How US, allies fund Gaza genocide by defunding UNRWA

By Maryam Qarehgozlou 

Caught in the merciless grip of a devastating blockade, the mother of five-month-old Jamal cradles his lifeless body in her weak arms with an agonizing weight upon her heart.

Jamal Mahmoud Jamal Al-Kafarna, born in August 2023 in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun, starved to death on January 18 due to hunger.

His grandmother, Samah Youssef Al-Kafarna, told the Euro-Med human rights team that they used to stay in a tent in a Jabalia schoolyard, north of the Gaza City, at the beginning of the Israeli military onslaught in early October.

However, they were forced to flee the shelter as bombs continued to rain down and they were experiencing a growing scarcity of humanitarian supplies.

As conditions worsened rapidly, Jamal’s mother was severely dehydrated due to an acute shortage of food and water caused by the crippling siege on the territory, struggling to produce milk for her starving infant.

“She had to drink salt water to be able to lactate, but gradually she lost her milk and the baby became flabby and dehydrated. The blockade also meant there was no formula to feed the baby either,” Jamal’s grandmother recounted.

Nursing mothers are advised by healthcare providers to drink at least three liters of water a day to compensate for the extra water that is used to make milk and to eat well to produce sufficient milk, but finding clean water and food in Gaza is becoming harder by the day.

“I’m breastfeeding my 9-month-old baby and facing lots of difficulties, even the baby does not breastfeed as usual because he feels that something is wrong,” a mother under siege in Gaza shared her desperate struggle with UNFPA, the UN sexual and reproductive health agency.

According to the Euro-Med Monitor, the one-and-a-half-year-old Gaza City resident Baraa Al-Haddad was also starved to death on December 30, 2023.

Jana Deeb Qudeih, a girl suffering from cerebral palsy also died of malnourishment and a shortage of oxygen, which was required for her condition, on December 8, 2023, at the Taiba School in the strip’s southern town of Abasan Al Kabira, east of Khan Younis, Euro-Med Monitor reported.

Young and old dying of starvation

Testimonies provided to the rights group also revealed that a number of elderly people in the Gaza Strip have also died as a result of starvation and dehydration, including Samira Abu Barbar, 59, Issam Al-Najjar, 63, and Jawda Zidane Shaker Al-Agha, 81.

Children, pregnant women, people with acute or chronic health conditions and the elderly remain the most vulnerable in Gaza, getting the worst of the blockade while they have fewer places in which they can shelter from relentless bombardment and seek services.

The UN bodies warn that famine is looming in Gaza as diseases are spreading at an alarming pace.

The World Food Program (WFP) estimates that 93 percent of the population faces crisis levels of hunger in Gaza.

The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that the death toll from starvation and sickness in coming months could eclipse the number of people killed in Israeli bombardment so far — more than 26,800, according to the Gaza health ministry, the majority of them women and children.

The heads of humanitarian organizations have time and again reiterated that the closing of entry routes to Gaza, which limit the number of trucks loaded with aid, entering the besieged territory and restrictions on the movement of humanitarian workers have worsened the “catastrophic” humanitarian condition.

“Under international pressure, Israel reopened the Rafah land crossing; however, the crossing is open to an average of just 100 trucks per day carrying humanitarian supplies coming from Egypt. This number is a far cry from the average load of 500 trucks that entered the Strip before October 7 to meet humanitarian needs,” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said in a press release last week.

No funding for UN aid agency

Making matters worse, Israel announced on Saturday that it will stop UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees which provides humanitarian assistance and protection to the Palestinians, from operating in the strip.

Israeli regime's foreign minister Israel Katz said on X, formerly Twitter, that the ministry aims to ensure “that UNRWA will not be a part of the day after.”

He claimed that UNRWA “obstructs peace” and serves as “a civilian arm of Hamas” in Gaza.

It came after UNRWA on Friday fired nearly a dozen staff members after Israel alleged that they were involved in the Operation Al-Aqsa Storm on October 7.

Based on the same claim, the United States, Israel’s all-weather ally, hurriedly announced on the same day that it would temporarily halt funding to the organization.

Since Friday, over a dozen other countries, including UNRWA’s major donors, namely, Germany, Sweden, Japan, France, Switzerland, Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands have jumped on the bandwagon and suspended their funding to the relief agency.

