In mid-December, a video from the frontlines in Gaza showed a big bang followed by Israeli soldiers cheering. A viewer might be forgiven if they thought Israel had managed to destroy a high-value military target. A Hamas bunker, tunnel, or command control centre of the kind Israeli propaganda claimed falsely lay under Al-Shifa Hospital.
However, the target was a UN-run school in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. Of course, Israel claimed the school was doubling up as a Hamas outpost. While there has been no evidence to support such claims, even if they were true, the school would not have been a legitimate military target under international law.
Several of the 183 UN-run schools across the Gaza Strip have been bombed in the course of Israel's war. In late November in Jabalia Refugee camp, Northern Gaza, the Israeli army struck the al-Fakhoura school-turned-shelter, killing at least 50 civilians. Another UN school was hit in the nearby Tal el-Zaatar, resulting in significant casualties.
None of this is by coincidence, or by way of 'collateral damage'. Some are even calling it a new escalation in the decades-long Israeli war with the United Nations, led by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
As of this Christmas, 300 UNRWA employees, all of whom are Palestinians, have been killed in Gaza since Oct 7. Israel has also led a systematic campaign to link UNRWA employees to October 7th, either as ‘supporters’ or ‘associated’ with it.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said that throughout the UN’s history, they had never witnessed the death of UN staff in such large numbers. Israel reacted to the criticism with indifference or by repeating the tropes about the UN being in the same trench as Hamas, or whoever stands against Israel’s occupation, the PA included.
To escalate further, Israel announced it was not going to renew the visa of a UN staff in the country and would also deny the visa application of another following the UN’s criticism of Israel's unprecedented targeting of Gaza’s civilians and its civilian infrastructure.
The Dahiyeh Doctrine?
Arguably, the targeting of UNRWA facilities - much like the destruction of Gaza’s schools, hospitals, mosques, and churches - falls within the Israeli policy known as the Dahiyeh Doctrine.
Envisioned by Israeli army top general Gadi Eizonkot during the 2006 onslaught on Lebanon, this military doctribe encourages the obliteration of civilian infrastructure to exercise pressure on the population to turn against armed resistance forces.
In Gaza, the doctrine has been intensified and expanded todrive a wedge between the people and the resistance through shock and awe, as well as render Gaza inhabitable, which would further Israel’s plans to depopulate Gaza.
However, targeting UN facilities has long-term goals that intersect with the Palestine cause itself: Targeting the interrelation between the UNRWA, the Palestine refugees, and Israel’s creation and legitimacy.
The UNRWA was established by the General Assembly in 1949 - and became officially operational in 1950 - to provide service to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were expelled from their homes following Israel’s inception.
Today, 5.9 million Palestinians are under the UNRWA mandate in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. The mandate also includes those displaced by the 1967 War, as well as relief efforts for poor families who do not fit the criteria of Palestine refugees but live in UNRWA's five regions of operation.
The services include healthcare, welfare, and education. The UNRWA has been especially credited for being pivotal in making Palestinians among the most educated in the region. Palestinians understand the UNRWA’s role in empowering them through education, and today education is deemed their primary weapon for decolonisation.
UNRWA and the Question of Palestine
The Palestinians have debated for long UNRWA's role. Some argue it has been detrimental to self-determination, as it created a culture of dependency and de-politicised the Palestinian situation, recontextualising some of its aspects into mere humanitarian concerns subject to financial blackmail.
Others are convinced that the agency trapped Palestinians in a no-peace/no-war state, reducing their ability to either harness political resistance or reach their full potential.
But from Israel’s perspective, UNRWA is an enemy regardless, arguably because of the trans-generational nature of the agency.
The refugee status assigned to the 750,000 Palestinians after the 1948 Nakba has been transferred to their descendants. So much so that today the UNRWA's history, geography, and mode of operation have become intertwined, if not synonymous, with the Palestine question and its continuous refugee problem.
Because this refugee problem remains unresolved, the UN General Assembly is poised to extend UNRWA’s mandate in Palestine and neighbouring countries repeatedly.
The level of Israeli impunity that has come with the Gaza war seems to have presented the Israeli government with a rare opportunity to achieve what it had failed to achieve under different circumstances: to cripple the UNRWA and what it represents, politically and logistically.
Ultimately, Israel hopes this would lead to pushing UNRWA out of Gaza and handing over its responsibilities to a local authority overlooked by Israel, provided Israel wins this war.
Israel: From Defund to Destroy UNRWA
For Israel, perpetuating the Palestinian refugee question that UNRWA is part of, casts a long shadow on the Jewish state’s original sin, the dispossession and expulsions of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Nakba.
Many Israeli Jews and their supporters, therefore, think of the UNRWA as a tool designed to delegitimise Israel’s right to exist; as such, by upholding the Palestinian right of return, the UNRWA poses an existential threat to the Israeli state.
For this reason, in 2017, Netanyahu told Nikki Haley, then US Ambassador to the UN and now presidential candidate, that “It is time the UNRWA be dismantled and merged with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.”
The UNHCR is designed to provide refugees with humanitarian aid and logistical needs through resettlements or integration in host countries. But it possesses no mechanism for reparations or repatriation. If the UNRWA was merged with it, it means Palestinians will be denied access and lose claim to their historical rights.
For years, Israel tirelessly lobbied to get the UNRWA defunded, especially by the United States. The first breeze of success came in September 2018, when President Trump announced that his administration would cease funding the UNRWA. He froze a policy supported by every former American president — Republican and Democrat — since the agency’s establishment 70 years prior.
Trump’s decision was reversed by the Biden Administration in 2020. In reality, the reversal was not meant to preserve the Palestinian right of return, but to avoid triggering regional upheaval and instability, which would prove challenging to Israel as well.
It is unclear at this point whether Israel’s attempted physical destruction of the UNRWA-run facilities and the targeting of its staff will change the agency’s operational essence. What seems clear is that a post-war Gaza will require closer involvement by the international community to rebuild and rehabilitate the Strip, and the UNRWA will have to bear a significant burden toward that goal.
Perhaps herein lies Israel's ultimate goal: To make Gaza's reconstruction and governance after the war impossible, or as difficult as possible, even for the United Nations and the international community.
Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism, and is currently a frequent contributor to multiple academic and media outlets, in addition to being a consultant for a US-based think tank.
Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa
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