In a report Thursday, The New York Times noted that in mid-January, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, received a paper that threatened to destroy his organization. The organization was already in deep crisis. Three months had passed since Hamas fighters stormed the barrier between Gaza and Israel, killing about 1,200 people, including 311 soldiers, and taking 250 others hostage, according to the official Israeli account.

“In response, Israel rained bombs on Gaza’s cities, killing tens of thousands, vowing to crush Hamas. Lazzarini’s organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, known as UNRWA, was uniquely equipped to respond to the humanitarian crisis that followed. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.2 million people were refugees, and providing them with services gave UNRWA a major role in the region,” the paper said.

After Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority, which now operates only in the West Bank, Gazans were left with a deeply dysfunctional government and increasingly dependent on the agency. Before the war, UNRWA operated more than 300 schools, health centers, warehouses, fuel depots and other facilities in Gaza and had 13,000 employees. Unlike other UN agencies, its staff is made up almost entirely of local Palestinians, not international aid workers. Amid the ongoing Israeli bombardment, there was simply no other organization so deeply integrated in the region and with the infrastructure to distribute food, provide shelter and meet the basic needs of so many displaced and traumatized people.

Lazzarini, a Swiss-Italian veteran of UN relief operations in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, took over UNRWA in 2020. He had hoped to put the agency back on a firmer footing, which for more than seven decades had teetered from one emergency to the next as turmoil in the Middle East battered the impoverished Palestinians UNRWA sought to help. But the war put an end to those plans. “Repeated evacuation orders and the devastation caused by the Israeli air campaign have displaced about nine out of ten Gazans, some multiple times.”

At various points, the agency says, more than a million people — nearly half of Gaza’s population — sought refuge in UNRWA facilities, with large families crowding into classrooms or warehouses that once held flour and medicine. As the war devastated Gaza, Lazzarini met regularly with Israeli officials to facilitate the movement of aid and agency staff in and around the territory. Relations between UNRWA and Israel have long been strained by the agency’s involvement in one of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the fate of Palestinian refugees. Since its founding in 1949, UNRWA has been tasked with caring for Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the creation of the Jewish state. As the original Palestinian refugees passed from generation to generation, their numbers have grown to nearly six million, scattered mainly across the Middle East.

UNRWA is a historically unique case, experts say: it is the only UN agency dedicated to a specific group of refugees, but it has no capacity to solve their root problems of displacement and statelessness. “Its Western funders mostly see the agency as a force for stability in a volatile region until the Palestinian refugee issue is resolved through a peace agreement. Many Israelis take a less tolerant view, especially as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed the country to the right. They argue that UNRWA’s very existence perpetuates the conflict by perpetuating the idea that these refugees will one day somehow return to their ancestral homeland, in what is now Israel, and destroy the Jewish state.”

On January 18, Israel claimed in an interview with the UN that 12 UNRWA employees it believes were involved in the October 7 attack, without evidence, forcing the UN to expel the 12, whose names Israel had given to the agency. The United States then froze funding to UNRWA. Other donors followed suit. Britain, Canada, Australia, Finland, Germany, Estonia and Japan suspended donations over the next two days. Within four days, 18 countries had frozen more than $430 million in expected funds, threatening to cripple the organization during the greatest crisis in its history.

“The donors’ reactions shocked UNRWA officials; the allegations were not verified and involved less than 0.1 percent of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza. They warned that cutting funding would make it harder to help Gaza’s most vulnerable people during a devastating war,” the paper says.

Israel has offered little evidence to support this claim, but Israeli leaders have seized on it, arguing that the agency should be shut down. “It is time for the international community and the United Nations itself to understand that UNRWA’s mission must end,” Netanyahu told a group of UN ambassadors on January 31. “UNRWA perpetuates itself. It perpetuates itself also in its desire to keep the Palestinian refugee issue alive.”

Netanyahu called for other relief agencies to replace UNRWA in Gaza, describing it as irreparable, claiming that "UNRWA is completely infiltrated by Hamas."

