Unrwa under attack to divert attention from the ICJ ruling
JVL Introduction
We repost two articles, by Nadine Finch and Lindsey German, relating to the decision to suspend aid to Unrwa, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, following allegations that a dozen of its 13,000 employees were involved in the October 7 attacks on Israel.
Unrwa did what it could as soon as it received the allegations, immediately ending the contracts of these staff members and launching an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay.
Nevertheless, this has been used unpardonably as an excuse for withholding aid to the people of Gaza, huge numbers of whom are entirely dependent on Unwra for their survival.
Cutting aid is a vindictive act – to divert attention from the ICJ judgment and to punish Unwra whose testimony was important in establishing South Africa’s case at the ICJ.
WE note the Irish deputy premier, Micheál Martin’s response: Ireland had no plans to suspend its funding for the agency, saying it provided “life saving assistance to 2.3m people and at incredible personal cost – with over 100 staff killed in last four months”.
RK
PS: See the Guardian explainer on Unrwa here.
Israel fails to win the legal argument, so targets the UN
Labour Hub, 29th January 2024
The West’s action taken against UNRWA may not be compatible with international law or a two state solution, argues Nadine Finch.
On 26th January 2024, the seventeen judges who currently comprise the International Court of Justice announced the provisional measures to be imposed on Israel pending a full hearing of the case brought by South Africa, asserting that Israel was in breach of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Fifteen of these judges had been elected to serve terms of nine years by the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council, sitting and voting simultaneously. Two others were ad hoc judges, only sitting on this case. One was appointed by South Africa and one by Israel. Despite fears articulated by some before the hearing, all but two of the judges accepted the legal arguments relied on by South Africa in their entirety and the Israeli ad hoc judge agreed with two of the provisional measures imposed by the ICJ.
The case for South Africa was put by a highly skilled and articulate team of international lawyers. The evidence it relied upon was impeccably sourced and the propositions of law it relied upon were accepted by the ICJ.
In contrast, the team instructed by Israel sometimes relied on facts that had been proven to be false or were highly contested. Its legal content was weak and none of its submissions were accepted in the ICJ judgment. For example, it complained that the actions of Hamas should also have been explored by the Court, ignoring the fact that the Convention only applies to member states. (Any actions found to be war crimes committed by Hamas will fall within the jurisdiction of the separate International Criminal Court.)
The ICJ accepted that Palestinians were a group for the purpose of the Genocide Convention and that the actions of Israel were capable of amounting to genocide. It also found that it was necessary to impose provisional measures to protect the rights of this group pending the final hearing.
It is true that the ICJ did not include a ceasefire in its provisional measures. But given its findings and the other provisional measures, the orders made by the court cannot be achieved without a ceasefire. This has been amply identified by the continuing bombardment of Gaza that is killing Palestinians, causing them serious bodily and mental harm and deliberately inflicting harm on the group’s conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s destruction in whole or in part – all of which are breaches of the ICJ’s first provisional measure.
Another provisional measure supported by a 16–1 majority, which included Israel, was that:
“the State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
This was in the light of the ICJ’s finding that Israel had been denying the inhabitants of Gaza access to food, water, sanitation, health care, safety or education.
But, having failed to win the legal argument against this provision in the ICJ, Israel proceeded to appeal to the Western states to stop funding the major agency providing such aid to the population of Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East. Many of these states were already arming and/or supporting Israel’s military actions for their own strategic, economic and political reasons.
The pretext for this attack on the major source of humanitarian aid in Gaza was the alleged action of 12 UNRWA employees on 7th October, 2023, One of whom is known to be dead, two who have not been identified and nine who have already been dismissed by UNRWA.
The dismissals were confirmed on 27th January 2024, by Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner General of UNRWA, who said that “to protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay.”
The twelve employees represent 0.04% of the 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza and, as Philippe Lazzarini also stated, “UNRWA is the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival. Many are hungry as the clock is ticking towards a looming famine. The Agency runs shelters for over 1 million people and provides food and primary health care even at the height of the hostilities.”
Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the UN has also stated that “the tens of thousands of men and women who work for UNRWA, many in some of the most dangerous situations for humanitarian workers, should not be penalised. The dire needs of the desperate populations they serve must be met.”
Despite this, some of the major donors to UNRWA – the UK, US, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Canada and Australia – immediately suspended all funding for UNWRA.
This places them in breach of international law and potentially culpable of genocide themselves. As was made clear by the ICJ, all member states share a responsibility to prevent and punish genocide. This is why South Africa was deemed to have the jurisdiction to bring the case before the ICJ. The provisional measures imposed by the ICJ sought to prevent any actions capable of amounting to genocide pending the final hearing of the case. Therefore, any state that also, by implication, prevents the timely provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip may be said to be assisting in a genocide.
