Let UNRWA Aid Trucks Into Gaza
The region’s most experienced aid agency could feed all of Gaza’s population for three months—if Israel would just let them do their job.
Trucks loaded with humanitarian aid from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
(Abed Rahim Khatib / picture alliance via Getty Images)Each day, we see more images of children with protruding ribs, sunken eyes, and frail bodies barely clinging to life. We see chaos and pandemonium as tens of thousands of beleaguered, starving Palestinians descend on the rare food convoys permitted to enter Gaza. And we’ve seen over 1000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces while desperately seeking food at “aid distribution centers” operated by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
In shocking testimony over the weekend, former US Green Beret Anthony Aguilar, once a GHF contractor, described indiscriminate violence against Palestinian civilians during his time in Gaza, including the use of live ammunition on unarmed civilians seeking food. He called this a war crime.
Starvation and humanitarian aid have been weaponized by the Israel-US-backed GHF, while Israel ices out UNRWA, the humanitarian aid agency with the single longest successful food operation on the planet. For 75 years, UNRWA brought food and aid into Gaza. At this very moment, UNRWA alone has 6,000 trucks waiting just beyond the border with enough food to provide for the entire population of Gaza for three months. How, then, did we get to a place where Israel has attempted to restrict UNRWA, and the UN as a whole, from doing the work they know best? Work they do with humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence—the four core principles that guide the principled distribution of aid.
Israel says it is because UNRWA and the UN have allowed humanitarian aid to be diverted by Hamas. However, three major reports that were published over the weekend show that this is fundamentally not true. Last week, it was reported that USAID found no evidence of widespread aid diversion by Hamas in Gaza. On Saturday, The New York Times reported that Israeli military officials have found no proof that Hamas routinely stole UN aid. What is more, in a shocking exposé on Israeli Channel Kan 2, an IDF whistleblower stated that the Israeli military destroyed the contents of 1,000 aid trucks, buried the evidence, and continues to blame Hamas for “aid diversion.” Netanyahu and others have continued to openly espouse lies about UNRWA and the efficacy of UN-sponsored aid—as recently as Monday, after these reports were published—despite the clear evidence to the contrary.
Tragically, UNRWA has long been subject to a deliberate and coordinated propaganda campaign—one that only accelerated after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks in Israel.
One of Israel’s most serious efforts to discredit UNRWA centered on its charge that the agency has been a witting collaborator with Hamas. Israel continued to press this charge even after UNRWA immediately fired nine of its 13,000 employees on the basis of a report by UN’s highest investigatory that “evidence provided” could, “if authenticated and corroborated,” conclude that these staff members “may have” participated in the atrocities of October 7. And Israel continued to amplify unsubstantiated allegations about UNRWA’s staff despite the findings of the independent Colonna Report, which concluded, in 2024, that UNRWA possesses a more developed approach to neutrality than any of its UN and NGO peers. No evidence has been provided to substantiate any of Israel’s countless other weaponized allegations against UNRWA, despite UNRWA’s repeated requests for evidence. Israel also vetted each and every employee of UNRWA for two decades and had not made one objection to any of the staff members put forth since 2011.
Despite what the coordinated disinformation campaign would have you believe, UNRWA has been sidelined by Israel’s far-right government precisely because of its role in keeping Palestinian refugees and the hope of Palestinian freedom and self-determination alive. Its sinister, deadly “replacement” agency—GHF—must be recognized for the killing machine that it is and laid to rest.
The alleviation of starvation of a besieged population should not be in the hands of the entity that besieged it and caused the very starvation it purports to alleviate. More important, when famine reaches a tipping point, as we started to see with clusters of deaths, it requires a massive surge of food and medical aid, clean water, and healthcare, not a piecemeal approach of limited food aid delivery and airdrops.
UNRWA and its UN partners must be allowed to do their essential job, which is providing full access to humanitarian aid that is both principled and that can reach the whole of the Gaza strip at scale. Such a change must take place immediately before the blood of up to 2 million people, including 1 million children, is on all of our hands.
