They’ve lost colleagues, families and homes. Israel has painted them as the enemy. But UNRWA and others refuse to stop.
When Hussam Okal sought shelter with his family at a training centre in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis in October, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) staffer found the place full with an estimated 22,000 people searching — like him — for safety from Israeli bombs.
“We’re working on two sides. On the one side, we’re trying to keep our families safe, and on the other, we’re trying to serve the displaced people,” he said at the time. “As UNRWA staff, we carry a humanitarian message to try to offer as much assistance as we can.”
It is a task that the UN agency has performed since 1950 in the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, serving as a lifeline for Palestinians. It runs schools, health programmes and more for the Palestinian refugees and their descendants who have been deprived of their homeland since the Nakba when 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their land during the 1948 creation of Israel.
For decades, its UN blue logo has been a source of support for Palestinians. Now, in Gaza, it is struggling to fulfil its mission, in a war where the UNRWA has suffered like never before.
At least 146 UNRWA staffers have been killed in Israeli bombings, the highest-ever death toll for any UN agency in a war. Others have lost their homes and family members. Like Okal, they have been forced to seek safety in schools and training centres their own teams set up in the past. The war is scarring the agency — and its leadership is not immune.
“I am devastated and heartbroken for the people of Gaza,” Thomas White, the head of the UNRWA in Gaza, told media in an interview. “I don’t quite know how to deal with the emotions of the most profound sense of loss of staff members and community that you know. Gaza is grieving,” White said.
The UNRWA has worked with Palestinians through the multiple wars and waves of displacement they have endured over the past 74 years.
Yet, the current war is unlike any the agency has witnessed. “UNRWA have planned and rehearsed for such eventualities, we know what we need to do,” White said. “However the scale of death and destruction in such a short time frame, compounded by the fact everyone is trapped in Gaza, with nowhere that is safe, and we are effectively being starved of resources – which has made this enormously difficult.”
That includes UNRWA staffers who must settle their spouses, children, siblings and parents, then turn to help the hundreds, sometimes thousands, who had come to the same place for help.
“We’re working in terrifying life conditions,” said Okal. “Whenever there is an air raid nearby, you can hear children of all ages screaming and the adults trying to calm them down.”
Before the war, a typical day for White would involve meeting key team members, heading out to visit UNRWA staff at the agency’s schools or health clinics and meeting people living in refugee camps.
But on October 13, the agency evacuated from Gaza City to a logistics base in Rafah in the south of the strip amid the bombing. From there, White has been watching his agency come under attack.
Latest reports from the UNRWA indicate that 132 installations have been damaged, including 63 that took direct hits. In addition, 52 schools sustained damage and 53 took direct hits.
‘Starved of resources’
In times of war, the UN and its agencies are usually treated as neutral players and peacemakers by all sides. This time, it is different.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s permanent representative to the UN, has publicly accused UNRWA staffers of links to Hamas. He argued that “the influence of Hamas is so pervasive that it taints the objectivity of reporting and statistics provided”.
UN convoys delivering aid in the north of the enclave have come under fire from Israeli forces, despite being clearly marked “UN” and prior coordination to ensure that they would be protected.
“This award is in recognition of the lifesaving and irreplaceable work that my colleagues are doing, especially in the Gaza Strip and across the region,” said Lazzarini.
White said, “The majority of the staff have been displaced from the north with their families, and are now living in IDP shelters themselves. But, they still show up to work every morning and put in a solid day and do an impossible task, despite being exhausted.”
“They give me strength.”
Like the UNRWA staff, a majority of the people of Gaza have been forced to leave the north of the enclave, now largely a dystopian wasteland of millions of tonnes of conflict debris.
White, who was posted to Gaza two and half years ago straight from Afghanistan before the fall of Kabul, said, “The damage is so severe I don’t recognise the north any more. You lose your bearings because all the landmarks have gone.”
North of Wadi Gaza, relatives of the “missing” who still lie buried, entombed in a mass of shattered concrete and contorted steel, hover where their homes once stood, listening, in hope for a miracle and searching for memories. An estimated 8,000 civilians are reported missing, feared dead, buried beneath the rubble, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
The UNRWA’s struggles are mirrored in the experiences of other leading aid providers too.
Khalid al-Hardan, vice chairman of the Qatar Committee for the Reconstruction of Gaza (QCRG) who has spent more than a decade overseeing the implementation of substantial Qatari-funded projects in Gaza, said the damage sustained in this war, compared with previous wars, was simply staggering. The QCRG’s projects in Gaza include hospitals, arterial roads, law courts and housing.
“People in Gaza have the right to live like any normal human being, educate their children, support their families, travel without restriction and live in peace. They deserve better than this,” said al-Hardan, speaking from Gaza.
The QCRG is already aware of severe damage to projects it has supported. The Palace of Justice — Gaza’s main court — located in az-Zahra, has been destroyed along with several parts of al-Rashid road along the strip’s beachfront.
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