According to The Guardian, Tel Aviv has demanded that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) be dismantled and its responsibilities and staff transferred to a new entity in exchange for allowing more aid into the Gaza Strip.
The newspaper quoted unnamed sources as saying that the proposal was discussed by Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi and UN officials in Israel, and then handed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Under the plan, 300 to 400 UNRWA staff will be transferred either to an existing UN agency, such as the World Food Program (WFP), or to a newly established organization focused on food distribution in Gaza. More UNRWA staff and assets may eventually be transferred, although it remains unclear who would administer the new entity or provide security for its operations.
UNRWA was not involved in the proposal-related talks because of Israel's reluctance to interact with the agency amid Tel Aviv's unverified claims that 12 of the agency's 13,000 Gaza staff participated in the October 7 Hamas incursion
Tamara Alrifai, the agency's director of external relations, warned that Israel's plan would undermine the effective distribution of aid in Gaza, while a number of UN insiders, as well as other aid agencies and human rights organizations, insisted that the proposal actually aims to eliminate UNRWA.
“If we allow this, it is the slippery slope to us being completely managed directly by the Israelis, and the UN directly being complicit in undermining UNRWA, which is not only the biggest aid provider but also the biggest bastion of anti-extremism in Gaza. We would be playing into so many political agendas if we allowed this to happen,” The Guardian quoted an unnamed UN official as saying.
Alrifai, for her part, stressed that if the World Food Program were to start distributing food in Gaza tomorrow, they would use UNRWA trucks and bring food to UNRWA warehouses and then distribute food in or around UNRWA shelters.
“So they’re going to need at a minimum the same infrastructure that we have, including the human resources,” she added.
The same tone was struck by Chris Gunness, a former UNRWA spokesman, who said, "It is outrageous that UN agencies like WFP and senior UN officials are engaging in discussions about dismantling UNRWA." He recalled that it is the UN General Assembly "which gives UNRWA its mandate and only the general assembly can change it, not the secretary general and certainly not a single member state."
Martin Griffiths, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, tweeted that "attempts to sideline UNRWA must stop".
“UNRWA is the backbone of the humanitarian operation in Gaza. Any effort to distribute aid without them is simply doomed to fail. No other agency has the same reach, experience or community trust needed to do the job,” Griffiths pointed out.
Russia's UN envoy Vassily Nebenzya, for his part, called for a review of the decision to dismiss UNRWA staff and also stressed the need to restore funding to the agency. He was referring to the fact that several countries, including the US, the UK, Germany and Japan, have suspended funding in response to Israeli accusations of UNRWA's involvement in the Hamas attack.