Humanitarian crisis in Gaza to deepen as aid is frozen
Republican senators demand permanent halt to US aid as UN says operations will start being affected in February.
Funding cuts from the US and other international donors will likely hit the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency operations over the coming month, adding to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and raising difficult questions for Washington about how best to deliver aid as the war drags on.
On Wednesday, a key group of Republican senators demanded the US permanently halt funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, less than a week after the US suspended contributions following allegations that at least 12 of its employees had connections to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.
At least 10 countries, some of them the agency’s biggest donors, have also suspended funding pending an investigation. Intelligence reports seen by The Wall Street Journal said that around 10 per cent of all of the agency’s Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres earlier this week warned that funding levels were insufficient to meet the agency’s needs in February. Unrwa didn’t respond to requests for comment on details.
The halt in funding threatens to hit Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians at a point when food shortages and lack of shelter and medical services are becoming more severe. More than 85 per cent of the population has been displaced amid Israel’s bombardment and land invasion.
More than 26,000 people, mainly women and children, have been killed in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, according to Palestinian authorities. The figure doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT) said it was “essential” the US and other nations “work through the terrible allegations that have been raised with regard to some UNRWA personnel.”
“At the same time,” a spokesman for the State Department said on Wednesday, “we think UNRWA’s work is critical and we believe that there is no other partner on the ground right now who can replace UNRWA and can deliver the humanitarian assistance.”
In a letter, 24 Republican senators, almost half the GOP conference, demanded that language permanently banning US aid to the UNRWA be added to a $US110.5 billion package that would fund aid for Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific, and tighten US border security.
“As we consider ways to provide necessary assistance to Israel in its fight against Hamas terrorists, we request that any supplemental package include an immediate and permanent prohibition against US contributions to UNRWA,” the senators wrote in their letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The senators wrote that the revelation that UNRWA staff members played a part in the Oct. 7 attacks “is not an example of a few bad apples acting out of turn. Instead, it is emblematic of an organisation where no investigation or subsequent corrective measures will ever be enough to cure the rot that is so clearly endemic to its mission.”
Led by Sen. Pete Ricketts (R., Neb.), the letter also was signed by Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a member of GOP leadership, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a close McConnell ally, and Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Other signatories include Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, a vocal advocate for more Ukraine aid, and Sens. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) and Joni Ernst (R., Iowa).
The US typically gives $US300 million to $US400 million a year in funding to UNRWA, a State Department spokesman said Tuesday. Between Oct. 1 and the suspension of funding, the US gave around $US121 million to the agency. The Trump administration suspended funding for UNRWA in 2018, but the Biden administration renewed cash flows in 2021.
UNRWA looks after more than five million Palestinians across the Middle East, including in densely packed refugee camps in the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. But its biggest operations are in Gaza, where its hundreds of schools and scores of clinics serve an estimated 80 per cent of the local population and which Hamas has ruled as a single-party state since 2007.
The agency has come to the fore since the start of the conflict as Gaza’s main on-the-ground distributor of aid from various UN and international organisations. That role was agreed upon in the internationally recognised Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism in 2014.
The UN agency coordinates the entrance and distribution of aid with a fleet of trucks, a network of warehouses and local staff. It also currently shelters 1.1 million internally displaced people out of the total estimated 1.9 million Palestinians currently displaced.
“UNRWA is indispensable and can’t be replaced or substituted,” said a statement from the Association for International Development Agencies, which coordinates the transit of international aid into Gaza through UNRWA.
The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, said on X that famine for the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinians was inevitable following the decision to defund.
The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said Tuesday that Washington had reached out to Israel for more information regarding the allegations and that it was in contact with both the UN as well as Israel regarding potential further steps.
The UN said that out of the 12 individuals implicated in the Oct. 7 attack, nine were immediately identified and terminated by the UNRWA head. One is confirmed dead and the identities of the remaining two are being clarified.
When asked whether the US would resume funding before the February deadline mentioned by Guterres, she said: “We need to see fundamental changes before we can resume providing funding directly to UNRWA.”
William Mauldin, Fatima AbdulKarim and Carrie Keller-Lynn contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal
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