Philippe Lazarrini, speaking to journalists at the UN headquarters in New York, called for Israel’s responsibilities in the attacks on UN facilities to be investigated. Attacks that have killed 180 employees in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war in October.
The head of UNRWA directly attacked Israel afterand, on Monday night, Tel Aviv described UNRWA-Gaza as a “rotten and poisonous tree whose roots are Hamas.”. For Philippe Lazarrini “the real objective behind the attacks on UNRWA is political in nature: it is to deprive Palestinians of refugee status, starting with Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank”.
According to Lazarrini “this is exactly what we heard in the (Security) Council from the Israeli Ambassador. It is a State objective.”
These statements come one day after the report by independent experts led by the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Catherine Colonna, concluded that, Despite the UN humanitarian agency’s lack of political “neutrality”, UNRWA is “irreplaceable” for the region’s 5.9 million Palestinians.
UNRWA has more than 30,000 employees across the region and is accused by Israel of having “more than 400 terrorists” in the Gaza Strip among its employees. O The Israeli government even accused 12 UN agency workers of having been directly involved in the Hamas attackon October 7, 2023, which killed 1,170 people, mainly civilians.
These Israeli accusations led to the suspension of funding from donors such as the United States and the United Kingdom. The Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA) is considered the “backbone” of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, where more than 34,000 people, mostly civilianswere killed in Israeli military operations.
