JERUSALEM—Israel has been settling old scores with enemies, and UNRWA, the terrorist-riddled U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, may be next.
A series of Israeli legislative, diplomatic, and military actions this month have threatened UNRWA’s presence along the country’s borders like never before. A consensus has emerged in Jerusalem that the agency is part of a terrorist menace that can no longer be tolerated following Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
"UNRWA encourages terrorism and encourages massacres like Oct. 7," Dan Illouz, a lawmaker from the ruling Likud party who cosponsored draft legislation meant to kneecap UNRWA, told the Washington Free Beacon, summing up the general sentiment among Zionist lawmakers. "Those things are completely unacceptable, and therefore UNRWA should not exist."
The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Sunday unanimously approved Illouz's bill, which would bar Israeli officials from having "any contact" with UNRWA or anyone acting on its behalf. All the committee members also voted to advance a related bill that would revoke UNRWA's authorization to conduct "any activity, either directly or indirectly," on Israeli territory.
Lawmakers from both coalition and opposition parties cosponsored the bills, combining a slate of previous proposals. The full Knesset plenum was expected to take up the draft legislation for debate and potential enactment later this month after a recess for the Jewish High Holidays.
Together, the bills "would make it difficult if not impossible" for UNRWA to continue to operate in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, Illouz said.
The multifront Israeli offensive against UNRWA comes as Israel shows new boldness in its defensive war against Iran and its terrorist affiliates, which have attacked the Jewish state from all directions over the past year. So far in October, Israel has launched a ground campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, moved to encircle Hamas in the northern Gaza Strip, and put Tehran on notice of severe retaliation for a second massive Iranian missile attack on the country—leaving the Biden-Harris administration and other international critics to complain from the sidelines.
"Our counterattack against our enemies of Iran's axis of evil is a necessary condition to ensuring our future and our security," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a cabinet meeting on Monday to mark the first anniversary of the massacre. "We are changing the security reality in our region, for our children and for our future, in order to ensure that what happened on Oct. 7 does not recur. Never again."
Kobi Michael, a senior research fellow at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies and Misgav Institute for National Security, told the Free Beacon, "The entire Israeli strategy is totally different from what we knew before."
"It's not a question of being aggressive. It's a question of being much more determined and understanding that enough is enough and we don't have to tolerate this situation," added Michael, a former head of the Palestinian file in Israel's Strategic Affairs Ministry and before that an Israeli military intelligence officer. "If before Oct. 7, the Israeli strategy was to create change of a first order—which means to accept the existing system and try to make changes to the existing system—now the strategy is to create change of a second order, which means to change the entire system, to change the rules of the game, to change the existing balance of power."
"In this regard," Michael said, "there is also an opportunity to change the situation of the Palestinian refugees on the ground."
Sunday's Knesset votes went ahead over the objections of U.N. secretary-general António Guterres, who wrote a threatening letter to Netanyahu beforehand, reported Israeli news website Ynet: "In light of the seriousness of the matter, I will have to bring it to the attention of the General Assembly if the draft legislation is adopted. … UNRWA cannot be separated from the U.N. It is an inseparable part of it."
At a press conference on Tuesday, Guterres confirmed having sent the letter "to express profound concern over draft legislation that could prevent UNRWA from continuing its essential work in the occupied Palestinian territory" amid Israel's Gaza war to destroy Hamas in response to the Oct. 7 attack. He said the bills "would suffocate efforts to ease human suffering and tensions in Gaza and, indeed, the entire occupied Palestinian territory. It would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster."
Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon shot back in a statement: "Israel works with humanitarian agencies that are actually interested in humanitarian aid and not activism or, in some cases, terrorism."
Last week, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz barred Guterres from the country, citing the U.N. chief's failure to "unequivocally condemn" Iran's missile attack on Israel a day earlier. Guterres has said the Oct. 7 attack "did not happen in a vacuum" and has repeatedly condemned Israel for civilian deaths in Gaza.
To some extent, Israeli diplomatic and security officials have long shared Guterres's concerns about the challenges of replacing UNRWA. But national security considerations have come to trump such doubts over the course of a year of war in which UNRWA and Guterres were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Israeli critics have charged that UNRWA, an internationally funded agency that has provided aid to Palestinians for decades, perpetuates Palestinian grievances and violence against Israel by treating generation after generation as refugees, teaching anti-Semitism and jihadism in its schools, and collaborating with terrorist groups.
A flood of revelations linking UNRWA to Hamas has hardened Israeli attitudes toward the agency. In August, a U.N. investigation of UNRWA partially confirmed declassified Israeli intelligence indicating that 19 UNRWA-employed Gazans participated in the Oct. 7 attack. UNRWA fired nine of the employees after donor countries temporarily suspended funding. The U.N. probe did not publicly address additional Israeli findings that thousands of UNRWA employees were Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives and that the agency appeared to be "assisting Hamas with securing humanitarian aid" meant for Gazan civilians.
In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly late last month, Netanyahu identified Hamas's ongoing ability to exploit humanitarian aid supposedly controlled by UNRWA as a central obstacle to removing the group from power.
"Now, ladies and gentlemen, even with Hamas's greatly diminished military capability, the terrorists still exercise some governing power in Gaza by stealing the food that we enable aid agencies to bring into Gaza," Netanyahu said. "They sell the stolen food at exorbitant prices, and that's how they stay in power. Well, this too has to end, and we're working to bring it to an end."
On Sunday, Israeli troops returned en force to northern Gaza, with the military calling on the estimated 300,000 remaining residents of the area to move through evacuation corridors to an expanded humanitarian zone in the south. Israel looked poised to surround northern Gaza, evacuate the civilians, and neutralize the remaining Hamas terrorists, a tactic that could be repeated in other parts of the strip, according to several Israeli national security experts. In any areas that Israel clears, the experts agreed, neither Hamas or UNRWA is likely to be allowed to return.
Amir Avivi, a former Israeli brigadier general who has advised Netanyahu throughout the war, told the Free Beacon that military leaders were coming around to his view that Israel must take over Gaza "for a while" and directly handle humanitarian aid distribution.
"The IDF will try, starting in specific areas where Hamas has been removed, to build some local leadership," Avivi said, referring to the Israeli military. "It's not going to continue the way it has been until now, where Hamas is seizing the aid from UNRWA all the time."
Michael, the Israeli researcher, agreed: "We have no option other than to establish a temporary military administration [in Gaza]. There will be no UNRWA there. The IDF will be responsible for the distribution of humanitarian aid, and we will facilitate the required conditions for a replacement to Hamas."
The Biden-Harris administration appears to have other ideas. After days of anonymously sourced press reports that the White House feels left out of Israeli decision-making, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Wednesday criticized Israel’s ongoing evacuation of northern Gaza and the overall humanitarian situation in the strip.
Thomas-Greenfield also expressed "deep concern" about the Israeli draft legislation to cut ties with UNRWA, saying that only "a small percentage of UNRWA employees have ties to Hamas and other terrorist groups."
Spokesmen for the Prime Minister's Office and the Israeli military declined to comment on the record.