UN chief tells Israel that draft law blocking aid agency UNRWA in Gaza would be ‘catastrophe’

Draft Israeli legislation that would stop the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) working in the Gaza Strip and West Bank would be a “catastrophe” if enacted, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday.

Guterres said he raised his concerns with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Such a measure would suffocate efforts to ease human suffering and tensions in Gaza, and indeed, the entire occupied Palestinian Territory,” he told reporters.

“It would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”

The Israeli parliament in July gave preliminary approval to a bill that would declare UNRWA a terrorist organization. Israeli leaders have accused UNRWA staff of collaborating with Hamas militants in Gaza.

In response to Guterres’s remarks, Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon told Reuters: “Israel works with humanitarian agencies that are actually interested in humanitarian aid and not activism or, in some cases, terrorism.”

The UN said in August that nine UNRWA staff may have been involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and had been fired. Then a Hamas commander in Lebanon — killed last month in an Israeli strike — was found to have had an UNRWA job.

UNRWA provides education, health and aid to millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. It has long had tense relations with Israel but ties have deteriorated sharply since the start of the war in Gaza and Israel has called repeatedly for UNRWA to be disbanded.

Guterres spoke to reporters a day after the one-year anniversary of the shock Hamas rampage in Israel, during which some 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli figures. More than 100 hostages remain held in Gaza by the Palestinian militant group.

The secretary general said there is still time to stop the spreading violence.

He again called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, the release of all hostages taken in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack in southern Israel and the delivery of humanitarian aid to the multitudes in desperate need.

The Hamas attack triggered Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, sparking a humanitarian crisis in the besieged enclave where authorities say nearly 42,000 people have been killed.

“There is something fundamentally wrong in the way this war is being conducted,” Guterres said on Tuesday.

“Ordering civilians to evacuate does not keep them safe if they have no safe place to go and no shelter, food, medicine or water.”

The conflict in Gaza has raised fears of all-out regional war, pitting Israel against Iran and the militant groups that it backs, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Israel’s military on Tuesday deployed more troops into south Lebanon, signalling an expanding ground offensive against Hezbollah.

Gaza in ‘death spiral,’ says Guterres

Guterres appealed to Israel and Hezbollah to respect the safety and security of UNIFIL peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.

He said that Israeli forces operating adjacent to a UNIFIL position — staffed by Irish peacekeepers — had left after he complained on Monday “to different entities.” A UN official later said Guterres had communicated with the United States.

About 2,000 Lebanese have been killed since Hezbollah began firing at Israel a year ago in solidarity with Hamas, most killed in the past few weeks. Guterres said the death toll in Lebanon has already surpassed the number of people killed in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

Guterres said “the Middle East is a powder keg with many parties holding the match,” adding that Lebanon is on the verge of “an all-out war” and Gaza is “in a death spiral.”

The conflict in the Middle East “is getting worse by the hour,” Guterres said, and every airstrike, missile launch and rocket fired “pushes peace further out of reach and makes the suffering even worse for the millions of civilians caught in the middle.”