West’s dilemma: fund terror, or make the suffering worse?
The furore over terror links involving the biggest UN aid agency in Gaza has further complicated the war.
The furore over terror links involving the biggest UN aid agency in Gaza has further complicated the war and poses an acute dilemma for Australia.
The news that 12 employees of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East were directly involved in the October 7 massacre of 1200 Israelis by Hamas has had a seismic global fallout.
The revelations, based on Israeli intelligence verified by the US, have led at least 12 countries including Australia to pause funding for the UN agency that provides and distributes an estimated 70 to 80 per cent of aid to Palestinians in Gaza.
The news confirms what Israel and Jewish organisations in Australia and around the world have long believed – that the UNRWA is deeply compromised by its links to Hamas and that it should be either scrapped or fundamentally reformed.
But the problem is that the UNRWA is by far the dominant player in distributing aid in Gaza, where it also runs hundreds of schools and scores of clinics. There is no aid agency equipped to take its place at short notice in the middle of a war and in the midst of a deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Any decision by Australia and other nations like the US, Germany and Japan to continue to withhold UNRWA funding was “perilous and would result in the collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza”, the heads of the UN agencies claim.
The head of the UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, has ordered an independent investigation into the allegations, but he criticised countries for withholding funding, saying that the enclave’s more than two million residents depend on the agency “for their survival”.
Yet for Australia and other large international donor countries to resume funding to the UNRWA as it currently operates would bring with it the risk that at least some of the funding could be appropriated by Hamas.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong has announced a “temporary pause” on $6m in extra funding for UNRWA which was announced just weeks ago, and Anthony Albanese has not said what Australia will do next.
“Our closest partners all fund UNRWA, including the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, and we know that as well, we take the allegations of breaches of UNRWA’s neutrality very seriously,” the Prime Minister says. He added that the issue “needs to be resolved” because “UNRWA is the only United Nations body with the mandate to provide relief and services to Palestinians in the region”.
But how did we get to this unedifying moment where the employees of such a critical and supposedly politically neutral UN agency took part in a horrific terrorist massacre?
The first thing to understand is that the UNRWA is a strange creature, an anomaly of history. It was established in 1949 after Israel’s war of independence to provide shelter, welfare and health services for some 700,000 Palestinian refugees from that conflict. But bizarrely it continues to confer refugee status on their children and subsequent generations which now number around six million, and it is the only refugee body dedicated to a specific population, with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees responsible for the rest of the world’s refugees.
As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote this week: “It is a self-perpetuating organisation, a bureaucracy whose existence – reliant on conferring refugee status on, by now, a fourth generation of Palestinians, 75 years since their great-grandparents became refugees – has become an end in itself rather than a means of solving a problem.”
And yet the UNRWA does not have a mandate to resettle refugees, but instead its 30,000 employees administer humanitarian aid and social welfare to Palestinian “refugees” in the Middle East.
In Gaza, the UNRWA employs around 13,000 workers who are overwhelmingly Palestinian. Given this, it is no surprise that some of these employees sympathise with Hamas, which has been the civil administrator of Gaza since 2006.
But the agency appears to have made little effort to enforce the political neutrality which its employees are supposed to adhere to as an aid agency. UNRWA employees are required to sign a pledge to remain neutral but the agency admits that it does not have the ability to carry out background checks on exactly who it is employing in Gaza.
UNRWA has been accused of using its schools in Gaza to implement a curriculum that promotes anti-Semitism and glorifies martyrdom. Albanese and Wong were warned in detail about these and other issues in a letter sent to them in December by 30 Jewish community and business leaders.
“Affiliation with Hamas is not a barrier for employment with UNRWA,” the Jewish leaders wrote in the letter which pleaded to the Prime Minister not to increase funding to the agency. “Investigations have revealed many members of Hamas and its affiliates among the UNRWA staff. A 2023 report by UN Watch identified 133 UNRWA educators and staff who had promoted anti-Israel hate and violence on social media alone.”
Intelligence reports revealed by The Wall Street Journal this week found that around 10 per cent of all UNRWA employees in Gaza had ties to Islamist militant groups and about half have close relatives who belong to militant groups.
