Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation. Will a new Israeli law make it worse?

Israel’s parliament voted to ban the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNWRA) on Monday, a decision that could further impede the delivery of critical aid to Gaza as Israel continues its brutal assault there.

For over 70 years, UNRWA has provided assistance and services — schools, clinics, food and cash assistance, and shelter — to the Palestinian population in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. It has continued its operations in increasingly challenging conditions throughout the war, orchestrating the distribution of humanitarian aid despite Israeli obstruction and funding shortfalls. Palestinians seeking medical care and facing crisis levels of hunger and disease have become increasingly reliant on UNWRA’s aid amid Israel’s bombardment, which has left Gaza in ruins. 

It’s hard to imagine Gaza’s humanitarian crisis worsening, but that is likely to happen with the UNRWA ban. UNRWA itself has provided food to more than 215,000 families in Gaza since the start of the war, but it has also coordinated the entry of more than 18,500 aid trucks into Gaza, including those operated by other nonprofit groups.

The ban will shutter UNRWA’s offices in East Jerusalem, stop legal immunity for the agency’s staff in the Israeli justice system, and criminalize coordination between the Israeli military and the agency. The new regulations are the result of two new laws, both of which passed by a wide majority. Set to take effect over the next three months, the ban is part of an effort by Israeli officials to dismantle it following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. 

Israel accused 19 UNRWA workers of involvement in the attacks; a UN investigation concluded that 10 may have been involved and fired those individuals, but did not find evidence supporting the other cases. In the wake of those allegations, UNRWA was defunded by the US and other major donor countries. US funding hasn’t resumed, despite the firings, and Israel maintains that Hamas is deeply embedded in the agency’s Gaza operations. 

That leaves Palestinians who rely on UNRWA in an even more vulnerable position.

“UNRWA is a lifeline for Palestinians,” said Christopher Lockyear, secretary general of the aid group Doctors Without Borders. “If implemented, the ban on UNRWA’s activities would have catastrophic implications on the dire humanitarian situation of Palestinians living in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, now and for generations to come.”

What Israel’s decision to ban UNRWA means for Gaza

Gaza is already experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe. The Palestinian death toll now exceeds 40,000, though there are likely many more unreported. 

Israeli attacks have displaced more than 2 million people, many of them multiple times. Most are living in tent encampments because housing has been destroyed on a level not seen anywhere in the world since World War II, according to the United Nations.

A September report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the primary organization tracking food insecurity worldwide, found that the entire Gaza Strip is facing emergency levels of food insecurity. More than 133,000 are experiencing famine. Malnutrition has made the population more vulnerable to disease, including waterborne illnesses like polio. If the fighting goes on and humanitarian aid continues to be restricted, the IPC projects a widespread risk of famine heading into the winter months. 

Few humanitarian aid shipments have made it into Gaza in recent months: According to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), September marked the lowest volume of deliveries since March, when half the population was at critical and imminent risk of famine. This is not because aid isn’t available. The WFP has enough food to feed 1 million people for four months ready to go into Gaza, but the organization says it needs Israel to open up more border crossings in order to make those deliveries. Recent Israeli evacuation orders have also made it even more difficult for aid workers to operate within Gaza. 

The lack of available border crossings and the recent UNWRA ban all appear to contravene an International Court of Justice ruling in January demanding that Israel take steps to facilitate the delivery of aid to Gaza. 

According to Doctors Without Borders, UNRWA currently serves as Gaza’s largest health provider, providing over 15,000 consultations daily across the Strip, and its absence would lead to more preventable deaths. NGOs also rely on UNRWA to coordinate aid deliveries and inform the Israeli military about the movements of humanitarian workers. Doctors Without Borders, for instance, anticipates that coordinating those movements with Israeli authorities will become harder and entrance permits to Gaza are more likely to be denied as a result of the decision. That could further endanger aid workers and lead to less aid getting into Gaza. 

The International Rescue Committee said in a statement that other NGOs cannot fill the critical role UNRWA has played in Gaza, which has well-established infrastructure and the trust of the community: “The Bill passed in the Israeli Parliament is an unprecedented attack on a UN agency and, if implemented, would only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe.”

Will the US withhold weapons?

Israel’s decision to ban UNRWA could potentially trigger a reaction from the US, Israel’s primary security partner, which has supplied more than $17 billion in military aid to Israel over the past year, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. 

The US State Department and the Department of Defense had already warned Israel earlier this month that some US aid could be curtailed if the humanitarian situation in Gaza did not significantly improve within 30 days. 

During a press briefing Monday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the department was “concerned” about the legislation banning UNRWA and warned that “the passage of this legislation could have implications under US law and US policy.”

The laws in question could include the Leahy Law, which prevents military aid to specific units suspected of gross violations of human rights, and other federal provisions that prevent military transfers to governments that block US humanitarian aid.

Over the course of the past year, both Hamas and the Israeli military have been repeatedly accused of war crimes by the UN and other human rights experts. The scale of Israel’s alleged crimes amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people, according to South Africa and at least 12 other countries, as well as a number of experts. The International Court of Justice has also determined that Israel is, at the very least, not doing enough to prevent it in its prosecution of the war in Gaza.

Those accusations have not been enough for the US to change its stance on aid to Israel. The Biden administration did impose a “red line” at a major military operation in Rafah in southern Gaza, but insisted that Israel’s military actions there did not meet that criteria.

It’s unclear whether Israel’s UNRWA ban will result in any shifts in the US’s position, but Jesse Marks, senior advocate for the Middle East at Refugees International, said there is reason to believe that is unlikely.

“The White House can draw red lines, and the Israelis can blow past those red lines with impunity,” he said. “There’s a sincere degree of skepticism of the potential that the Biden administration would push back against the Israelis in any meaningful way if the measures around UNRWA move forward.”