’The UN’s refugee agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, is the focus of major scrutiny after Israel claimed some UNRWA staff were involved in the October 7th attacks, and thousands more were members of Hamas, or supportive of it. Now one of two UN investigations has concluded that UNRWA does need to improve its measures to uphold the humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality, but that Israel has offered no supporting evidence for its claims that many UNRWA staff support Hamas. Many people around the world hadn’t really heard of UNRWA before this scandal - so what is it exactly, why was it founded, and does it really need to continue? Imogen Foulkes takes a deep dive, talking to UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, Israeli diplomat Nina Ben-Ami, Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Louis Charbonneau of Human Rights Watch.
Inside Geneva looks at what’s at stake.
For more stories on the international Geneva please visit www.swissinfo.ch/
Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
’The UN’s refugee agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, is the focus of major scrutiny after Israel claimed some UNRWA staff were involved in the October 7th attacks, and thousands more were members of Hamas, or supportive of it. Now one of two UN investigations has concluded that UNRWA does need to improve its measures to uphold the humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality, but that Israel has offered no supporting evidence for its claims that many UNRWA staff support Hamas. Many people around the world hadn’t really heard of UNRWA before this scandal - so what is it exactly, why was it founded, and does it really need to continue? Imogen Foulkes takes a deep dive, talking to UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, Israeli diplomat Nina Ben-Ami, Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Louis Charbonneau of Human Rights Watch.
Inside Geneva looks at what’s at stake.
For more stories on the international Geneva please visit www.swissinfo.ch/
Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, imogen Folks, and this is a production from SwissInfo, the international public media company of Switzerland.
Speaker 2:In today's programme, Unroha remains the only lifeline in a region full of despair, a region which now deserves that we collectively look at promoting a proper, genuine piece of political solution.
Speaker 3:I think that there have to be alternatives to UNRWA and Gaza. Israel will not continue working with UNRWA and Gaza. We are not.
Speaker 4:A long-running complaint is that UNRWA, by its very nature and its very mandate, keeps the refugee issue alive, issues like the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
Speaker 5:We have more dead children in Gaza in these four or five months than in all other armed conflict combined worldwide in the same period.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. In today's programme we're going to cautiously but objectively take a look at a UN agency which for years, it seems, was not in the news but is now in the eye of a political and media storm. That agency is UNRWA, long version of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. The year was 1948. Around 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land and the state of Israel came into being.
Speaker 2:The conflict died down, but its effects remained.
Speaker 6:Material ruins but above all a new problem an exodus of almost a million Arab refugees.
Speaker 1:UNRWA was founded in 1949 to support almost a million Palestinians who were expelled or fled from what is now Israel, losing their homes and livelihoods in the process. That was, yes, 75 years ago. So when UNRWA's Commissioner General, Philippe Lazarini, came to Geneva, I asked him why the organisation still existed after all this time.
Speaker 2:In reality, it's an organisation providing services such as education, primary health care to one of the most destitute communities in the Middle East, being the Palestinian refugees, and UNRWA has been created to be a temporary organisation to provide these services, to provide also some job opportunity, to invest, in fact, in human development of this community until the day there is a lasting and fair political solution between Israel and Palestine. Now, the fact that we still exist 75 years later is nothing else than the expression of a collective failure to have promoted a lasting and fair political solution.
Speaker 1:So ideally, you'd quite like to be out of a job, but you can't be because there's no political solution.
Speaker 2:Ideally, we should be out of a job. And now the question is after these seismic changes occurring now in the Middle East and this unprecedented war in Gaza an unprecedented massacre on October 7, maybe it is time that the international community be generally invested in promoting such a political solution. And if we have such a political solution, indeed, unrwa would phase out because we would hand over all our activities to a newly set up Palestinian state and the administration 75 years later, as we all know, there is no Palestinian state, and the chance of one seems further away than ever.
Speaker 4:For millions of Palestinians, the primary UN agency, UNRWA, is simply a lifeline.
Speaker 1:Today, UNRWA supports almost 6 million Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Speaker 5:An astonishing new image that turns this decades-old conflict around A coordinated and unexpected attack, a breach in Israel's security and unprecedented attacks by Hamas militants.
Speaker 6:It represents the biggest loss of life in a single day in Israeli history.
Speaker 1:Now, in shocking allegations, Israel claims some UNRWA staff were involved in the October 7 attack by Hamas, in which almost 1200 Israelis were killed and at least 200 taken hostage. Nina Ben-Ami is the Israeli diplomat in charge of relations with United Nations.
