What’s behind Israel’s decision to target UNRWA?
Al Jazeera
Israel has long tried to eliminate the UN agency, which enshrines the right of Palestinian refugees to return home.
Kholood Mkhamer fled her neighbourhood weeks after Israel began bombing the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7.
An employee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Mkhamer moved from northern Gaza to the south, heeding Israel’s orders for more than one million people to make that journey. The UN feared that the order amounted to the forceful transfer of a population, which is a war crime, but Mkhamer just wanted to survive.
Shortly after relocating with her parents and siblings, they were killed. By that time, Mkhamer, a medical secretary, was working in a clinic along the border with Egypt when the house the family was staying in was shelled.
“They were all martyred,” said Halima Loaz, a former colleague of Mkhamer’s and an UNRWA nurse who recently relocated to Spain. “Her, her mother and her brothers.”
In recent days, a series of countries – including the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Japan, Austria and Romania – have cut funding for UNRWA, the agency that Palestinians have relied on for everything from vaccinations to education for seven decades.
