UNRWA's Mission is Critical to Regional Security

Mara Rudman

United States, regional, Israeli and Palestinian security requires that American and other international support for UNRWA should resume, conditional on (1) outside audit on how the organization came to function in such as a way as to tolerate Hamas operatives embedded among its staff, and (2) an assessment on whether and how its mandate might be executed more effectively, including by other entities.

Five key points underlie this conclusion.

UNRWA has many shortcomings, which its most immediate failures expose.

UNRWA just fired 12 staff who, based on the strength and rapidity of the US pause on funding, were operatives who participated in the barbaric ISIS-like Hamas attack on Israelis; more may be affiliated with Hamas in some way. In my experience working with Israeli military, Palestinian leaders, and UN officials, I found some in UNRWA leadership to tend toward the sanctimonious, too often painting only in black and white, when the reality was much more often a continuum between the two. And in so doing, they rarely acknowledged fault or shortcomings within their own organization. This has rendered them on occasion blind, and often blinkered in their outlook.

UNRWA’s mission is unique, and it is critical to regional security and stability, including that in Israel.

UNRWA is mandated to provide assistance and protection specifically to some 5.4 million registered refugees, in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. UNRWA’s mandate includes providing education, health care, and social services to its target population, as well as employment and direct relief. Employing 13,000 Palestinians in Gaza; UNRWA is the single largest employer. It runs the only public school system in Gaza. A majority of the two million Palestinians in Gaza depended on UNRWA assistance before Oct 7. For the services UNRWA provides to a desperate population there is no substitute at this time.

Providing for the most basic needs of Palestinians is part and parcel of providing security for the State of Israel.

Having two million famished, increasingly desperate people, long treated as expendable by de facto Hamas rulers, with no ability to move and limited ability to provide for themselves and their families, within walking distance of southern Israel and Egypt’s Sinai, threatens Israeli and Egyptian security and stability.

Palestinians that are food secure, and able to sustain themselves and their families, and have a political horizon that will one day realistically offer a better future for their children, are Palestinians less likely to be drawn to, or be forced to serve terrorist forces such as Hamas.

Israeli military officials long have been committed to getting humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

I know from the countless hours I spent with them on the details -- they prioritized doing so because they saw it as directly serving Israeli security interests. They worked closely with UNRWA leaders and other UN officials to devise the most effective and secure means for executing these aims. They did so appreciating that there was risk involved, but they saw far greater risk to their country, and their security, if critical goods were not able to flow, and they knew these UN entities were vital actors to ensure provision of such services in Gaza in particular.

Aid to UNRWA is key to meeting basic needs of Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, and thus critical to Israeli, regional, and US security.

For that aid to resume, we need a framework to assess what has gone so terribly wrong within the agency and whether it can be righted with internal reform or requires a transition of responsibilities to another organization within or outside of the UN. The development and oversight of the audit necessary for such assessment should be led from outside of UNRWA.

Aid must resume to UNRWA as the assessment is being carried out; Palestinians, Israelis, the region, the United States, and the world, cannot afford the risk of famine taking root in Gaza.

Mara Rudman

Former deputy envoy and chief of staff for the Office of the US Special Envoy for Middle East Peace and former official at the National Security Council