According to the UN Watch UNRWA’s biggest donors in 2023 were the US and EU countries, accounting for roughly $865 million or about 75 percent of the agency’s $1.16 billion budget.

Even though some countries such as Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, Scotland, Norway and Spain announced they will continue their funding to UNRWA, the agency says it will be forced to halt operations within weeks.

What does UNRWA do?

Established in 1949, UNRWA serves the civic and humanitarian needs of nearly 6 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and vast camps in neighboring Arab countries.

In Gaza alone, the UN agency has 13,000 employees. It runs the strip’s schools, primary healthcare clinics and other social services, and organizes the distribution of humanitarian aid.

UNRWA has been the principal agency overseeing the distribution of aid to Gazans amid the dire humanitarian crisis in the territory that has deteriorated through almost four months of Israel’s genocidal war.

Currently, the entire Gaza’s 2.3 million population relies on UNRWA for basic necessities, including food, water and hygiene supplies.

Nearly half of Gaza’s population have sought refuge in UNRWA schools, clinics and other public buildings from Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment.

So far, more than 150 UNRWA staff have been killed since the war broke out, making it the deadliest conflict ever for UN employees.

Backlash around the world

Palestinian officials slammed the move by donor countries to defund UNRWA and urged an immediate reversal of the move.

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Secretary General Hussein al-Sheikh said the countries’ decision “entails great political and humanitarian relief risks.”

“At this particular time and in light of the continuing aggression against the Palestinian people, we need the maximum support for this international organization and not stopping support and assistance to it,” he wrote on X, urging the countries to “immediately reverse their decision.”

Gaza-based Hamas resistance movement also denounced Israeli “threats” against UNRWA, urging the UN and other international organizations not to “cave into the threats and blackmail.”

In a statement on Sunday, Secretary-General António Guterres urged donor countries to reconsider their decisions to ensure continuity of the UN agency's vital humanitarian operations amid the Israeli war.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the agency, “shocked” by the move, said withholding aid from the aid agency, a “lifeline” two million people depend on, is a “collective punishment.”

The UN special rapporteur on the right to food also warned in a post on X on Sunday that famine in the Gaza Strip was “imminent” and after the funding pause for UNRWA is “inevitable.”

The move also saw backlash from pro-Palestine social and political activists.

They took to social media and lashed out at the Western countries' decision to cut off funding for UNRWA while they still provide support for Israel despite a recent ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel finding its action in Gaza “plausibly genocidal.”

Professor Heidi Matthews, an Assistant Professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School, said countries that have paused funding for UNRWA are “complicit” in genocide.

“Every country that has cut funding to UNRWA is complicit in the deterioration of the humanitarian situation of Palestinians in Gaza, which the ICJ has found is at least plausibly genocidal,” she wrote in a post on X, on Sunday.

Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi echoed Matthews, saying countries that halted funding to UNRWA are not only “complicit” in Israel’s genocide but are speeding it.

“Let’s be clear, the nations that cut off funding to UNRWA today are complicit in genocide. Not only that, they want the genocide to happen faster. They want the population of Gaza to starve to death. They want them to die of disease. They want them to perish into the sea,” he said.

Former UN official Craig Mokhiber also said there is no limit to the “racism” of countries that suspended funding to UNRWA.

“The US and other Western states have now joined together to kick Palestinian civilians while they are down, enduring a brutal genocide, by defunding their humanitarian safety net (UNRWA). The violent racism of these countries has no limit,” the human rights lawyer said.

Hanan Ashrawi, a veteran Palestinian leader, criticized the US and other countries that followed in its footsteps in cutting off aid to UNRWA, for not waiting for the investigations to complete before taking action. 

“They don’t even ask for an independent investigation or wait for the results of UNRWA’s investigation. They immediately take measures against a whole organization that’s providing vital services to the captive and slaughtered people of Gaza, based on accusations against 12,” she wrote.

Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the UK Labour Party, in a post on X on Sunday, slammed the UK’s “moral depravity” for suspension of funding to UNRWA while ICJ finds genocide case against Israel “plausible.”

“Yesterday, the ICJ found a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza. Today, the UK has joined others in suspending funding to UNRWA. This is collective punishment — our government should be ashamed of its moral depravity toward Palestinians starving to death,” Corbyn said.

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