Speaker 3:October 7 was a game changer, and what happened on that day required us in Israel and many people in the international community to take another look at what was going on, because the direct involvement of those 13 UNRWA employees in Israel, the October 7th attacks on Israel, changed everything.
Speaker 1:So you brought the allegations to the United Nations, to UNRWA. They fired the people. They're now having this official investigation plus an overview assessment of UNRWA. You must be quite pleased with the quick reaction.
Speaker 3:I think it's something that has to happen, because it's clearly not in the interest of the international community or of the UN to have taxpayer funds from around the world go into an organization that is co-opted by being so involved in terror. And I want to just open up a little bit more, because some of the claims are that, oh, it was only these 13 people, what about the rest of the organization? But as we've continued our operations in Gaza, the information has continued to come out and the numbers are much wider. We know about 1,500 people that are UNRWA employees, that are Hamas operatives, and about 50% of the people who work for UNRWA have a first degree relative who is a Hamas operative.
Speaker 4:In war torn Gaza. Unrwa, the UN's Relief and Works Agency, is one of the largest providers of lifesaving aid to Palestinians, but now shocking revelations from the agency itself.
Speaker 1:Now, to be fair, what we know so far is that Israel claimed to the UN that 12 or possibly 13 UNRWA staff were in some way or other involved in the October 7th attack. Unrwa immediately fired those staff members and now the UN has launched an investigation. The organization has 13,000 staff in Gaza. It runs schools and clinics. Jan Egland, former UN humanitarian coordinator and now head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, told me his reaction when he heard the news.
Speaker 5:Very serious allegations and I felt really when I heard of it that potentially 12 colleagues in UNRWA have betrayed every fundamental humanitarian ideal. We're supposed to be humanitarians by being neutral, independent, impartial. If we start to fight in a conflict, I mean we undermine those sacred humanitarian values for all.
Speaker 1:You have said and in fact the humanitarian community is pretty much speaking with one voice here that UNRWA is crucial in Gaza and cannot be replaced. Why not? There are other aid agencies there. Your own is among them.
Speaker 5:Well, we, the other organizations, including the Norwegian Refugee Council we have 60 colleagues inside Gaza at the moment they were one of the larger non-governmental organizations, but I would admit that all of us combined, all of the non-governmental organizations, all of the Red Cross, red Crescent organizations, all of the UN agencies combined, were not even half of what UNRWA is for Gaza society. And the reason for that is the whole premise that Gaza, the West Bank, the Palestinians have been a population under occupation, under siege. They haven't had a state since 1948. The whole purpose of UNRWA is to provide social services, education, health care and hopefully more and more works so that one day they can stand on their own feet within the nation state. But until then, its UNRWA is the social services, if you like, for the Palestinians.
Speaker 6:The Israeli Prime Minister, benjamin Netanyahu, says he has told the United States he opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Speaker 1:England is making the point that Philippe Lazzarini also made. Unrwa's mandate is different from that of the classic aid agency. It was supposed to be temporary, but because there has been no political solution, it's still there. The current Israeli government seems to have ruled out any chance of a two-state solution, and Louis Charbonneau, the UN director at Human Rights Watch, told me the fact that the UN agency supporting Palestinians still holds out the hope of statehood has been a source of irritation in some Israeli political circles for years.
Speaker 4:Israel has long accused UNRWA of being biased. They've criticized their approach to education, because UNRWA is the main organizer of schools and education in Palestinian areas. And then a long-running complaint is that UNRWA, by its very nature and its very mandate, keeps the refugee issue alive, issues like the right of return for Palestinian refugees who left after 1948 and the founding of the state of Israel. So the complaints against UNRWA have been around for a long time. They run deep and this is the latest series of allegations. But again, they're serious allegations and Israel says that they have evidence to prove them. We still don't know what the full extent of that evidence is, but even if it's true, we still need UNRWA to be funded, because they need to function. They're saving lives and without them, many people women, children, civilians will likely die, starve to death. We have accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war, which is a war crime in the Gaza Strip. So we need UNRWA on its feet.
Speaker 1:Gaza is hungry. This was the view from a UN convoy as it tried to deliver food into war-torn northern Gaza this month. Human rights watch is critical of the way Israel is conducting its war on Hamas and the effect on Gaza's civilians. Sharbonne, too, sees the allegations against UNRWA as very serious, but he would like to see the evidence. Some in Israel have suggested the information is too sensitive and can't be shared, but Nina Ben-Ami says the evidence will be given to the two investigative teams the UN has set up.
