If I were to borrow, for a few minutes, the pen of the newspaper’s artist and cartoonist, colleague Nasser al-Jaafari, I would draw a tent bearing the UNRWA logo, erected in front of the international body’s glass building, located on the banks of the East River in central New York, with the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, its Director-General, Philippe Lazzarini, and a number of his employees inside, covered with blankets, and lighting a kerosene stove for heating and preparing food.

If my grandparents, my father and my mother were victims of the first Nakba, with their forced exodus from the village of Beit Atab in 1948, and their “temporary” asylum, which became permanent in the Deheishe camp, then the international agency that provided them and hundreds of thousands of refugees, who were distributed in the homeland and the diaspora, with education, health and relief services, and the construction of “temporary” housing, became a refugee like them, living in a tent.

Without UNRWA, I would not have been able to write this daily column and become the editor-in-chief of the largest newspaper in the country. It is to it that I owe my education and my family’s salvation from the scourge of poverty, disease, need, ignorance and miserable housing, which the refugees found themselves facing after their means of decent living were cut off.

Today, as UNRWA itself is added to the refugee list, this is the greatest disaster for the afflicted who are being killed morning and evening in Gaza, and who are dying of hunger and poverty. At the moment when they are most in need of the services of the Relief Agency, its tent is being removed from them, leaving them prey to killing, hunger, terror and displacement.

After about eight decades, Israel returns to its former ways, as a gang that commits crimes of genocide, and is reassured that it will escape punishment, or even accountability, as if it is not questioned about what it does!

Stop the war of extermination now!