They are also aiding Israel to inflict collective punishment on the whole population of Gaza, who are already facing famine conditions, no viable shelter or access to medical treatment and are being herded by the IDF into an ever-smaller section of Gaza to precipitate a second Nakba. Those who work for UNRWA, 99% of whom are locally recruited Palestinians, are suffering a different form of collective punishment, as they will no longer be paid a salary to support themselves and their families.
The attack on UNRWA also puts in question the support for a two-state solution, much vaunted by many of the states who have suspended funding. UNRWA was established by the UN General Assembly on 8th December 1949 and became operational on 1st May 1950. It was given responsibility for the 700,000 Palestinians rendered homeless and destitute by the Nakba. Part of its mandate, under Resolution 194 of 1948 of the UN General Assembly, was to promote a right of return.
Some 75 years later, Palestinians remain permanent refugees in camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. the West Bank, as well as Gaza. Most of them are also excluded from the Refugee Convention, as the UN deemed them to be the responsibility of UNRWA in what was intended to be a short- term measure only, pending a resolution of their displacement.
Support for Palestinians will now fall on small states, such as Ireland and Norway, who are continuing to support UNRWA and those of us who provide support to UNRWA. Individuals can donate here.
Nadine Finch is a former barrister who specialised in human rights law and is the author of several books on family, immigration and comparative law. She writes in a personal capacity.
29th January 2024
Good morning.
I can only think of one word for the reception of the ICJ judgement on Gaza by the British government – disgusting. The court’s ruling on the case brought by South Africa was a powerful indictment of Israel and said that the country had a case to answer for possible genocide. It is disappointing that it did not order a ceasefire as it has the power to do (and as it did to Russia over its invasion of Ukraine) but not surprising given the conflict with US imperialism that would have brought.
It did however demand that Israel takes steps to prevent genocide, protect civilians and allow humanitarian aid – and that it has to report back to the court in a month on progress. It also demanded that it prevents and takes action against calls for genocide (which are coming from far-right cabinet ministers among others).
The response from the foreign secretary Lord David Cameron was slow in coming. He had after all assured us that Israel had no case to answer at the ICJ. So it took 24 hours for the government to frame its reply, and when it came it showed the depths to which the British ruling class can sink:
‘We respect the role and independence of the ICJ. However we have stated that we have considerable concerns about this case, which is not helpful in the goal of achieving a sustainable ceasefire.
‘Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas in line with IHL, as we have said from the outset. Our view is that Israel’s actions in Gaza cannot be described as a genocide, which is why we thought South Africa’s decision to bring the case was wrong and provocative.’
This effectively denies the court’s ruling, defends Israel’s actions and attacks South Africa for having the temerity to call out an apartheid state. It shows the extent to which Britain is prepared to back Israel in its barbaric attacks on the Palestinians. It is completely in accord with the Israeli refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing, and with the US backing of the slaughter. It is in great contrast to the government decision to halt funding to UNWRA as a result of unproved allegations, rather than a court verdict.
This endorses the smokescreen thrown up over the 12 UNWRA employees alleged to have been involved in the October 7th attacks. I don’t know the truth or otherwise of these allegations. I do know that it is criminal to withdraw funding for the major relief agency in Gaza and the West Bank over them. Yet that is what 9 of the wealthiest nations have done. So the response to a highly respected and widely accepted court ruling which says that all steps should be taken to prevent genocide of the Palestinians is….to penalise the Palestinians and protect those accused of preparing that genocide.
Thus the complicity with Israel reaches ever higher levels and will cause huge problems for western imperialism over the longer term. This complicity extends in Britain to the official opposition Labour Party, which is in internal turmoil over Gaza and has lost large numbers of councillors over Keir Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire. It also extends to the media which has by and large gone along with the government agenda both in minimising the ICJ judgement and giving extensive coverage to the UNWRA question.
I was surprised how little coverage there was on the two main channels’ news on Friday, with ITN even leading on the king’s prostate operation. Only Channel 4 news gave it adequate space, although here ran a very long interview with the Israeli government spokesman. The journalist Peter Oborne said on X that the first mention of the story in The Times on Saturday was on page 42. The Guardian and Financial Times print editions led on the ICJ case but it was much less prominent on their websites.
One can only see this as a deliberate downplaying of the issue. It is also impossible to the timing of the accusations against UNWRA as anything other than a means of shifting attention away from this indictment of Israel.
