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Senior staff left following their agency’s banning by Israel, but its facilities reportedly remain open and working in eastern Jerusalem.
By JNS
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) remains operational in eastern Jerusalem despite its outlawing there and throughout Israel last month, an Israeli radio station reported on Sunday.
Senior UNRWA staff have left Israel and Judea and Samaria because the outlawing of the agency risked compromising their freedom of movement, Kan 11 reported. The organization’s two headquarters in Jerusalem have also closed down.
But schools and other UNRWA facilities in eastern Jerusalem and beyond remain open and operational, according to the report.
Laws that ban UNRWA in Israel went into effect on Jan. 30, making it illegal for UNRWA to maintain a presence or activities in Israel and prohibiting Israeli officials from engaging in contact with the agency.
On Oct. 28, the Knesset passed, by large majorities, two laws banning UNRWA following the exposure of UNRWA staff complicity in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre, and despite pressure from the United States under former president Joe Biden.
The language of the ban was by far the most robust ever used by Israel against the agency, whose largest donors have been the United States and the European Union. UNRWA has for decades been accused of providing cover and income to Palestinian terrorists while undermining peace efforts, including via its schools’ curriculum.
According to Israel, hundreds of UNRWA workers have engaged in terrorism in recent years, including the killers of Yonatan Samerano, an Israeli soldier slain on Oct. 7, 2023, whose body was taken to Gaza. Israel identified one of his kidnappers as UNRWA social worker Faisal Ali Mussalem al Naami.
On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump temporarily suspended U.S. foreign aid to UNRWA, pending reviews of existing development programs.
UNRWA caters to several millions of people it defines as refugees in Judea and Samaria, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Through UNRWA, the United Nations employs a unique refugee definition for Palestinians. UNRWA defines as refugees not only those who fled the war in 1948 but their descendants in perpetuity until a “just solution” emerges for their status. The United Nations has a different definition for all other refugees, who cannot give the title to their descendants and often lose it when they are naturalized elsewhere.
Critics of the UNRWA definition argue that it’s designed to perpetuate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
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