The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) says its staff are continuing to deliver aid to people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, who depend on them "for their very survival," days after an Israeli parliamentary ban on its activities went into effect. As the humanitarian operation in Gaza continues, UNRWA says it is committed “to stay and deliver until it is no longer possible to do so.”
In Gaza, UNRWA staff are on the ground delivering aid and providing services to a population of some 2.1 million Palestinians who have been devastated by 15 months of constant bombardment, forced displacement and lack of critical resources. Since the start of the ceasefire, UNRWA has already reached an estimated 750,000 people with food aid and says it has enough in the pipeline to reach the rest of Gaza's population.
On Thursday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres again appealed to the Israeli government to retract new legislation that essentially bans the UN agency from aiding Palestinians.
“I regret this decision and request that the Government of Israel retract it,” Guterres wrote in a Monday letter to the Israeli UN Ambassador.
The UN chief said UNRWA is irreplaceable and that no other organization has the capacity or mandate to do its work.
Guterres said in his letter that Israel's "unilateral demand" that UNRWA "cease operations and evacuate all premises in less than one week of formal notice" was "unreasonable and inconsistent" with Israel's international obligations, and that the UN and Israel should enter into discussions about the law.
On October 28, 2024, the Israeli parliament passed two laws banning UNRWA. The laws prohibit UNRWA from operating within the sovereign territory of the State of Israel and prohibit any contact between Israeli officials and UNRWA.
According to the laws, UNRWA will be prohibited from maintaining any representative office, service or activity within Israeli territory. Israel will cease all cooperation, communication and contact with UNRWA or anyone acting on its behalf.
In a letter to the Secretary-General on January 24, Israel's Permanent Representative to the UN sought to order UNRWA to vacate all its premises in occupied East Jerusalem by January 30 and to cease its operations there.
However, this order is contrary to the international legal obligations of UN Member States, including Israel, which is bound by the General Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. UN premises are inviolable and enjoy privileges and immunities under the UN Charter.
Israel is a signatory to the General Convention on Privileges and Immunities and has incorporated its provisions into its domestic law. These provisions require Israeli authorities to respect the privileges and immunities of the UN as well as UN premises.
In East Jerusalem alone, some 70,000 patients and more than 1,000 students would be affected by the cessation of UN operations.
The Knesset legislation, part of an Israeli political campaign to dismantle UNRWA, defies resolutions of the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly, and ignores rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
At a Security Council meeting on Tuesday to discuss the situation, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said that implementing the law now would be disastrous.
“At stake is the fate of millions of Palestinians, the ceasefire, and the prospects for a political solution that brings lasting peace and security,“ he said.
He said the UN agency is even more critical as the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire is implemented and humanitarian agencies race to deliver aid to millions of Palestinians.
“Across the Gaza Strip, Palestinians are turning to UNRWA — the agency they have known all their lives — for support,” Lazzarini said.
“Curtailing our operations now — outside a political process, and when trust in the international community is so low — will undermine the ceasefire. It will sabotage Gaza’s recovery and political transition.”
The UNRWA chief added that “Full implementation of the Knesset legislation will be disastrous. In Gaza, undermining UNRWA’s operations will compromise the international humanitarian response.”
“It will degrade the capacity of the United Nations just when humanitarian assistance must be scaled up significantly. This will only worsen the already catastrophic living conditions of millions of Palestinians.”
Israeli officials claim that other UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can take over UNRWA's work, but those aid agencies, as well as Lazzarini, disagree.
“Since October 2023, we have delivered two-thirds of all food assistance, provided shelter to over a million displaced persons, and vaccinated a quarter of a million children against polio,” he told the Security Council.
“Since the ceasefire began, UNRWA has brought in 60 percent of the food entering Gaza, reaching more than half a million people.”
According to UNRWA, the UN agency provided half of the emergency response in Gaza, with all other UN agencies filling the other half. UNRWA is the largest UN presence in Gaza, with 13,000 staff and 300 premises.