UNRWA was born shortly after the United Nations itself. In the aftermath of World War II, the new world body was trying to solve global problems through consensus. One of these problems was what to do about the more than 700,000 Palestinians who had been forced into exile when Israel was founded, an event known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” World powers hoped that the displaced would soon return to their towns and communities or start new lives elsewhere. But it was not clear how this would happen, as the new Israeli government refused to allow the refugees to return, and the Arab governments to which they had fled did not want them to stay. Meanwhile, the refugees were sleeping rough and facing starvation. So, in 1949, the UN General Assembly created UNRWA to meet their immediate needs until a permanent solution could be found.

Seventy-four years later, that has not happened yet. As the original Palestine refugees have passed on their status to their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, UNRWA has grown. It has 32,000 staff in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, working mostly in 58 official refugee camps, which have evolved from makeshift tent cities into crowded neighborhoods of small dwellings and apartment buildings. In its first decade of operation, UNRWA tried to help individual refugees establish businesses as shoemakers, blacksmiths and carpenters, while at the same time pursuing ambitious regional water plans, inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority (in the southern United States), that it hoped would create long-term agricultural employment. “These efforts to quietly resettle the refugees outside of historic Palestine failed, largely because Arab states did not want to integrate the refugees and the refugees did not want to be resettled—they wanted to return to their homes. As a result, much of UNRWA’s work in recent decades has focused on education and health care. Before the war, more than half a million children attended its 700 schools, and two million patients sought care at its 140 health centers each year,” the paper said.

There is nothing else like it in the UN’s pantheon of agencies. No other agency is dedicated to such a specific group or runs the school and health systems. More than 97 percent of its staff are Palestinians, who earn far less than other UN employees and do not receive diplomatic passports. Although the organization has been around for decades, it remains officially “temporary.” The UN General Assembly renews its mandate every few years, but the UN provides only a small portion of its budget. The rest comes from donors. “It is a UN in name only,” says one UNRWA official.

Over the years, the Israeli occupation authorities have leveled a range of criticisms at UNRWA, with Israeli officials accusing it of being far from a neutral UN agency, but rather a Palestinian organization in international guise. They accuse UNRWA’s top leaders (mostly Westerners) of violating UN neutrality rules by criticizing Israel. An Israeli-based research organization issues regular reports alleging that UNRWA schools encourage extremism and anti-Semitism, highlighting the appearance in its schools of regional maps that exclude Israel or lessons about Palestinian figures that Israel considers terrorists. UNRWA officials say they use local textbooks so that students can easily transfer to regional high schools but supplement them with UNRWA’s own materials and remove any content that violates UN principles.

But the most common criticism is that UNRWA allows Palestinians to pass on their refugee status to each new generation, ensuring that their numbers continue to grow and turning calls for a “right of return” into a growing existential threat to the Jewish state. UN officials point out that this policy is not unique to the Palestinians. It is common for people displaced by long-running conflicts, such as those in Afghanistan and Myanmar, to pass on their refugee status to their children. More than a third of the 625,000 registered Syrian refugees in Jordan were born there, and the Syrian war began just 13 years ago. This phenomenon is even more pronounced among Palestinians, who were displaced seven decades ago and have no country to return to. Yet the UN treats Palestinians differently in some ways. When the UN set global standards for the treatment of refugees, there could be no discrimination against them.

Many Palestinians believe they have suffered a grave historical wrong, and despite UNRWA's inability to provide them with a durable solution, refugees have long viewed the agency as proof that the UN remains invested in resolving their plight, and as evidence of their right to return.

The paper says that this kind of talk angers Jewish Israelis, who see the demand for a “right of return” as a demographic Trojan horse. And because UNRWA is the one that registers every new refugee, they see the agency as a conspiracy.

“UNRWA must go, because it is the flaming sword hanging over the Jewish state,” Einat Wilf, a former Labor Party member of the Israeli Knesset and anti-UNRWA activist, was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “Shut it down, stop funding it, in order to send a message to the Palestinians that the 1948 war ended long ago, that the State of Israel is here to stay, that they need to move on” and that there is no right of return for them.

This trend is receiving great support in the US Congress, which has taken a series of decisions not only to stop funding the agency, but to declare it an illegal agency that supports terrorism.