It found that of the 12 employees who assisted in the October 7 attack, two helped kidnap Israelis. two others were tracked to sites where scores of Israeli civilians were shot and killed, while others co-ordinated logistics for the deadly assault, including procuring weapons.
The truth is that before these latest revelations, Western governments – including Australia – have continued to fund UNRWA knowing its links with Hamas. They have turned a blind eye to UNRWA’s failings by making the private, unspoken calculation that there is no alternative aid agency in Gaza and so it is better to fund an imperfect, dodgy agency with loose ties to Hamas, than it is to not fund the people of Gaza at all.
For example, Wong and Albanese deliberately chose to ignore the written warnings from Australian Jewish leaders in December about the “mounting evidence” that UNRWA “has been aiding and abetting Hamas, including during the horrific October 7 attacks”.
The letter cited that UNRWA “has allowed Hamas to utilise its buildings to launch rocket attacks into Israel, store weapons and build tunnels” and that the agency’s officials had “openly celebrated the October 7 attacks”.
These accusations were all true.
Despite this, Wong announced an extra $6m in funding for the agency on January 17.
She all but betrayed a lack of confidence that these funds would be used properly when she stated during her visit to the region last month that she had raised with the Palestinian Authority Australia’s “continued expectation” that the extra funds would be “used appropriately” and with “transparency” to ensure they were used correctly.
Given that the PA has no authority in war-torn Gaza, it is unclear how Australia would have had any control over the use of any extra funding which was sent to the enclave.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says Wong’s position would be “untenable” if it was revealed she had advice that funding for UNRWA could be used for purposes that “wasn’t intended by the government”.
“If she’s knowingly sent that money to a terrorist organisation, then I think that’s an outrage,” Dutton said.
Despite the shocking nature of the allegations against UNRWA on October 7, the international community has been divided in its response, largely because of the irreplaceable role that the agency plays in Gaza, especially in this current time of crisis.
The US, which is the agency’s largest donor, having pledged $US344m in 2022, said it was pausing funding along with Germany, Japan, Britain, Canada, Australia and others. But the EU said it would not suspend funding because it was critical to preserve the agency’s “irreplaceable role” in Gaza, while Norway urged other donors not to “collectively punish millions of people” for the actions of a few.
Israel dismisses the argument that the problems of the UNRWA are limited to “‘a few bad apples”.
“It’s more than a dozen bad apples. Add two zeros – and make it 1200,” Israeli government spokesman Eylan Levy said, referring to the findings that 10 per cent of UNRWA employees had ties to militant groups.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says “UNRWA is totally infiltrated with Hamas”, and that other aid agencies needed to replace the agency in Gaza.
“I say this with regret because we hoped there would be an objective and constructive body to offer aid. We need such a body today in Gaza but UNRWA is not that body,” Netanyahu said.
The problem is that UNRWA cannot simply be scrapped at short notice with nothing to replace it. Even Israel would not want that because it would find itself having to distribute aid in Gaza instead.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says the US is taking “swift action” in investigating the allegations. “The abhorrent alleged acts of these staff members must have consequences,” Guterres says. “But the tens of thousands of men and women who work for UNRWA, many in some of the most dangerous situations for humanitarian workers, should not be penalised. The dire needs of the desperate populations they serve must be met.”
It is unclear what sort of workable reforms the UN could recommend quickly that would ensure that UNRWA operates more independently of Hamas and other militant groups.
With Gaza currently a dangerous war zone, the options for any fundamental long-term reform of the enclave’s main aid agency appear limited.
Some urgent changes will need to be implemented with UNRWA but any short-term fix is likely to fall short of the comprehensive reform the agency needs.
The findings of the UN investigation and any proposals which flow from that will almost certainly be the fig-leaf which Australia, the US and other donors will grab to justify resuming funding to the UNRWA. This is because their short-term fear of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is greater than their immediate concern about UNRWA’s links with militants.
But this controversy has underlined the structurally flawed approach to delivering aid in Gaza. There must be a long-term, root-and-branch solution to the UNRWA, which has become hopelessly compromised and whose reason for existence no longer makes sense.
Whatever authority eventually replaces Hamas in Gaza will need to work with a new aid agency that can deliver the humanitarian assistance that people need, rather than one which is tainted by links with terrorists.