Speaker 3:We will be sharing that evidence with both investigative bodies. They are planning to come to Israel in the next week or so and we will be sharing this information absolutely because we call on a serious investigation, an in-depth investigation on what's happening with UNR for you to be able to be resolved. We cannot continue with the current situation where UNR is part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Speaker 1:So the statements made from other members of the Israeli government that Israel will not share this information because it doesn't trust the United Nations? That's not true. Then You're telling me that all of it will be shared.
Speaker 3:You will be sharing the information with the investigative bodies that are coming here for that purpose, absolutely, and we've invited them to come and we are absolutely going to be cooperating with them so they can get to the bottom of this, because it is clearly a subject which concerns Israel, because we are, in the end, the receiving end of the violence and the terror that came out from this situation, but the UN has some little soul searching to do, because I would also posit that if this has happened with UNR, it's possible that there are similar things happening in other UN bodies that are also working in Gaza, but let's focus right now on UNR and Gaza.
Speaker 3:And Israel will not be able to continue working with UNR and Gaza. We are not.
Speaker 1:Never.
Speaker 3:Never is a very long term, but UNR has become part of the problem and not part of the solution, and so it is really incumbent upon the UN to do these investigations and to get to the bottom and the source of the problem.
Speaker 1:While the investigations are now underway and nothing is proven yet, but it seems many minds in Israel are already made up. Meanwhile, unr itself has not yet seen the evidence. Philippe Lazerini fired his staff on the basis of allegations to protect, he hoped, the organisation as a whole.
Speaker 2:I did not have any concrete evidence. These are allegations. They're shocking allegations. They're related to October 7. And basically I have taken the decision to not only terminate the contract of the staff alleged having participated to the October 7 massacre but, at the same time, an investigation through the Office of Internal Oversight Services in New York. So basically we have a kind of a reverse due process. The reason behind it was because of the huge reputational risk for the agency, but also because of the risk to compromise the ability of the agency to provide services to a million of Palestinian refugees.
Speaker 1:Let's go to the immediate concern, which is massive humanitarian needs in Gaza. Now Israel has said it really doesn't want to work with UNR. Wouldn't it be sensible, in terms of getting a more efficient humanitarian operation, for UNR to step back and have WFP, world Health Organisation and so on, step in?
Speaker 2:To start with, if Israel does not want to work with UNR, it's because Israel wants to dismantle this organization and it is not due to the allegation of the 12 staff. It's more of an overarching political aim to get rid of this organization. We heard many times during this war a number of Israeli politicians saying that one aim of this war is not only to get rid of Hamas. We have to get rid of UNR as an agency. Now, today, the needs are absolutely staggering in the Gaza Strip, Five percent of the population within four months has been either killed, injured or is a missing.
Speaker 2:We are talking about starvation and possibly famine. The level of destruction is absolutely unbelievable. Now we are talking about a possible looming military offensive in Gaza. Unr is the agency which has an extraordinary footprint in the Gaza Strip With 13,000 employees. All the other agencies have a very modest footprint for the time being in the Gaza Strip. It does not make sense, at the peak of a new return response all, of suddenly dismantling the platform which allows all the other agencies to operate in the Gaza Strip.
Speaker 1:She said that there is a long history of tensions between UNR and Israel. I mean, hand on heart have there been faults on both sides? If you look back at Unruh's history, have mistakes been made?
Speaker 2:There have always been mistakes been made, and whenever a mistake is identified, it is corrected, and this is also the reason why today we have commissioned a group of independent institutes from Denmark, sweden and Oslo to look at all these internal mechanisms, to look at how the agency, in the past and today, is dealing with any breaches of neutrality. It's an extraordinary polarised environment, a very emotional environment. It's a divided environment. Everything seems to be black or white and obviously reality is far more complex than looking through the lens of the black and white.
Speaker 1:Children in Gaza are hungry. Donor to Unruh. The main UN agency that supports Palestinians, withdrew their funding 10 days ago. But in reaction to the allegations against Unruh, some donor governments have chosen what Lazarini might call a simple black and white response by suspending their funding before the investigations had even started, let alone been completed. Jan Eglund says that's the wrong choice.
Speaker 5:Unruh has done everything right since this crisis started. Number one they fired. They didn't suspend, which would be the normal thing. They fired the 12 staff that might have done what Israel, the party to the conflict, ledgers. Secondly, they've asked for an international investigation in all sites of what happened, which is ongoing, and then, on top of that, they've also asked three Scandinavian research institutes to look at how we operate. Could there be something with our education systems or whatever that we need to reform? It's an open invitation for a very fine organisation to potentially reform and improve further.
