Several countries announced on Saturday that they had suspended funding to the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), following the United States which did so on Friday: the decision was made after Israel accused some of the agency’s employees to have been involved in the violent attack carried out by the Palestinian armed group Hamas against Israel last October 7, which started the war in the Gaza Strip. Italy, however, said it had already suspended funding before the accusations, after October 7.
In total, there are currently 9 countries that have announced the suspension of funds: the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, as well as the United States and Italy. Philippe Lazzarini, the director of UNRWA, he defined Such a reaction in response to accusations that concern only a small group of agency employees is “shocking”. Lazzarini also said that the employees involved in Israel’s accusations were immediately fired, and that an internal investigation had been launched to ascertain their possible responsibility.
The accusations were made in particular by Mark Regev, one of the advisors to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during an interview with BBC. Regev had claimed that the UNRWA union was controlled by Hamas and later said he had become aware of teachers at UNRWA schools “openly celebrating” the October 7 attack. He also said that an Israeli hostage freed by Hamas had reported spending his detention in the home of an UNRWA employee. “I think it’s time for the United Nations to investigate the links between Hamas and UNRWA,” he said. At the moment there is not enough evidence to verify the solidity of these accusations.
The UK Foreign Office said it made the decision after learning of Israel’s allegations, and that the suspension of funding would last while the allegations were examined. The European Union said it would evaluate whether to take similar measures “based on the outcome of a full investigation.”
The Italian Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, however, made it known that Italy had already suspended funding to UNRWA immediately after 7 October, although he did not explain why: in fact, after 7 October the siege of Israel began on the Gaza Strip, continued with a ground invasion, and from then on UNRWA’s role was crucial in providing assistance to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Strip who were left without water, food and medicine.
Lazzarini recalled that the agency provides assistance to “more than two million people” in the Gaza Strip. During the war between Israel and Hamas, around 150 agency employees were killed, many of them Palestinians.
UNRWA provides humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees living in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank. It has often been criticized by both Israel and some conservative US politicians, who argue that the agency’s humanitarian activities are actually exploited or controlled by the radical Palestinian group Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007.
However, it is not the first time that some countries have decided to suspend funding to UNRWA: in 2019, for example, the Netherlands and Switzerland did so after learning of situations of nepotism and discrimination that occurred within the agency, or the United States in 2018 during Donald Trump’s administration.