Israeli ban on UNRWA justified

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s indignation over the Knesset’s ban on operations of the controversial UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which the Israeli parliament has decreed a terror organisation, is no surprise. She believes the UN agency, which has more than 30,000 employees, does “lifesaving work”. It may do.

But events since the slaughter of 1200 Jews on October 7 last year show UNRWA members are troublingly close to Hamas. The democratically elected Knesset has every right to act in Israel’s security interests as the nation is confronting a threat to its existence.

UNRWA confirmed last week that one of its staff killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, Muhammad Abu Attawi, was a commander of Hamas’s Nukhba special forces. According to Israel, he led the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7. According to Israeli reports, UNRWA was informed of Attawi’s involvement with Hamas in July but the UN body took no action.

With foreign ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain, Senator Wong has argued in a joint statement that without UNRWA’s work the provision of lifesaving humanitarian aid and basic services to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and across the region will be “severely hampered if not impossible, with devastating consequences on an already critical and rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation”.

Reality suggests otherwise. Gaza’s desperate people should be better off assisted by Israel’s own highly efficient, well-resourced welfare systems and freed from UNRWA’s unhelpful interference. The UN agency’s bias against Israel has caused problems virtually since UNRWA was founded in 1949.

In response to the Knesset’s 92-10 vote against UNRWA, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that Israel “stands ready” to provide effective humanitarian aid to desperate Palestinians.

Having banned UNRWA, Israel has an inviolable obligation to make good on Mr Netanyahu’s word. Israel will be judged on its record. As Bill Shorten says: “There’s a lot of Palestinian people who are not members of Hamas who are suffering, and we’ve got to make sure they’re getting food and aid. There are innocent civilians caught up in this, and they’ve got to get food and aid … that’s got to happen.”

Israeli animus towards the UN has been intensified by the deranged outburst of Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, an Italian, who claimed Israel killing Hamas leader, mass murderer and architect of the October 7 massacre Yahya Sinwar was “quite inhumane … I do not believe that this is justice”.