How a U.N. Agency Became a Flashpoint in the Gaza War

UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, has survived 75 years of Israeli-Palestinian strife. Can it survive the latest conflict?

In mid-January, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, was handed a piece of paper that threatened to doom his organization. It was already in deep crisis. Three months had passed since Hamas militants burst through the barrier between Gaza and Israel, killing about 1,200 people and dragging 250 back as hostages. In retaliation, Israel rained bombs on Gazan cities, killing tens of thousands as it vowed to eradicate Hamas.

Lazzarini’s organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, was uniquely equipped to respond to the humanitarian crisis that ensued. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are refugees, and providing them with services has given UNRWA an outsize role in the territory. After Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority, which now functions only in the West Bank, Gazans were left with a highly dysfunctional government and came increasingly to depend on the agency. Before the war, UNRWA maintained more than 300 schools, health centers, warehouses, fuel depots and other facilities in Gaza and had 13,000 employees. Unlike other U.N. agencies, its staff is made up not of international aid workers but almost entirely of local Palestinians. Amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment, there was simply no other organization as deeply integrated in the territory and with the infrastructure necessary to distribute food, provide shelter and meet the basic needs of so many displaced, traumatized people.

Lazzarini, a Swiss-Italian veteran of United Nations aid operations in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, took the helm of UNRWA in 2020. He hoped to put the agency on sure footing. For more than seven decades, it had lurched from one emergency to another, as turmoil in the Middle East buffeted the impoverished Palestinians that UNRWA sought to help. The war put an end to those plans. Repeated evacuation orders and the destruction caused by Israel’s air campaign have displaced about nine in 10 Gazans, some multiple times. At various points, the agency says, more than a million people — nearly half of Gaza’s population — have sought shelter in UNRWA facilities, with large families crowded into its classrooms or into 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 members into and around the territory. The relationship between UNRWA and Israel has long been fraught because of the agency’s link to 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 the Palestinians who fled or were pushed from their homes during the creation of the Jewish state. As the original Palestinian refugees passed their status from one generation to the next, their numbers grew to nearly six million, spread mainly across the Middle East.

UNRWA is a historic anomaly: It is the only U.N. agency dedicated to a specific group of refugees, but it has no ability to solve their root problems of displacement and statelessness. Its mostly Western funders see the agency as a force for stability in a volatile region until the Palestinian-refugee issue can be resolved through a peace deal. Many Israelis take a less charitable view, particularly as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed the country to the right. They argue that UNRWA’s mere existence perpetuates the conflict by keeping alive the idea that, someday, somehow, these refugees will return to the land of their forefathers, in what is now Israel, destroying the Jewish state.

On Jan. 18, Lazzarini arrived at the David Kempinski Hotel, in Tel Aviv, to see Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Weissbrod had told him that he had information to share, so Lazzarini was expecting bad news. Now, Weissbrod produced a list, handwritten in Hebrew, of 12 UNRWA employees who Israel believed participated in the Oct. 7 attack. The allegations were cursory but explosive: The men, Weissbrod said, had assisted with logistics, entered Israel during the assault, attacked Israelis and helped take hostages.