The agency is also the main provider of health care and education for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank, the largest provider of primary health care in Gaza and the second largest in the West Bank.
Lazzarini said that in Gaza, 650,000 girls and boys live in the rubble, learning nothing more than how to survive.
“We are determined, however, to stay and deliver until it is no longer possible to do so,” the UNRWA chief said.
Humanitarian organizations and senior UN officials say UNRWA is irreplaceable and indispensable as a humanitarian lifeline and must be allowed to fulfill its mandate. They argue that the agency is the backbone of the humanitarian response and cannot be replaced by other UN agencies.
The UN General Assembly established the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in 1949 to assist some 700,000 Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which broke out after Israel became a state in May of that year. In the absence of a political solution for the Palestinian refugees, the UN General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWA's mandate.
UNRWA operates not only in Gaza and the West Bank, but also in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, where there are large Palestinian refugee communities. Nearly 6 million Palestinians throughout the region are eligible for UNRWA services, which include education and health care.
Before Israel launched its war, two-thirds of Gaza's population, or 1.6 million people, were Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA. The agency employs more than 13,000 staff in Gaza, including more than 3,500 in emergency operations. In the West Bank, UNRWA serves 1.1 million Palestine refugees and other registered persons, including 890,000 refugees.
An unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe has been raging in Gaza for more than fifteen months, with people dying from widespread attacks, starvation, dehydration, disease and hypothermia. The relentless operations of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have caused mass casualties and widespread destruction.
The total number of UNRWA staff killed since October 7, 2023, stands at 273. Since the beginning of the war, 205 UNRWA facilities have been damaged in more than 665 attacks targeting or impacting these facilities and the people inside them.
A ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian armed group Hamas went into effect in the Gaza Strip on January 19, 2025, and Israeli forces have halted most of their attacks after more than 470 days of war that devastated the tiny territory and left its two million people in desperate need of the basics to survive.
Thousands of trucks - including more than 1,000 UNRWA trucks - carrying essential humanitarian supplies have entered Gaza since the ceasefire began, allowing for an increase in the humanitarian response to critical needs. United Nations agencies and non-governmental humanitarian organizations are making every effort to scale up humanitarian assistance throughout the Gaza Strip.
Since the start of the ceasefire, a surge in supplies and improved access conditions have allowed humanitarian agencies to expand the delivery of life-saving assistance throughout the Gaza Strip, including in areas that were previously inaccessible.
According to the United Nations, nearly half a million people are estimated to have returned to northern Gaza as the ceasefire continues to hold.
International humanitarian law requires Israel to ensure that the basic needs of the people of Gaza are met. This includes making sure that the people of Gaza have access to sufficient water, food, health care, and other basic necessities for survival.
For more than a year, humanitarian aid into Gaza had been obstructed by Israeli officials in gross violation of international humanitarian law and in apparent use as a method of warfare. The first phase of the ceasefire agreement now allows the entry of 600 trucks per day into Gaza, including 50 trucks of fuel.
Between October 7, 2023, and January 18, 2025, more than 47,000 Palestinians were killed and more than 111,000 others wounded, most of them civilians, in Israeli attacks on the territory, according to Gaza health officials. The fatalities include at least 385 aid workers, 277 UN staff, 1060 health workers and 198 journalists.
It is estimated that at least 15,000 children are among the dead. More than 10,000 people, including thousands of children, are missing and presumed dead. In total, Israel's air and ground operations in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, have killed, wounded or left missing at least 168,000 people, or more than 8 percent of Gaza's population.
However, according to an analysis by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), the civilian and total death toll from Israel's war in Gaza is far higher than official figures.
The analysis, published in January in The Lancet, estimates that more than 64,000 Palestinians died as a result of violence in Gaza between October 2023 and June 2024, suggesting that the death toll is underreported by at least 40 percent.
The figures do not include Palestinians who died from causes indirectly related to the war, such as starvation, dehydration, and disease, nor do they include missing persons. Some 59 percent of the dead were women, children or the elderly, according to the peer-reviewed study.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.