2 hours ago
6
Israel is breaching international law by continuing to impose restrictions on aid flows into Gaza, where the population remains critically short of food and life-saving goods as winter sets in, a senior official at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees has said.
In an interview during a recent visit to Brussels, Natalie Boucly, an Unrwa deputy commissioner general, said the whole world – including the EU and US – needed to increase the pressure on Israel’s government to ensure the unrestricted flow of aid into Gaza.
Unrwa has enough food, tents and other essentials to fill the equivalent of up to 6,000 trucks, Boucly said.
“As winter approaches and famine continues to grip the population, it is critical that all this aid is allowed into Gaza without delay,” she said. “Our supplies would be able to provide food … for the entire population for about three months. And that is sitting outside [in Jordan and Egypt], not able to come in. And that is the case for the other UN agencies because the restrictions and the constraints are still there.”
She estimated that only about half, “if that”, of the 500-600 daily truckloads needed were getting into the devastated territory.
Boucly said Israel as an occupying power was “not abiding by international humanitarian law and international human rights law”, referencing the fourth Geneva convention as well as a recent advisory opinion from the international court of justice that said Israel had to ensure the people of the occupied Palestinian territory had “the essential supplies of daily life”.
The same ICJ ruling, issued on 22 October, concluded that Israel had an obligation to cooperate with Unrwa. The court found no evidence that Unrwa lacked neutrality or that significant numbers of it staff were members of Hamas, claims repeatedly made by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Israel severed diplomatic relations with Unrwa after accusing the body of having been infiltrated by Hamas and allowing “widespread and systematic” misuse of its facilities by terrorists. The ICJ opinion noted that nine Unrwa employees were dismissed over possible involvement in the 7 October 2023 attacks but said Israel’s broader claims were not substantiated.
Boucly said she had received no indication that Israel was going to change its no-contact policy towards her agency.
Unrwa was created in 1948 to aid the 700,000 Palestinian refugees displaced in the war around the establishment of the state of Israel. It was meant to be temporary. Nearly eight decades later, Unrwa is a vital supplier of health, education, social welfare and other services in the occupied Palestine territories and neighbouring countries, where 5.9 million Palestine refugees are registered.
“It is not the time for Unrwa to collapse,” Boucly said. “[We are] irreplaceable because nobody can pick up the slack.”
In Brussels, she was expected to discuss with EU officials a $200m (£152m) shortfall in the agency’s funding until March, among other topics.
“We were meant to be temporary. The only reason we’re here is because there’s a collective failure of the international community to come to a political solution to this conflict,” she said.
Boucly said that for the first time since the 1993 Oslo agreement there was light about finding a lasting political settlement to the decades-old conflict. While stressing it was not for the UN to decide the terms of a settlement, she warned of the risks of allowing “this unique opportunity” for peace to slip away.
“Unless you have a political solution … neither the Israelis, nor the Palestinians will live in peace,” she said.
She argued that European governments should exert “a different sort of moral pressure on Israel … that you need to have a reconciliation process, that military might is not going to make you live in peace.”
Boucly, who was employed in Jerusalem in 2023, recalled the trauma experienced by Israelis after the 7 October attacks, which triggered a backlash against Unrwa. She said she had been verbally assaulted and colleagues were physically attacked as attitudes to the agency changed in Israel.
While crediting the Trump administration for the ceasefire deal, she voiced worry that a lot of the peacemaking effort was happening “outside of the usual tools of multilateralism and the usual UN construct around peacekeeping”.
As such, she said crucial details were missing, such as the membership and terms of reference for the proposed board of peace to be chaired by the US president. “You have to know where you are sailing, otherwise the winds are going to take you to a different destination,” she said.
Unrwa is providing a few hours of schooling a day and mental health support to about 40,000 children via 280 “temporary learning spaces” in shelters in Gaza. But its work is hampered because it is not allowed to bring pens and notebooks into the territory under import rules imposed by Israeli authorities, it has said.
The children at these centres have endured two years of unimaginable trauma that for many has involved being forced to move multiple times, the deaths of close family members, hunger, relentless bombing and destruction.
By early September at least 2,596 children in Gaza had lost both parents and a further 53,724 had lost either their father (47,804) or mother (5,920), according to Gaza health ministry statistics cited by the UN’s child protection agency, Unicef.
Boucly said Gaza’s orphans would have “nothing to lose unless they see a future for themselves. Unless you offer something to these kids … we cannot exclude another terrorist attack. We cannot exclude armed groups being formed [or] much worse.”
