The allegations, that have yet to be substantiated, and the halt in UNRWA funding by ten Western countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Australia, raise questions that go far beyond UNRWA’s potential culpability. The nine countries’ move freezes US$667 million pledged to UNRWA.

Gaza’s third largest employer, UNRWA is the leading UN aid agency in the Strip. UNRWA, the only UN arm focused exclusively on one group of refugees, has a staff of 13,000, including 3,000, who have reported to work during the Gaza war. More than 130 UNRWA staffers have been killed in the war.

The US and Israel’s allegations came barely 24 hours after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) warned that Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war risked acts of genocide.

The court ordered Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

The Western funding freeze threatens to aggravate an already dire human apocalypse in Gaza. It violates the principles of due process that would give UNRWA an opportunity to defend itself and address legitimate complaints.

Due process would have also allowed the US and others to adopt positions less at odds with the court ruling and more independent of Israeli policy.

Not all Western countries followed the US lead. Norway and Ireland have opted for a more balanced approach. With UNWRA’s future in doubt, the organisation’s former spokesman, Christopher Gunness, warned that wealthy Gulf states’ failure to step in would come to haunt them.

Countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are seemingly hesitant to fund an organisation accused of links to Hamas. The two countries would like to see Hamas defeated because of its links to the Muslim Brotherhood and violence, even if they condemn Israel’s devastating military tactics.

Former UNWRA official Lex Takkenberg suggested that the organization may only feel the financial pinch several months down the road. He said UNRWA will likely have received “large advances” on pledged funds that will keep it afloat for some time.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy advisor, Ophir Falk, asserted that there was “abundant evidence… It seems that this is just the tip of the iceberg… An in-depth investigation is underway.”Falk said the evidence was on camera and based on information revealed by captured Hamas operatives.

The US-led response to the allegations bolsters a long-standing Israeli campaign against UNRWA that is as much an integral part of a broader policy to undermine Palestinians’ refugee status as it may be based on legitimate concerns.

Israel hopes to undermine Palestinians’ insistence on the right to self-determination and an independent state by depriving many of them of their refugee status that dates to Israel’s creation and the 1948 and 1967 Middle East wars. To be sure, UNWRA defines as refugees not only those Palestinians who fled the wars, but also their descendants, now in their fourth generation. In doing so, the agency has a vested interest in maintaining their status, which is not to diminish Palestinian rights.

By not following due process, Western countries have fuelled an Israeli campaign that could add to the suffering in Gaza and complicate efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Critics take Mr. Katz’s assertion with a grain of salt. UNRWA has not denied allegations that 12 staff members participated in the October 7 attack in which 1,100 people, mostly civilians, were killed.

In response to the allegations, UNRWA said it had fired the employees identified by the US and Israel. “Any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution,” UNRWA said. The UN organisation noted that it “shares the list of all its staff with host countries every year, including Israel. The Agency never received any concerns on specific staff members.”

UNRWA has asked for an independent investigation, while warning that Gazans depended on it for humanitarian aid. The investigation could substantiate allegations that support for Hamas among UNRWA staff is broader than the organisation has admitted. UN Watch, a pro-Israel group focused on the United Nations, asserted that 3,000 UNRWA teachers were members of a Telegram chat group that “celebrated the October 7th Hamas massacre.”It was unclear whether the chat group included only current staff or also past employees.

Before the war, UNRWA allocated 58 per cent of its budget to education. It operated 183 schools in Gaza attended by 286,000 students that follow curricula provided by the Palestine Authority supplemented by materials produced by the UN organisation’s staff.

Since the war, UNRWA schools have become shelters for Palestinians displaced by hostilities. A November 2023 report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-SE), an Israeli group that engages in textbook analysis, asserted that materials in UNRWA schools were “openly anti-Semitic and continue to encourage violence, jihad, and martyrdom while peace is not taught as preferable or even possible. Extreme nationalism and Islamist ideologies proliferate throughout the curriculum, including in science and math textbooks.”

The report cited, among others, an exercise for 9th graders that celebrated a Palestinian firebombing attack on a Jewish bus as a “barbecue party” and a female fighter who in 1978 allegedly murdered Gail Rubin, the niece of US Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff, and hijacked a bus, killing 38 Israelis, including 13 children.

Responding to an earlier March 2023 report co-authored by Impact-Se and UN Watch, UNRWA said its staff “receive regular in-person training sessions and mandatory online courses on humanitarian principles, social media use, and ethics. In addition, UNRWA undertakes regular and meticulous reviews of all textbooks and learning materials.”In response to a 2022 report, UNRWA asserted it had “in reviewing the material referenced in the report…, discovered the existence of a private, commercial website that illegally utilizes the Agency’s logo and the names of UNRWA educators. The Agency is seeking additional information on these sites for follow-up action, including possible legal referral.”

UNRWA noted that Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Educational Media or Georg Eckert Institute had concluded in a 2021 study that Impact-se reports were “marked by generalising and exaggerated conclusions based on methodological shortcomings” that require “further investigation based on an overarching and comprehensive examination of the textbooks, contextualising the specific passages mentioned.” (Arabian Post — IPA Service)