It isn’t going to work. This is a turning point for Israel which has already lost in the court of public opinion across the world. It is harder and harder for its supporters to claim it as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ when it has the labels of apartheid and genocide pinned to it. Whatever the bluster from Cameron, this ruling puts pressure on those governments arming and funding Israel. Britain is involved in sending arms, which should stop immediately, and its Cyprus bases are being used to send US arms to Israel.
The latest peace deal planned by the western powers for a two-month ceasefire while hostages are released and prisoners freed also talks about a ‘technocratic government’ in Gaza and the possible transfer of Hamas fighters from Gaza to another country. This was what happened to the Palestine Liberation Organisation after the Lebanon war and of course it failed, because the resistance of the Palestinians comes from their situation of occupation and repression, not primarily from any individuals.
Why is this plan brokered by the old Etonian unelected Cameron, dictators and monarchs across the Middle East, and a US imperialism which is becoming ever more bellicose? The answer lies in the fact that despite the abstract support for self-determination of nations, the Palestinians have never been granted this right, and the US and its allies collude in the colonial treatment they receive from the Israelis. So ‘solutions’ are repeatedly imposed on the Palestinians without their consent; their resistance is branded as ‘terrorist’; and the calls for a Palestinian state from the ‘international community’ ring increasingly hollow when we see that there is absolutely no possibility of one – as Netanyahu himself has made clear.
Meanwhile defence minister Grant Shapps has raised the stakes not just about the situation in the Middle East but across the world, when he claimed that we are in a ‘pre-war’ not post-war situation and that there would be major conflicts over the next five years – hence the need to up the already huge levels of defence spending to 2.5% of GDP. Spending on the military has already risen by 10% in the past decade. This has been accompanied by various Dad’s Army figures, including Boris Johnson, calling for the return of conscription.
There is much talk of an ‘international rules-based order’. It would certainly be a good idea. Because at the moment what we have is nothing of the sort. Instead we see a declining western imperialism trying to use its military might to maintain its power. What could possibly go wrong?
Everything is distinctly odd about these Israeli allegations.
I’ve already mentioned the CNN report that the allegations were put on Twitter / X in NOVEMBER by a lone Israeli journalist who claimed an UNWRA teacher had been identified as one of the Hamas attackers. It’s easy to believe this journalist was passing on misinformation given to them by the IDF – they themselves wouldn’t have been able to identify the Hamas attackers nor the UNWRA teachers AND they had no sources of local information from Gazans.
The story in the “Daily Telegraph” today is different from CNN’s. The DT says they were handed a “dossier” (shades of the Iraq War!) – I think on Friday? – from Israeli intelligence. The DT sensibly said they couldn’t verify its claims.
The “dossier” said UNWRA staff had been identified from TAPED MATERIAL as being involved with the Hamas attack. That’s a peculiar way to identify anyone – we’d expect photographic evidence and independent witnesses to back up the story. We also already know that Israeli intelligence has doctored previous tapes and then put out the material as “legit”. They’ve come unstuck when a multitude of different independent forensic organisations showed how the Israeli doctoring had been done and that the alleged “Palestinians” were from a different ethnic group.
The other odd thing about the Israeli claims is what they allege the UNWRA staff were DOING. The “dossier” had one of them engaged in transporting a dead Israeli back to Gaza by car. To what purpose? If they’d been Hamas attackers, they’d have been focused on grabbing much more valuable live Israeli hostages to exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
Of those 9 named countries 5 have been responsible for genocides of their own.
The BBC in particular gave more prominence to Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp announcing he was leaving the football club, than the International Court of Justice verdict on Israel’s responsibilities in Gaza.
Obviously too this story on Unrwa was also given even more unrepresentative prominence and with little critical contextual reference to Israel’s history of lying and misinformation.
Since the Iraq War it has become increasing hard to justify the public funding of the BBC News apparatus. The Gaza genocide issue seems to suggest BBC News has reached the point of being beyond repair.
Very informative. Two points: it used to be the case that one was innocent until proved guilty: terminating contracts whilst investigating is being guilty until proved innocent.
As for Channel 4, on Friday they interviewed an Israeli, Palestinian, and a Brit. Predictably the only person interrupted was the Palestinian.
We need to be clear following the points Lindsay German has made that we are entering a new stage in global conflict and need to decide which side we are on. The anti- US forces are now a credible counter to US world domination. The Palestinians have no choice but to support those opposed to US imperialism and global economic and military domination which Israel is a component of. This will be brutal and those that e fight alongside will not necessarily agree with everything we stand for and will do things we don’t like. But defeating western domination of the globe is a PREREQUISITE for political advance.
Please see https://consortiumnews.com/2024/01/29/craig-murray-un-court-spurned-israels-key-argument/.
