Israel parliament considers bill banning Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA

Israel’s parliament was considering a bill on Monday that would ban the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) from working in Israel and occupied east Jerusalem, despite objections from the United States.

Lawmakers began voting on the bill on Monday night after years of harsh Israeli criticism of UNRWA, which has only increased since the start of the war in Gaza following Hamas’s deadly October 7 attacks last year.

If approved, the ban on the UN agency -- which has provided essential aid and assistance across Palestinian territories and to Palestinian refugees elsewhere for more than seven decades -- would be a blow to humanitarian work in Gaza.

The US said on Monday it was “deeply concerned” about the bill under consideration, reiterating the “critical” role the agency plays in distributing humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy expressed “profound regret” that Israel was “considering shutting down UNRWA’s operations”.

In January, Israel accused a dozen of UNRWA’s Gaza employees of involvement in the October 7 attack by Hamas, which sparked the deadliest war in the territory.

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 chief allegations.

“There is a deep connection between the terrorist organization (Hamas) and UNRWA and Israel cannot put up with it,” Yuli Edelstein, a Likud party lawmaker and one of the sponsors of the bill, said in parliament as he presented the proposal.

“There is no place for enemies in the heart of the capital of the Jewish people.”

Israel claims the whole of Jerusalem, including the annexed east, as its indivisible capital.

The proposed ban, a combination of two different private members bills presented to the Knesset by lawmakers from both the government and opposition, would effectively prevent UNRWA from operating in Israel.

The legislation would also target the agency’s operations in east Jerusalem, where it currently provides some essential services such as cleaning, education, and healthcare in certain neighbourhoods.

“There is a big gap between how UNRWA is viewed by some in the international community and how people in Israel see the agency,” Boaz Bismuth, an Israeli lawmaker who co-sponsored one of the pieces of legislation, told AFP.

UNRWA and other humanitarian agencies have accused Israeli authorities of restricting aid flows into Gaza, where almost all of the territory’s 2.4 million people have been displaced at least once in the war.

UNRWA itself has suffered heavy losses, with at least 223 of its staff killed and two-thirds of the agency’s facilities in Gaza damaged or destroyed since the war began.

The war in Gaza erupted with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 43,020 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, figures which the UN considers reliable.

Over the weekend, a statement by foreign ministers from several Western countries slammed the proposed legislation targeting the UN agency.