Speaker 1:I see you are I mean you have been, from the moment this started really indignant, angry at the fact that the big donors the United States, united Kingdom, germany were so quick to suspend aid. You said they're doing everything wrong.
Speaker 5:They are. They are Number one. How come it took a few minutes for them to spend all funding after they had gotten these allegations? I mean, there seems to be some kind of orchestration here. And finally, a very important point of principle here how come these countries are still selling and providing arms to Israel after a million evidence of Israeli soldiers, civilians, politicians and others committing grave violations of humanitarian law? I mean, israel has killed more than 10,000 children, they've destroyed 360,000 civilian housing units and they have had no suspension of either aid nor arms. By that logic, the one party that could receive nothing from the United States would be Israel.
Speaker 1:Palestinians in Gaza are facing the immediate possibility of starvation the UN said today Well, as we have said, this is a polarized, often emotional debate. But one thing the UN aid agencies here in Geneva are united on there is no replacement for UNRWA, particularly not now, in the middle of a major humanitarian crisis. Israel's Nina Ben-Ami disagrees. She says other agencies should step up.
Speaker 3:I think that there have to be alternatives to UNRWA in Gaza. There are plenty of organizations and humanitarian bodies that do excellent work for the UN all over the world and there is no reason why they shouldn't be able to step in and fill some of the needs that UNRWA is doing in Gaza. Israel has no limits on what humanitarian aid we can put into Gaza. The limits are right now inside the Gaza Strip, with a big part of the bulk of the problem being UNRWA and their logistical capabilities and their links with terror.
Speaker 1:Just let me stop you there, because I listen to the humanitarian agencies every week, and it's not just one of them, it's all of them who say that the difficulties with aid getting in, if we really want to go in that direction, are primarily the very limited crossing points, the endless checks, the repeated denials. So I don't think that it would be fair for me not to question you when you say that it's nothing to do with the body which controls the aid going in and out, which is Israel.
Speaker 3:And we're working together to try and find solutions and ways to get the aid and humanitarian assistance into Gaza. So all of those agencies that you mentioned we're aware of, we work with them and it is a big challenge, but one which will not be solved by UNRWA, which is helping to do terror attacks on Israel. That will not stand. There's something wrong.
Speaker 1:Can I just ask you if you want to stand by the statement that UNRWA as an institution is doing that? It's 30,000 people, just to remind you. Well, I'm talking about UNRWA in.
Speaker 3:Gaza.
Speaker 1:UNRWA in Gaza is not. That's 13,000. That's 13,000.
Speaker 3:And the numbers that I've said, I stand by them, of the 1,400 that are militants in Hamas, which is 10% of the 13,000, and 50% that have first-degree relatives. But I always say, don't be surprised that they're so deeply embedded. And the involvement of those 13 people out in the October 7th events was just, I would say, an indication of what else is going on.
Speaker 1:Okay. So for balance, I feel I need to say Israel's claims that 10% of UNRWA staff are involved with Hamas, or that half have family members who are connected to Hamas, are, for now, just that claims, not proven facts. And lawyers will point out that having a relative who is a bad person is not a reason to convict.
Speaker 6:I have condemned unequivocally the orifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel. All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
Speaker 1:But on October 7th Israel suffered appalling violence. So when the United Nations tries to point out that the tensions in the Middle East are longstanding, the feelings of hurt and anger are understandable. Louis Charbonneau again.
Speaker 4:There's no question that Israel has been extremely critical of the United Nations. They have repeatedly called for the UN Secretary General, antonio Bruteres, to resign. When the Secretary General in the Security Council strongly condemned what Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups did on October 7th, the atrocities that they committed, he also said that these atrocities didn't take place in a vacuum and that caused outrage on the part of the Israeli government. So the criticism against the UN has been very strong and, yes, the Israeli government seems to want the UN to take sides, and this is not something that humanitarians can do. They have to function as neutral parties whose job it is to provide life-saving humanitarian assistance. That's what they're there for, and whether it's UN humanitarian organizations or the International Committee of the Red Cross, they should not be forced to take a side. We are now in the area of the basement of the hospital.
Speaker 1:In this video released by Israel's military, it says Hamas used the Al-Rentisi Hospital as a command center and to hold hostages. But in Israel, Nina Ben-Ami is not convinced. Aid agencies are impartial and neutral. Israel has repeatedly claimed that in densely populated Gaza, Hamas is operating in or near hospitals. Ben-ami claims aid agencies working in hospitals in Gaza must have seen things and she wants them to condemn.
