CrossFireArabia
As Israel shuts down UNRWA in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, the move serves a strategic purpose: Undermining Palestinian national liberation and the right of return.
By Sara Troian
This week, Israel’s ban on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) takes effect, cutting off its services in its two main areas of operation in Palestine; namely, Gaza and, the occupied West Bank, including east Jerusalem.
Established in 1949 in response to the Nakba, UNRWA was meant to provide humanitarian aid and protect Palestinian rights until a just resolution to the refugee crisis was achieved. Central to this is the Palestinians’ inalienable right of return, which Israel has consistently denied.
Beyond the 5.4 million UNRWA-registered refugees, at least five million more Palestinians have been forcibly displaced by Zionist colonisation. The right of return belongs to them all.
Calculated attack on Palestine
In October, the Israeli parliament passed two bills targeting UNRWA. The first prohibits the agency from operating within the 1948 borders. The second bars Israeli officials from engaging with UNRWA in any capacity.
These laws are designed to remove Palestinian rights to a homeland and further weaken the agency that serves them. They also mark the culmination of decades of attacks by Israel and its allies seeking to dismantle UNRWA as part of the broader Zionist settler-colonial project.
For the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza, this will cripple efforts to rebuild the warmth of their homes and the safety of life-sustaining infrastructure vaporised by Israel’s annihilatory violence. This will further obstruct the restoration of life and the healing from nights spent beneath skies ablaze with fire and days suspended between slow and quick death in dwindling food rations.
In the West Bank and east Jerusalem, 49,000 students will be forced out of UNRWA schools, and will be left either without education or, in Jerusalem, to the whims of Israeli curricula that distort, dehumanise and erase their history and culture.
Nearly a million Palestinians will be denied medical care. The loss of thousands of jobs will further drive Palestinians into economic precarity, deepening the cycle of engineered de-development.
Political goals and neoimperial strategies
The dismantling of UNRWA is not just a humanitarian crisis; it is a political manoeuvre. Zionism has slated Palestine for erasure as part of a broader regional strategy. In this imperialist framework, the US and EU finance oppression, Israel enforces it, the local bourgeoisie complies, and the UN provides a thin veil of legitimacy.
The timing of the ban aligns with Israel’s shifting tactics. While the intensity of genocide in Gaza has momentarily slowed, violence in the West Bank—particularly in Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps—has escalated. Zionist forces use airstrikes to destroy life-sustaining infrastructure, obstruct healthcare, and drive mass evacuations, all while continuing the daily expansion of settlements and mass arrests.
Palestinians today face the same oppressive forces as during the 1936-39 revolt: self-serving leadership, Arab regime complicity, and Zionist-imperialist domination.
At the core of these dynamics is Palestinian refugeehood—a fundamental consequence of Zionist colonisation. Since 1948, Israel has displaced over 10 million Palestinians, most, descendants from the Nakba, severing them from their homeland.
The right of return threatens Zionism’s foundation because it challenges Israel’s colonial reality, built on destruction and displacement.
The Zionist-Western axis‘ attacks on UNRWA aim to depoliticise its mandate, while crystallising Palestinian refugeehood into a permanent humanitarian crisis to be managed.
While the status of Palestinian refugees and their right of return cannot be solely determined by UNRWA or any international agency–as it is a condition that stems from the implementation of Zionist settler-colonialism– these attacks weaken the agency’s ability to advance Palestinian political claims within the UN.
Moreover, heavy reliance on donor-driven funding has transformed the agency into a semi-corporate entity, dependent on fluctuating foreign funding, further undermining its capacity to support Palestinian political aspirations. This, however, is a symptom of the neoliberal exploitation that, disguised as humanitarianism, treats Palestinians as disposable and expendable subjects to Western imperial expansion.
Palestinians are therefore held hostage by a global structure designed to rob them of their autonomy. This is reflected, for example, in the fact that all senior UNRWA officials are non-Palestinian, making decisions for 5.4 million refugees, yet often against their quest for national liberation.
Integration?
Meanwhile, US imperialism has dealt another blow by freezing all USAID projects–except for those in Israel and Egypt– and halting military aid to all countries except Israel, Egypt and Jordan.
The suspension of USAID serves as a coercive tool to absorb the thousands of Palestinians whom Israel’s brutal campaign aims to expel in the coming months. For example, in Jordan, where USAID plays a critical role in supporting public services like healthcare, justice, and water supply, the freeze pressures the Kingdom to participate in this plan, which has been in the works for years, but only recently the US has openly encouraged Egypt and Jordan to endorse a new wave of forced Palestinian exile.
In recent years, experts and international bodies have proposed integration into host countries or resettlement in third countries as pathways to securing a modicum of rights and emancipation for Palestinians who have been forcefully encamped for over seven decades.
While access to civil and political rights in places of exile is crucial, these proposals must not be weaponised to suppress the central struggle for return. At this moment, such narratives risk legitimising forced expulsions, under the guise of legal solutions, erasing Palestinian claims from the global agenda.
Access to rights must never serve as a strategy to downplay or marginalise the central struggle for return and efforts to secure it. At this moment, it is crucial to recognise how such narratives and solutions can be exploited—either to hinder Palestinian survival amid genocide or to suppress resistance against forced displacement.
Türkiye condemns Israel’s ban on UNRWA in occupied Palestinian territories
Many Palestinians in the West Bank already hold Jordanian citizenship—remnants of the Nakba and Oslo. If Palestinians will be forced to relocate to Jordan or third states under the pretense of naturalisation and resettlement, this strategy, framed as a legal solution, will ultimately legitimise further forced expulsions and erase their right of return from the international agenda.
This will facilitate the elimination of 10 million Palestinians as a political force challenging Western imperial expansion.
The time for return
A just solution cannot emerge from the very institutions and structures that have perpetuated Palestinians’ plight and the plundering of their land for decades. Such alternatives merely rebrand subjugation of the people.
The answer lies in the steadfastness of Palestinians themselves. Over the past 16 months, in defiance of over a century of disenfranchisement and exile, including 480 days of settler-colonial erasure, Palestinians alone have transformed return from a distant dream, into a tangible reality.
As displaced Palestinian in Gaza flood back towards their destroyed homes in Gaza City, Beit Lahiya, Jabaliya, and Beit Hanoun, this marks only the beginning of their Great March of Return. Eighty percent of Gaza’s population descends from those expelled from 247 villages in central-southern Palestine through waves of Zionist massacres.
This must be the guiding principle for any just and lasting solution—one that restores Palestinians to their homes, land, and dignity from which they have been forcibly expelled for far too long.
SOURCE: TRT World
Sara Troian
Sara Troian is a Hume PhD Scholar in the Department of Law and Criminology at Maynooth University. Her PhD research examines the tension between international law and settler-colonialism in Palestine.