For the first time, I think there’s a plausible explanation of how the allegations against the UNRWA staff were “obtained” by the Israelis. What is absolutely shocking is that the USA, UK and other countries were prepared to cut off funding to UNRWA on the basis of allegations they couldn’t verify and which may well have been obtained by the torture or mistreatment of detainees.
The following quotes were taken from the Craig Murray article:-
” After US and allies cut off funding for UNRWA, NYT’s @ronenbergman and
@PatrickKingsley launder Israel’s stated pretext that a handful of UNRWA employees were involved in Oct. 7th. NYT conveniently omits that Israeli officials have admitted that “a lot” of their so-called “intelligence” about UNRWA “is a result of interrogations of militants” — aka torture. (https://axios.com/2024/01/26/unrwa-gaza-hamas-israel-attack…)
Perhaps this is why we learn that Western officials have “not been able to verify” Israel’s claims. And even though the US “has yet to corroborate the Israeli claims itself, American officials say they found them credible enough to warrant suspending aid.”
“(Ryan Grim) “Israeli officials originally told the press that they obtained intel about the 12 former UNRWA employees — 7 teachers, a custodian and other ground level staff — through interrogation of detainees. Because Israel has long been criticized by human rights groups for abusing and torturing detainees, the optics of that explanation were awkward in the West. Now Israel is telling the NYT they got the info through surveillance. The Times ran that new explanation without even mentioning the original one”
As observed by us all, the UNRWA is obviously under attack to divert focus away from the ICJ ruling that Israel appears to be inflicting genocide on the indigenous inhabitants of the region. To suspend funding towards the relief of the victims, with no good reason and without proof, is deliberately nasty.
I understand that the UNRWA employs 13000 people for relief etc in Gaza.
The elected government infrastructure in Gaza is Hamas. It is obviously impossible for the relief agency to function without interfacing with Hamas. It is obvious that the persecuted population is embittered towards Israel.
The unverified allegation by Israel against the UNRWA is that a dozen staff may have taken part in the October 2023 reprisal attack on Israel and that up to a couple of hundred altogether are Hamas sympathisers. It is a tiny proportion of UNRWA workers and even if true would be unsurprising in the circumstances of persistent Israeli bad treatment of the indigenous people.
The fiction by Israel and its backers is that the Hamas raid in October 2023 started the conflict. In truth, the Palestinians, the indigenous inhabitants, have been oppressed and dispossessed by the Israelis over about 75 years.
I am wondering what the world’s reaction will be when we start to see pictures of emaciated starving Palestinians in Gaza.
@ Emma Tait : 30th January 2024 at 14:19 –
Hi, Emma. I doubt if we will see any footage of those scenes on, either, UK, or US MSM outlets.
Al Jazeera – probably – but our own home-grown journalists have been very circumspect in what they report, for the past four months.
Although, I will say, some have, gradually, become less circumspect, as time has gone on.
Hi Emma & George.
No, we didn’t see any of million and more Iraq War deaths. Nor the protests by Afghan mums about the Western practice of killing their children.
The West used depleted uranium ammunition in Iraq, this coincided with a generation of children born with cruel birth defects (that phrase seems apt because the probably didn’t have to have those conditions).
Hardly a mention of these phenomena much less images.
Though sometimes well after the fact and when it can do no harm to power – as George alludes to – the offences of the authorities can be mentioned, particularly when those responsible are gone or no longer in power.
Needless to say, the timing – literally just a few hours after the ICJ announced its provisional findings – was too good to be true. But even if it DOES transpire that these people were involved in the October 7th attack, how on earth does that justify suspending aid. Of course it doesn’t! The ONLY scenario in which it would be justified is if UNRWA senior staff knew that the employees concerned were involved with the military wing of Hamas. And it goes without saying that they obviously didn’t, because apart from anything else – given that many of their main donors have proscribed Hamas as a terrorist organisation – there is no way that they would knowingly employ people involved with Hamas and, as such, risk jeopodising their funding.
And if that’s the case – which it undoubtedly IS – then there is no justification whatsoever for the US and the UK and these other countries to suspend their aid. But if it’s all a stunt concocted and contrived by Israel and its chums to stick two fingers up to the ICJ and S Africa, THAT would be much more credible, and especially so given their prior form.
It is beyond disappointing that apologists for Israel, including self-declared “Zionists” like Sunak and Starmer, are trying to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through bombardment and starvation, maiming and disease and promote this, eg through supplying arms and withholding funds. They are complicit in genocide. WWIII or “Armageddon”, will see that they don’t face the International Criminal Courts for their complicity.