Israel Must Not Be Allowed to End UNRWA

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.

Sara Troian

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.

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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

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.

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Israel Orders UNRWA Shutdown in Jerusalem

Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, announced on Tuesday that the Israeli government will sever all ties with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Danon demanded the agency cease operations and vacate all its facilities in Jerusalem within 48 hours.

UNRWA plays a critical role in providing healthcare and education in the occupied Palestinian territories. Since the outbreak of the genocide in Gaza on October 7, 2023, the agency has supplied 60% of the food entering the besieged strip.

Danon’s statement came ahead of a UN Security Council meeting discussing Israel’s recent legislation to end UNRWA’s legal presence in Palestine. The law, passed by the Knesset, takes effect on January 30.

“The law prohibits UNRWA from operating within Israel’s sovereign borders and bans any communication between Israeli officials and the agency,” Danon said. He emphasized that Israel will terminate all cooperation and communication with UNRWA or any entity representing it.

Danon also informed Security Council members that Israel will stop collaborating with UNRWA within 48 hours. He insisted the agency must halt its activities and evacuate its facilities in occupied Jerusalem.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini addressed the Security Council, warning that the ongoing attacks on the agency harm the lives and futures of Palestinians across the occupied territories. “This undermines their trust in the international community and jeopardizes any prospects for peace and security,” he said.

Lazzarini highlighted that 650,000 Palestinian students in Gaza have been out of school for nearly two years. He stressed the urgent need for UNRWA to continue supporting them.

Ahead of the law taking effect, Danon told reporters, “Israel will halt all ties with UNRWA and anyone acting on its behalf as of January 30.” He clarified that the decision was not made lightly or hastily, calling it a “necessary” move rather than a political one according to the Quds News Network.

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Israel Tell Us UNRWA to ‘Pack Up And Leave’

The Israeli envoy to the UN, Danny Danon, sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, demanding that UNRWA cease its operations in the Israeli-occupied territories, including Jerusalem, by the end of January 2025.

“UNRWA is required to cease its operations in Jerusalem, and evacuate all premises in which it operates in the city, no later than 30 January 2025,” Danny Danon stated in the letter.

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Jerusalem Signs: Identity and Political Power

At a recent lecture hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), Yasir Suleiman, professor of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Cambridge guided the audience through the intricate linguistic landscape of Jerusalem. Exploring the Holy City’s street signs, Suleiman revealed how these seemingly mundane markers act as silent witnesses to history and power struggles, charting the evolution of identity and conflict in the region. 

“Language is important, not because it gives you information, but because it stands for something that is beyond language,” Suleiman explained. “Road signs, anywhere in the world, do tell a story. They present you with a narrative, a cultural map, a linguistic map, and a political map.”

Language Layers of Jerusalem 

Jerusalem’s street signs have long served as a battleground for identity and political power, reflecting the city’s historical transformations, from the Ottoman period through the British Mandate and into the present day. Suleiman traced this history, showing how language has shaped and been shaped by competing claims over the city’s public space. 

https://twitter.com/CBRL_news/status/1878758921340678444

Before the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, Jerusalem’s signs prominently featured Ottoman Turkish (written in Arabic script) alongside English and occasionally French. Hebrew was largely absent. For instance, an original 1892 sign at the Jerusalem-Jaffa train station displayed the name of “Jerusalem” in English and Ottoman Turkish, with Hebrew was only added post-1948. 

This marked a time when Hebrew was largely absent from Jerusalem’s linguistic landscape, reflecting its limited presence in the population’s daily life, while Arabic script was present, but the Arabic language itself was absent.

However, the rise of the Zionist movement sought to change this, prioritising Hebrew revival as a cornerstone of its political and cultural agenda. 

Three Languages, One Hierarchy

Under British Mandate, it was decided that English, Arabic and Hebrew were all required on street signs. Yet, their arrangement revealed the prevailing power dynamics: English appeared at the top, Arabic in the middle, and Hebrew at the bottom, as stipulated by British authorities. 

This vertical hierarchy symbolised the ruling power, with English taking precedence and Arabic reflecting the majority population (around 90% of the people in Palestine were Arabic-speakers, including the Jews and Christians). Hebrew’s lower placement underscored its marginal status at the time. 

The Zionist movement, unhappy with this arrangement, lobbied for horizontal signs, where all three languages appeared side-by-side. Even so, Arabic retained a visual advantage because its right-to-left orientation naturally positioned it above Hebrew in terms of linguistic flow, as any right-to-left script placed on the right takes visual precedence over one positioned on the left.

Three Languages, Three Names

Suleiman highlighted how different languages on street signs often tell different stories about the same location. For instance, the famous Damascus Gate is labelled in Arabic “Bab el-’Amoud,” referencing Roman pillars in the area, while in Hebrew, it is called “Bab Nablus,” acknowledging Nablus’s religious significance for Jews, and in English, it is “Damascus Gate,” reflecting the trade connexions to the Syrian capital. Each language offers a distinct historical or cultural claim to the place, underscoring the city’s layered identity. 

Three languages, Two Boxes

The 1948-1967 Jordanian control of Jerusalem brought changes to Jerusalem’s signs. With almost no Jewish presence within the Old City’s walls, the Jordanian authorities only put street signs in Arabic and English. 

Arabic was placed above English, with the English text mirroring the Arabic perfectly (e.g., “Al-Malak Road”). This reflected a shift in status: English was no longer the language of the ruling power but had become merely a lingua franca, while Arabic took precedence as the dominant language.

However, after the Israelis occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, the linguistic order shifted again. New signs were introduced, with Hebrew taking the top position, symbolising Israeli sovereignty. Arabic and English were relegated below it, marking a significant reordering of visual and political priorities. 

By 1980, when the Israeli Knesset declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, the street signs further evolved to reflect political realities. A single box now contained all three languages, with Hebrew firmly at the top. Arabic began to diminish in influence, with English morphology increasingly aligning with Hebrew rather than Arabic conventions. For instance, “Ha-Malak Road” replaced “Al-Malak Road,” subtly asserting Hebrew’s dominance over Arabic. 

Signs of Power

This dynamic became even more pronounced in 2018 when the Israeli Knesset stripped Arabic of its status as an official language. On modern street signs like “Nablus Road,” Hebrew now appears on top of the three languages and often in its fully pointed form, a form traditionally reserved for sacred texts, emphasising its elevated status in Israel’s narrative of Jerusalem. 

Suleiman underscored how Jerusalem’s street signs are not just tools for navigation, they are symbols of power. “These signs are not about informing you where you are, they tell you who owns the place, who calls the shots.”

Street signs of Jerusalem have become a linguistic archaeology, with layers of history etched into their evolving forms. From the Ottoman period to the present day, they quietly tell the story of a city at the centre of competing claims over its identity. 

This article was written by Sophie Constantin and appeared in the Jordan Times

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