UNRWA alternatives must be found to dispense aid

Conditions on the ground are worsening in Gaza, with growing numbers of people, including babies a few days old, dying of malnutrition and dehydration. Hospitals and clinics are overwhelmed and barely functioning, Doctors Without Borders reports. More than 1.9 million people – about 85 per cent of Gaza’s population – have been forced to flee their homes, infrastructure is broken and disease is rampant. Vast quantities of humanitarian aid are needed, now, if the death toll, already 30,000 people, is to be contained and a glimmer of hope restored. Against this background, Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced on Friday that Australia would reinstate funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Last month Australia was among numerous countries to pause funding to the UNRWA after 12 of its staff, including teachers, were found by Israeli intelligence to have been involved in the October 7 massacre of 1200 Israelis and the kidnapping of another 250. Of those who were kidnapped, 130 have not been returned and many are presumed dead.

However worthy the government’s intentions, funding UNRWA must only be a short-term measure for helping Gazans. New and more trustworthy corridors of transferring aid are opening up. On Tuesday a Spanish aid boat left the port of Larnaca in Cyprus, towing 200 tonnes of relief goods roughly 400km across the Mediterranean to Gaza. A second vessel has been loaded and US charity World Central Kitchen said work was under way on a jetty to unload the shipment. Four US Army vessels have left Virginia with 100 soldiers and equipment needed to build a temporary port with an offshore platform and pier to bring aid ashore. Morocco has sent a plane loaded with 40 tonnes of relief supplies directly to Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv; and under a pilot project for delivering aid directly into northern Gaza, six World Food Program trucks entered through a new crossing. All of which has come months too late. The port facilities and ongoing aid will be vital for the foreseeable future. But after the immediate crisis has passed, the UNRWA should be disbanded. Given its long, extensive links with Hamas, it should have no role to play after the war ends and rebuilding starts.

Senator Wong says she is reinstating funding after “the best available current advice from agencies and the Australian government lawyers” concluded UNRWA was not a terrorist organisation. Additional safeguards would “sufficiently protect” taxpayer funding, she said. But six weeks ago, an extensive investigation by The Wall Street Journal uncovered how deeply the UNRWA has compromised itself across many years. About 10 per cent of its Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, according to intelligence reports reviewed by the Journal. That accounts for the fact that for years relief workers and the Israeli military have found weapons caches in UNRWA-run schools. They also reported underground tunnels beneath UNRWA facilities, the theft of agency-provided fuel and aid by Hamas, and UNRWA teachers promoting the hatred of Jews and Israel.

What began as a small agency providing emergency relief for refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war grew into an organisation of 30,000 staff, with a $2bn budget funded mainly by the West. But when Gaza will be ready for a new start it will be past its use-by date. As opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham says, Senator Wong has acted before the US, which is waiting on the completion of the independent review. By acting out of step with the US, Australia was “failing to take advantage of the type of leverage that could get more effective outcomes”. Senator Wong’s announcement pleased the Greens, who said it should be the start of the government breaking away from “unquestioning and immoral support of Israel”. There are alternatives to the UNRWA. As Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion said, other agencies in Gaza – the World Health Organisation, the World Food Program, the Red Cross and UNICEF – would be more trustworthy conduits of aid. The notion that the UNRWA has changed its spots in a few weeks is not plausible.