By Abdelraouf Arnaout
JERUSALEM (AA) - Israel regards the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) as a symbol of Palestinian refugees and an imminent danger to its existence.
For many years, Israel has tried to push for the abolition of UNRWA and to transfer responsibility for Palestinian refugees to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
All of Israel's attempts in this regard have failed over the past years until it succeeded last week in convincing a number of countries that the agency's employees participated in the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 on Israeli towns and military bases around the Gaza Strip.
Countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, and Japan suspended their financial aid to the agency in light of Tel Aviv's allegation without clarifying the fate of their decision or the possibility of retracting it.
The decision came despite UNRWA's announcing last Friday, in a written statement, that it dismissed employees whom Israel accused and opened an investigation without any delay to preserve the agency's ability to continue providing humanitarian aid.
The agency is funded almost entirely through voluntary contributions from government donors and the European Union.
According to the list of aid for 2022 published by the agency, the United States is considered the largest supporter of UNRWA, followed by Germany, then Sweden in fourth place, followed by Japan in fifth.
On Wednesday, the heads of 15 international organizations warned, in a joint statement, that the decisions taken by several member states to stop funding UNRWA "will have catastrophic consequences" for the people of Gaza, as no other entity has the capacity to provide the volume and scope of assistance that 2.2 million people need.
In their statement, the organizations called on the countries that withheld their funding to "reconsider their decision," given the "far-reaching consequences, whether humanitarian or in terms of human rights, in the occupied Palestinian territories, and throughout the region."
- Israeli goal of dismantling UNRWA
Israel strongly welcomed the decisions of some countries to suspend financial aid to UNRWA, but it also did not hide that its goal was "to dismantle and erase the agency completely."
During a meeting with ambassadors to the UN in his office in West Jerusalem on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "It is time for the international community and the United Nations to realize that UNRWA's mission must end."
Netanyahu did not hesitate to say that the UN agency aims at "maintaining the Palestinian refugee issue."
He stressed that UNRWA must be replaced with other UN agencies and other relief agencies "if we are concerned with solving the Gaza problem as we plan to do," without naming these agencies or the plan that he aspires to implement for the sake of solving the "Gaza problem."
However, Netanyahu indicated that his administration "looks forward to the existence of an objective and useful body that provides aid," noting that Gaza "needs this body," refusing to have it represented by UNRWA.
The Israeli representative to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, repeated Netanyahu's statements.
The Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom quoted him on Wednesday as saying that the goal must be to "completely dissolve UNRWA."
- Systematic plan to dissolve UNRWA
Ariel Kahane, senior diplomatic commentator at the Israel Hayom newspaper, considered on Tuesday that the opportunity is now available for Israel to "make UNRWA disappear."
In an article, Kahane said that "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to instruct the Shin Bet, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the IDF Intelligence Directorate, and the Foreign Ministry to expose all of the incriminating information on UNRWA."
He added that "not fully exposing and revealing UNRWA today will enable the agency to claim (again) that it has rooted out corruption, thus returning us to square one. That would be a terrible squandered opportunity."
"Israel only has a few weeks left to explain what UNRWA is and have it replaced by an alternative agency with the US, at least partially," Kahane said, stressing that "this is the first opportunity in 75 years. We must not pass up on it."
UNRWA is a UN agency that was established in 1949 to help Palestinian refugees across the Middle East.
The agency operates in the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
* Writing by Ikram Kouachi