Rizky Amelia
The United States-led Board of Peace has ruled that the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees will play no role in Gaza, a decision that closely mirrors a campaign Israeli officials have pursued for years. Tasked with supervising the ceasefire and the territory's reconstruction, the board said on Friday that it would work only with partners it considers trustworthy and capable of meeting Gaza's needs — a standard it says UNRWA does not clear.
In a post on X, the board stressed that "the Board of Peace's policy as it relates to UNRWA's involvement in Gaza is unchanged," a formulation that pointedly did not announce any new consultation or review. According to the board, it will only work with partners who "deliver for the people of Gaza and contribute to a deradicalised Strip," adding that UNRWA "fails on those litmus tests." The language of a deradicalised Strip introduces an explicitly political criterion alongside the more familiar claims about efficiency and neutrality, a combination critics have long argued is a pretext for excluding rather than reforming a UN body.
A Board of Peace official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said members had in fact met UNRWA officials several times. The official conceded that individual UNRWA programmes could continue if they served Gaza's residents well, but insisted that "UNRWA's days are over" — suggesting the exclusion is about dismantling the agency rather than simply choosing different contractors for a list of projects.
The move followed the board's unveiling on Wednesday of a multibillion-dollar reconstruction blueprint on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly. The plan contains 66 projects, with $2.4bn proposed for the first tranche of recovery work, and comes nearly a year after the so-called ceasefire took effect in the devastated coastal territory. The announcement arrives at an awkward moment: several core elements of the ceasefire remain stalled, including the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the disarmament of Hamas, and reconstruction cannot meaningfully begin while those questions are unresolved.
UNRWA itself was established in 1949 to serve tens of thousands of Palestinians displaced from their homes by Jewish militias from areas that now form part of Israel. It has operated for decades in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where many Palestinian refugees live. Palestinians widely regard the agency as a guarantor of their right of return, while Israel has consistently pressed for it to be disbanded.
The practical scale of what has been excluded is difficult to overstate. UNRWA employs roughly 11,000 Palestinian staff in Gaza and remains deeply embedded in the provision of health care, education, and water and sanitation services — the everyday infrastructure on which a population under a blockade and a mass-displacement crisis depends. Its removal is all the more consequential given the scale of displacement across the territory and the continuing restrictions on aid entering Gaza.
UNRWA's acting Commissioner-General Christian Saunders responded indirectly from Gaza on Friday, saying the agency "remains an institution of considerable humanitarian and strategic value, with capabilities and expertise that are difficult to replicate today." He warned that disregarding those capabilities "at a moment of such profound need is neither logical nor responsible" — an argument aimed squarely at the gap the exclusion is likely to create rather than at the substance of the board's criticism.
Former UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, who until recently ran the agency, was blunter. Warning in remarks to AP that eliminating the organisation would have a devastating effect on Palestinians, Lazzarini said decision-makers want to get rid of the agency but also know that doing so completely today "might have a further … devastating impact on the population." In a separate post on X, he took a swipe at the board's own output, remarking that "grandiose plans are what the Board of Peace does best" while pointing to the suffering across Gaza amid Israel's continuing assault.
Hamas swiftly accused the board of simply adopting Israel's position. Spokesperson Hazem Qassem said on Saturday that excluding UNRWA represented "a complete alignment with the Zionist position," arguing the decision was designed to terminate the agency's operations, block aid deliveries and undermine Palestinian refugees' right of return. In remarks that trailed off, he also questioned the propriety of a body framed as a peace council taking what he called a hostile stance toward an agency providing services in Gaza.
The board's decision also lands against a backdrop of steadily hardening Israeli policy. Israel's parliament approved a legal ban on UNRWA in October 2024, and Israeli authorities later demolished a structure inside the agency's headquarters in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem. For Palestinians, the cumulative effect of legal prohibition, property demolition and now exclusion from international reconstruction efforts is a narrowing of the institutional space in which they can make claims on the international community.
Analysis of the announcement raises questions the board has not answered. It has not said who will deliver the schooling, health care and water services UNRWA currently provides, nor whether a successor mechanism will be created, nor how such an operation would be financed. It has also not set out the evidence by which the agency fails its reliability tests, or whether other donors and UN bodies will follow the same standard when allocating the billions the recovery will require.
The exclusion therefore functions less as a technical procurement decision than as a political declaration, aligning the architecture of Gaza's reconstruction with the position Israel has maintained for years. Whether it amounts to a genuine administrative judgement or a political litmus test will be judged by what — or who — replaces UNRWA in the coming months, and by whether the stalled elements of the ceasefire finally move forward.
Comments (0)