On Thursday Philippe Lazzarini, the director of UNRWA, the United Nations agency responsible for providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees, he said that the organization will temporarily close its headquarters in East Jerusalem after a series of attacks, attributed to Israeli individuals. According to Lazzarini, in the last week some Israeli inhabitants of the area, about whom he gave no further details, set two fires outside the agency’s headquarters, causing major damage and putting staff at risk. Lazzarini added that the fires were put out by UNRWA personnel themselves due to delays in the intervention of the Israeli police.
UNRWA has been providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinians since 1949, the year after the founding of the state of Israel, remembered in the Arab world and particularly in Palestine as the Nakba“the day of catastrophe”, due to the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the lands they inhabited.
Israel has long accused the agency of having links with Hamas, the radical Palestinian group that massacred more than a thousand Israeli civilians last October 7: having to operate in the Gaza Strip, governed by the radical group since 2007, in many cases the agency is obliged to work closely with Hamas. The extent of their collaboration is debated, but UNRWA has repeatedly distanced itself from Hamas’ methods and condemned violence against Israelis. In January the Israeli government opened an investigation into the alleged role of 12 UNRWA employees in the October 7 attacks, without any evidence.