US Pause on Funding UN Relief Agency for Palestinians May Become Permanent 

Trucks carrying aid to Gaza residents cross from Rafah border to Deir Al-Balah town, southern Gaza Strip, 08 March 2024. (EPA)
Trucks carrying aid to Gaza residents cross from Rafah border to Deir Al-Balah town, southern Gaza Strip, 08 March 2024. (EPA)
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US Pause on Funding UN Relief Agency for Palestinians May Become Permanent 

Trucks carrying aid to Gaza residents cross from Rafah border to Deir Al-Balah town, southern Gaza Strip, 08 March 2024. (EPA)
Trucks carrying aid to Gaza residents cross from Rafah border to Deir Al-Balah town, southern Gaza Strip, 08 March 2024. (EPA)

US officials are preparing for a pause on funding the main UN agency for Palestinians to become permanent due to opposition in Congress, even as the Biden administration insists the aid group's humanitarian work is indispensable.

The United States, along with more than a dozen countries, suspended its funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in January after Israel accused 12 of the agency's 13,000 employees in Gaza of participating in the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

The UN has launched an investigation into the allegations, and UNRWA fired some staff after Israel provided the agency with information on the allegations.

The United States - which is UNRWA's largest donor, providing $300-$400 million annually - said it wants to see the results of that inquiry and corrective measures taken before it will consider resuming funding.

Even if the pause is lifted, only about $300,000 - what is left of already appropriated funds - would be released to UNRWA. Anything further would require congressional approval.

Bipartisan opposition in Congress to funding UNRWA makes it unlikely the United States will resume regular donations anytime soon, even as countries such as Sweden and Canada have said they will restart their contributions.

A supplemental funding bill in the US Congress that includes military aid to Israel and Ukraine and is supported by the Biden administration, contains a provision that would block UNRWA from receiving funds if it becomes law.

US officials say they recognize "the critical role" UNRWA plays in distributing aid inside the densely-populated enclave that has been brought close to famine by Israel's assault over the past five months.

"We have to plan for the fact that Congress may make that pause permanent," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Tuesday.

Washington has been looking at working with humanitarian partners on the ground, such as UNICEF and the World Food Program (WFP), to continue giving aid.

But officials are aware that UNRWA is hard to replace.

"There are other organizations that are now providing some distribution of aid inside Gaza, but that is primarily the role that UNRWA is equipped to play that no one else is due to their long-standing work and their networks of distribution and their history inside Gaza," Miller said.

‘UNRWA is a front’

A few Senate Democrats, including Senator Chris Van Hollen, along with some progressive House members, have opposed an indefinite ban on funding to UNRWA.

But any new funding would need the support of at least some Republicans, who hold a majority in the House of Representatives. Many have expressed their opposition to UNRWA.

"UNRWA is a front, plain and simple," Republican lawmaker Brian Mast, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability, said in a statement.

"It masquerades as a relief organization while building the infrastructure to support Hamas ... It is literally funneling American tax dollars to terrorism," Mast said.

UNRWA was established in 1949 by a UN General Assembly resolution, after the war that followed Israel's founding, when 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes.

Today it directly employs 30,000 Palestinians, serving the civic and humanitarian needs of 5.9 million descendants of those refugees, in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and in vast camps in neighboring Arab countries.

In Gaza, UNRWA runs the enclave's schools, its primary healthcare clinics and other social services, and distributes humanitarian aid.

William Deere, director of UNRWA's Washington Representative Office, told Reuters that US support accounts for one-third of UNRWA's budget.

"That's going to be very hard to overcome," he said. "Please remember that UNRWA is more than Gaza. It’s health care and education and social services. It’s East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon."

Fighters from Hamas, which administers Gaza, killed 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 attack and took 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies, an assault that sparked one of the bloodiest wars in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign on the densely populated enclave has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza authorities, while infrastructure has been obliterated and hundreds of thousands are now close to famine.



