On 28 October 2024, the Israeli Knesset passed two bills aimed at banning the operations and functions of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) across all occupied Palestine. The Global Network of Experts on the Question of Palestine (GNQP) strongly condemns the adoption of this legislation. It marks a further significant stage in Israel’s institutionalized settler-colonial-erasure of Palestine and Palestinians.
The two laws are the culmination of decades of Israeli attacks seeking to dismantle the Agency. They effectively terminate UNRWA’s essential services across all of Palestine and cut contact with the Israeli occupation authorities. For the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, this will result in a further sharp decline in the conditions already created by Israel’s well-documented genocidal actions. For the 1.1 million Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, these laws will result in a marked acceleration in the deterioration of the conditions of life that they are already facing. For both groups, the threat is existential. Obstructing UNRWA across all occupied Palestine is designed to advance Israel’s genocidal goal of the destruction of the Palestinian people.
The enactment of these laws coincides with Israel’s current intensified assault on Gaza. Following a year of unchecked genocide, northern Gaza has endured a heightened siege for 30 days that has increased the already grave deliberate food shortage that is starving the population. Relentless bombardments have resulted in multiple massacres, killing hundreds, wounding thousands, many suffering life-changing injuries, and leaving an unknown number dying under the rubble. These attacks have rendered all hospitals inoperative. Simultaneously, Israel has intensified its operations in the rest of occupied Palestine, where escalating levels of violence have become a daily reality, ranging from forced displacement, lethal military incursions, and settler attacks to extensive mass detention and torture, destruction of homes and property, and denial of food production.
It is relevant that Israel’s actions in Lebanon are mirroring practices deployed in Gaza: in the last month, over 2,300 civilians have been killed, 1.9 million have been displaced, and hospitals, journalists, and healthcare workers have been systematically targeted.
The creation of the State of Israel between 1947 and 1949 resulted in the Nakba, the crystallization of a systematized project of ethnic cleansing and annihilation of the Palestinian people that resulted in massacres as well as the forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians into permanent exile. UNRWA was established in 1949 by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and mandated to deliver humanitarian assistance and protect Palestinian rights until a ‘just resolution of the question of Palestine refugees’ is achieved. Palestinian refugees have an inalienable right to return to their homeland. Reaffirmed annually since UNGA Resolution 194 in 1948, Israel has persistently denied the right of return to the 750,000 Palestinians it forcibly displaced during the Nakba, along with their descendants, who now exceed 9 million Palestinian refugees coerced to live outside their homeland. Preventing the exercise of this right has been a central objective of Israel’s attacks against UNRWA, as it represents a fundamental challenge to Israel’s illegal aims. This is especially so in Gaza, where 80% of Palestinians are refugees with legally justified claims to their homes and lands in Palestine, inside the so-called “Green Line”.
Israel’s ban on UNRWA is thus part of Israel’s settler-colonial project to create “Greater Israel”, extending its control over all of historic Palestine and beyond, while erasing Palestinian Indigenous presence.
UNRWA remains the sole organization equipped to provide essential humanitarian aid and relief to Palestinians, especially in Gaza, during this critical juncture in Palestine’s history of colonial dispossession. At the same time, a just solution to the ongoing eruption of genocidal violence requires addressing the root causes of the disenfranchisement of Palestinians: Israel’s settler-colonial occupation. It is necessary to move beyond treating Palestine as a humanitarian crisis to be managed in perpetuity. The international community must reckon with the colonial legacy that enabled Israel’s establishment as a settler colony in 1948 and has emboldened its expansion until today. This could not have happened without the unlimited political, military and financial outside support that has given Israel effective immunity from the consequences of its unlawful actions.
The new legislation breaches Article 105 of the UN Charter, the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, and UN Security Council resolution 2730 of May 2024 on the protection of humanitarian and UN personnel. Moreover, it defies the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the unlawfulness of Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem, and the subsequent UN General Assembly’s resolution calling for the withdrawal of Israel from these areas by September 2025. By adopting these laws, Israel violated the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice in South Africa v. Israel, which urged Israel to cease all its actions that create conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the protected Palestinian group and to allow for unhindered and appropriate humanitarian aid into Gaza. By banning UNRWA, Israel leaves no doubt that it intends to erase the Palestinians as a people.
The GNQP welcomes the global condemnation of Israel’s UNRWA ban. At the same time, the GNQP urges member states and private actors to take concrete, immediate, and pragmatic actions to put an end to Israel’s long-standing settler-colonial project and deliver justice to the Palestinian people. This necessitates increasing financial and political support to UNRWA, suspending Israel from the UNGA, and taking effective political, diplomatic, and economic countermeasures against Israel, with a two-way arms embargo being the obvious highest priority.