Speaker 3:I would say that independent and neutral requires very careful standards and I almost have sort of pity on them.
Speaker 3:If they're inside Gaza and they're working and the de facto government is run by Hamas, then it may be very difficult for them to speak out about things that they see are a problem and may be difficult for them to say there's something going on in the basement here that we need to look at. But at the end of the day, if they're not being fair and if they're not able to call out and criticize the misuse of a humanitarian infrastructure by a terrorist body, then they're in a situation of some kind of complicity and I cannot just let it stand and have them get away with it, because it's untenable. We are seeing over the last few months there is a sense that somehow, when it comes to Israel, that they're not doing the efforts that we would like to see them do. There's a great deal of public anger and feeling of abandonment that the UN is doing so much for so many others, but when Israel is now in a time of crisis, when our hostages are being held, that anyone's seeing them having a sign of life.
Speaker 6:We're getting medicine to them that we are left out.
Speaker 3:So yes for Geneva, I would say voice from Jerusalem. There's this definite feeling of anger and of abandonment by the international humanitarian community.
Speaker 1:over there, Aid agencies will tell you that the only side there on is the side of innocent civilians caught up in conflict that they haven't managed to convince. Israel and its vocal lack of trust could be very damaging for the UN's humanitarian work in all sorts of places. Jan Egland fears how this conflict, already so terrible, may develop.
Speaker 5:This will end very, very, very badly. It can end even worse than now, even though we are at the point where we have more dead children in Gaza in these four or five months than in all other armed conflict combined worldwide in the same period. Three times more children died in three months in the Gaza war than in two years of the Ukraine war. But Ra'fa is filled to the brim by vulnerable civilians, women and children mostly, and now Israel is thinking of going in with a bloody ground offensive. You can't have a war in a refugee camp, and Ra'fa is today the world's largest refugee camp. There is no other way to put it. We would hold United States, united Kingdom, germany and all of these other countries providing the arms to this. We would hold them accountable for what is going to happen in Ra'fa. There are countless warnings of how bad it would be.
Speaker 1:More than 100 people are reported to have been killed in Gaza as they tried to reach a convoy carrying food aid. The hunger created by war made this tragedy. That is a fundamental fact of what happened today and UNRWA itself. The investigations into Israel's allegations are underway and, as we said, the staff under suspicion 12 out of 13,000 have been fired. But UNRWA's biggest donors, the US, the UK and Germany, have suspended their funding and Philippe Lazerini warns the agency may not be able to continue.
Speaker 2:A lot is at stake if the agency would fall. Not only our collective ability to respond to the acute humanitarian needs would decrease. At the time, the International Court of Justice is asking all of us to increase the humanitarian response, but beyond that, there is also a risk for the transition period, a period which will be very painful and miserable for the people in Gaza and for which all the capacity to provide critical services, such as education, to half a million guns and bullets deeply traumatized. That we urgently need to bring back into an education system, because if we don't do this, we are sowing the seeds of future hate and resentment. But beyond that, there is also the political aspect, where Palestinian will feel that, with the fall of UNRWA, this is a betrayal of the international community, an international community turning its back, weakening the right of return and basically weakening or killing the aspiration of Palestinian for future self-determination. So all this would also be seen as an international community not generally committed to promote a proper political solution.
Speaker 1:It is a very difficult time on multiple levels. Where do you go now? How do you motivate yourself to keep on?
Speaker 2:Listen. What motivates myself is that I do believe that this agency remains critical, even if sometimes it looks like obsolete. After 75 years, it's almost an anachronism that an agency be requested to provide public-like services to such a large group, but in the other hand, the UNRWA remains the only lifeline in a region full of despair, a region which now deserves that we collectively look at promoting a proper, genuine piece for a political solution, and my motivation today is to try to keep afloat this expectation of a better future for a population which I have been in contact in and out for the last 33 years.
Speaker 1:And that brings us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. We know this is a controversial topic for many, but we hope we've managed to bring some clarity to a very complex issue. My thanks to Philippe Nazarini, Nina Benami, Jan Egland and Louis Charbonneau for their time and their perspectives.
Speaker 1:If you have comments on Inside Geneva, don't hesitate to contact us at insidejeneva, at Swissinfoch. In our next episode we'll be looking at artificial intelligence. Is it a threat to democracy in this big election year, and can the UN or human rights groups provide any guidance to voters? You can find us, subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva from Swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland, available in many languages as well as English. Check out our other content at wwwswissinfoch. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening and do join us next time on Inside Geneva.