Gazans Struggle to Imagine Post-war Recovery

Palestinians search for survivors amid the rubble of a building, which collapsed after Israeli bombardment on a building adjacent to it, in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City on September 23, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Hamas group. (AFP)
Palestinians search for survivors amid the rubble of a building, which collapsed after Israeli bombardment on a building adjacent to it, in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City on September 23, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Hamas group. (AFP)
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Gazans Struggle to Imagine Post-war Recovery

Palestinians search for survivors amid the rubble of a building, which collapsed after Israeli bombardment on a building adjacent to it, in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City on September 23, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Hamas group. (AFP)
Palestinians search for survivors amid the rubble of a building, which collapsed after Israeli bombardment on a building adjacent to it, in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City on September 23, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Hamas group. (AFP)

The sheer scale of destruction from the deadliest war in Gaza's history has made the road to recovery difficult to imagine, especially for people who had already lost their homes during previous conflicts.

After an Israeli strike levelled his family home in Gaza City in 2014, 37-year-old Mohammed Abu Sharia made good on his pledge to return to the same plot within less than a year.

The process was not perfect: the grant they received paid for only two floors instead of the original four.

But they happily called it home until it came under aerial assault again last October, following Hamas's attack on southern Israel.

This time, the family could not flee in time and five people were killed, four of them children.

The rest remain displaced nearly a year later, scattered across Gaza and in neighboring Egypt.

"A person puts all his life's hard work into building a house, and suddenly it becomes a mirage," Abu Sharia told AFP.

"If the war stops, we will build again in the same place because we have nothing else."

With bombs still raining down on Gaza, many of the Palestinian territory's 2.4 million people will face the same challenge as Abu Sharia: how to summon the resources and energy necessary for another round of rebuilding.

"The pessimism is coming from bad experiences with reconstruction in the past, and the different scale of this current destruction," said Ghassan Khatib, a former planning minister.

That has not stopped people from trying to plan ahead.

Some focus on the immediate challenges of removing rubble and getting their children back in school after nearly a year of suspended classes.

Others dream of loftier projects: building a port, a Palestinian film industry, or even recruiting a globally competitive football team.

But with no ceasefire in sight, analysts say most long-term planning is premature.

"It's sort of like putting icing on a cake that's not yet fully baked," said Brian Katulis of the Middle East Institute in Washington.

It could take 80 years to rebuild some 79,000 destroyed homes, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to housing said in May.

A UN report in July said workers could need 15 years just to clear the rubble.

The slow responses to past Gaza wars in 2008-9, 2012, 2014 and 2021 give little reason for confidence that rebounding from this one will be any smoother, said Omar Shaban, founder of the Gaza-based think tank PalThink for Strategic Studies.

The Israeli blockade of Gaza, imposed after Hamas took control of the territory in 2007, remains firmly in place, sharply restricting access to building materials.

"People are fed up," Shaban said.

"They lost their faith even before the war."

Despite the hopelessness, Shaban is among those putting forward more imaginative strategies for Gaza's postwar future.

Earlier this year he published an article suggesting initial reconstruction work could focus on 10 neighborhoods -– one inside and one outside refugee camps in each of Gaza's five governorates.

The idea would be to ensure the benefits of reconstruction are seen across the besieged territory, he told AFP.

"I want to create hope. People need to realize that their suffering is going to end" even if not right away, he said.

"Otherwise they will become radical."

Hope is also a major theme of Palestine Emerging, an initiative that has suggested building a port on an artificial island made of war debris, a technical university for reconstruction, and a Gaza-West Bank transportation corridor.

Other proposals have included launching a tourism campaign, building a Palestinian film industry, and recruiting a football squad.

"Maybe when you look on some of these, you would think they are, you know, dreams or something," Palestine Emerging executive director Shireen Shelleh said from her office in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

"However, I believe if you don't dream then you cannot achieve anything. So even if some people might find it ambitious or whatever, in my opinion that's a good thing."

Khatib, the former planning minister, said it was not the time for such proposals.

"I think people should be more realistic," he said.

"The urgent aspects are medicine, food, shelter, schools."