At the end of April, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that Latvia would resume funding to the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, which provides assistance to Palestinian refugees in various countries. This caused a storm on the social network X (previously known as Twitter), where many users reacted to the news by claiming that Latvia had decided to fund Hamas terrorists. Is this really the case? This is an explainer on what is UNRWA, why a number of countries froze its funding and why some have restored it.
What is UNRWA and why did a number of countries stop funding it?
UNRWA is a United Nations programme that provides health, education and other services to Palestinian refugees. The agency assists nearly six million Palestinians in various countries, and about 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip. Last summer, the agency ran eight refugee camps, 183 schools and 22 health facilities in Gaza. Since October, when Israel launched air strikes on Gaza following the Hamas attacks, UNRWA has helped to deliver about 25,000 truckloads of food and other humanitarian aid to Palestinians living there.
At the end of January, Israel accused 12 UNRWA staff members of involvement in the 7 October Hamas organised terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 700 Israeli civilians and about 240 were taken hostage. In January, media reported on Israeli intelligence estimates that ten percent of UNRWA’s Gaza branch staff, or around 1200 people, are linked to terrorist groups. Israel has submitted a six-page dossier to the donor-countries of the organisation outlining its allegations against UNRWA. The allegations are allegedly based on text messages, intercepted calls and other data obtained from mobile phones. Currently, the dossier is not publicly available, but several media outlets that have obtained it say that it does not provide adequate evidence for the allegations it contains.
The allegations resulted in several countries, including Latvia, suspending their annual funding to the agency. Human rights organisations have warned that the freezing of funds threatens access to food, medicine and drinking water for more than two million people.
Is UNRWA a terrorist organisation?
In response to Israel’s accusations, UNRWA immediately dismissed the staff concerned without an investigation, while the UN launched two investigations.
The first investigation was carried out jointly by three independent organisations: the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Sweden, the Christian Mikkelsen Institute in Norway and the Danish Institute for Human Rights, and was conducted under the leadership of the former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna. In the second half of April, the UN published the final report of the investigation (here). It states that Israel has provided no evidence that a significant proportion of UNRWA staff are connected to terrorist groups. In addition, the agency has a number of mechanisms and procedures in place to “ensure compliance with humanitarian principles, with particular emphasis on the principle of neutrality”. The investigation concluded that UNRWA’s approach to ensuring neutrality is better developed than that of other similar UN organisations or non-governmental bodies.
The report contains a number of recommendations to improve neutrality, such as introducing additional measures to assess the candidates at the first stages of recruitment. However, it concludes that there is no indication that UNRWA is controlled by Hamas or that it supports terrorist groups.
A second investigation is still being carried out by the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. Its aim is to establish whether the 12 UNRWA staff members indicted by Israel were involved in the 7 October terrorist attacks.
Have most countries stopped funding UNRWA?
18 countries have frozen their funding pledges to the agency. Half have restored it. Sweden, for example, did so in March to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, while Latvia restored funding to the organisation at the end of April following the above-mentioned investigation.
Source: Screenshot from X (formerly known as Twitter).
The European Union had frozen its funding until February, but decided to reinstate it in early March. Additionally, it should be noted that a number of EU Member States did not cut off their funding to UNRWA and some countries even increased their funding to the organisation to compensate for the shortfalls caused by other countries.*
Conclusion: Investigations by independent organisations have shown that Israel has not provided evidence that a significant proportion of UNRWA staff are linked to terrorist groups. It concludes that the agency has a number of measures in place to ensure compliance with humanitarian principles, and, in particular, with neutrality. The investigation into Israel’s allegation that the 12 UNRWA staff members were involved in the 7 October terrorist attacks is still ongoing. In response to Israel’s accusations, UNRWA immediately dismissed the staff concerned without an investigation. Eight of the 18 countries that froze UNRWA funding have restored it. The European Union has also restored it.
* The table was incorrect in the initial version of the article. Greece was listed twice, while Lithuania was listed under countries that have not restored funding. The article was corrected on 10.05.24.
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