunded for years, and under immense strain as Israeli bombing has internally displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza. If the U.S. and other nations refuse to reinstate its funding, UNRWA’s budget could run out as soon as next month, placing millions of Palestinians in grave danger of death from disease and famine.

Cutting this lifesaving aid amounts to collective punishment of Palestinians, which is a war crime. And it underscores the Biden administration’s hypocrisy. Since October, it has reiterated concern about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, while continuing to fund the Israeli military campaign that is creating these conditions of devastation in the first place. 

Right now, UNRWA is the biggest thing standing between starvation and deadly disease for more than a million people. And the U.S. cutting its funding is exactly what complicity in a genocide looks like.