Today, Tuesday, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, commented on Tel Aviv’s decision to prevent Philippe Lazzarini, Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), from entering Gaza by saying, “Israel does not want witnesses to genocide.”

On her account on the “X” platform, Albanese said: “The man-made conditions that cause the largest number of people to ever face starvation, coupled with mass killing, ongoing harm and the creation of conditions that destroy the lives of humanity, has a name: genocide.”

Earlier Monday, Lazzarini announced in a post on the “X” platform that Israel had refused him passage to the Gaza Strip, “while famine is about to spread” in the northern Gaza Strip.

On the other hand, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that preventing Lazzarini from entering Gaza was incorrect.

The director of UNRWA said in a press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukry in Cairo on Monday that he intended to go to Rafah, but he was informed an hour ago that entry was denied.

Shukry added, during the same press conference: “To be clear and clear, it was the Israeli government that prevented it, not Egypt, and this is an unprecedented position against a UN official.”

Since January 26, 18 countries and the European Union have suspended their funding to the UN agency, against the backdrop of Israeli allegations that a number of its employees participated in the attack on settlements adjacent to the Gaza Strip on October 7, while the agency announced that it was investigating those allegations.

The Israeli allegations against UNRWA come at a time when Tel Aviv has been waging a devastating war on the Gaza Strip since that date, causing it to appear before the International Court of Justice on charges of committing “genocide,” after the war left tens of thousands of civilian victims, most of them children and women, in addition to an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. It was preceded by massive destruction of infrastructure. UNRWA was established by a decision of the United Nations General Assembly in 1949, and was authorized to provide assistance and protection to refugees in its five areas of operations, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, until a just solution to their issue is reached.