UNRWA tents for internally displaced Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Nine out of 10 Gazans have had to leave their homes during the Israel-Hamas war.
Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

How a U.N. Agency Became a Flashpoint in the Gaza War

by · NY Times

In mid-January, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, was handed a piece of paper that threatened to doom his organization. It was already in deep crisis. Three months had passed since Hamas militants burst through the barrier between Gaza and Israel, killing about 1,200 people and dragging 250 back as hostages. In retaliation, Israel rained bombs on Gazan cities, killing tens of thousands as it vowed to eradicate Hamas.

Lazzarini’s organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, was uniquely equipped to respond to the humanitarian crisis that ensued. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are refugees, and providing them with services has given UNRWA an outsize role in the territory. After Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority, which now functions only in the West Bank, Gazans were left with a highly dysfunctional government and came increasingly to depend on the agency. Before the war, UNRWA maintained more than 300 schools, health centers, warehouses, fuel depots and other facilities in Gaza and had 13,000 employees. Unlike other U.N. agencies, its staff is made up not of international aid workers but almost entirely of local Palestinians. Amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment, there was simply no other organization as deeply integrated in the territory and with the infrastructure necessary to distribute food, provide shelter and meet the basic needs of so many displaced, traumatized people.

Lazzarini, a Swiss-Italian veteran of United Nations aid operations in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, took the helm of UNRWA in 2020. He hoped to put the agency on sure footing. For more than seven decades, it had lurched from one emergency to another, as turmoil in the Middle East buffeted the impoverished Palestinians that UNRWA sought to help. The war put an end to those plans. Repeated evacuation orders and the destruction caused by Israel’s air campaign have displaced about nine in 10 Gazans, some multiple times. At various points, the agency says, more than a million people — nearly half of Gaza’s population — have sought shelter in UNRWA facilities, with large families crowded into its classrooms or into warehouses that once held flour and medicine.

As the war devastated Gaza, Lazzarini met regularly with Israeli officials to facilitate the movement of aid and agency staff members into and around the territory. The relationship between UNRWA and Israel has long been fraught because of the agency’s link to one of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the fate of Palestinian refugees. Since its founding in 1949, UNRWA has been tasked with caring for the Palestinians who fled or were pushed from their homes during the creation of the Jewish state. As the original Palestinian refugees passed their status from one generation to the next, their numbers grew to nearly six million, spread mainly across the Middle East.

UNRWA is a historic anomaly: It is the only U.N. agency dedicated to a specific group of refugees, but it has no ability to solve their root problems of displacement and statelessness. Its mostly Western funders see the agency as a force for stability in a volatile region until the Palestinian-refugee issue can be resolved through a peace deal. Many Israelis take a less charitable view, particularly as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed the country to the right. They argue that UNRWA’s mere existence perpetuates the conflict by keeping alive the idea that, someday, somehow, these refugees will return to the land of their forefathers, in what is now Israel, destroying the Jewish state.

On Jan. 18, Lazzarini arrived at the David Kempinski Hotel, in Tel Aviv, to see Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Weissbrod had told him that he had information to share, so Lazzarini was expecting bad news. Now, Weissbrod produced a list, handwritten in Hebrew, of 12 UNRWA employees who Israel believed participated in the Oct. 7 attack. The allegations were cursory but explosive: The men, Weissbrod said, had assisted with logistics, entered Israel during the assault, attacked Israelis and helped take hostages.

“That is absolutely horrible — if true,” Lazzarini told me, recalling his reaction. It was mid-May, and we were having drinks at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, near UNRWA’s main headquarters. Lazzarini said he remembered feeling the gravity of the charges sink in. “I know how sensitive this is,” he said. It is “like an accusation to have participated in 9/11. We were talking about something huge.”

Lazzarini does not read Hebrew, so Weissbrod translated the list into English and asked him to verify whether the men worked for UNRWA. The names checked out quickly; two of the men had since died. Lazzarini had no easy way to figure out what the 12 men had or had not done, but it was not inconceivable that some UNRWA employees also had covert roles in Hamas. Lazzarini switched into crisis mode. He flew to New York to alert his boss, António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, and informed the United States government, at the time UNRWA’s largest funder.

As the days passed, Lazzarini worried that the accusations would leak to the news media, providing ammunition for UNRWA’s critics. Though the United Nations has not designated Hamas a terrorist organization, Israel, the United States and other Western governments have. On Jan. 26, in an effort to get ahead of the story, UNRWA went public, releasing a brief statement about the allegations and announcing that the agency had fired the accused men and would investigate in order “to establish the truth without delay.”

The news was incendiary, dominating global headlines and newscasts. The United States froze funding for UNRWA. Other donors followed suit. Britain, Canada, Australia, Finland, Germany, Estonia and Japan suspended donations over the next two days. Within four days, 18 countries froze more than $430 million in expected funds, threatening to hobble the organization during the greatest crisis in its history.

The donors’ reactions shocked UNRWA officials; the allegations were unverified and involved less than 0.1 percent of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza. They warned that funding cuts would make it even harder to help Gaza’s most vulnerable people during a crippling war. “I expected that some donors might be very concerned, alarmed, on edge,” Lazzarini told me. “But I did not expect such a domino effect within 48 hours. My first reaction was: How is this possible? This is collective punishment.”

Israel soon fleshed out the allegations, sharing with the news media names and photos of the accused, with brief summaries of what Israel said they had done. They included a school principal, a counselor, some teachers, a social worker and a health-center clerk. Over the next few weeks, Israeli officials broadened their accusations, claiming that nearly 10 percent of UNRWA’s Gaza staff, some 1,200 people, had ties to Hamas and other militant groups. Israel offered little evidence to support this allegation, but Israeli leaders seized on it, arguing that the agency should be shut down. “It is time that the international community and the U.N. itself understand that UNRWA’s mission has to end,” Netanyahu told a group of U.N. ambassadors on Jan. 31. “UNRWA is self-perpetuating. It is self-perpetuating also in its desire to keep alive the Palestinian refugee issue.”

He called for other aid agencies to replace UNRWA in Gaza, painting it as irredeemable. “UNRWA is totally infiltrated with Hamas.”

UNRWA was born soon after the United Nations itself. In the aftermath of World War II, the new world body was trying to solve global problems through consensus. One such problem was what to do about the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee into exile when Israel was founded, an event Arabs call the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” World powers hoped that the displaced would soon return to their communities or start new lives elsewhere. But it was not clear how this would happen. The new Israeli government refused to let the refugees back in, and the Arab governments to whose territories they fled did not want them to stay. In the meantime, the refugees were sleeping in the open and facing starvation. So, in 1949, the United Nations General Assembly created UNRWA to address their immediate needs until a permanent solution could be found.

Seventy-four years later, it still hasn’t been.

As the original Palestinian refugees passed their status to their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, UNRWA grew, too. It has 32,000 staff members in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, working mostly in 58 official refugee camps, which have evolved from makeshift tent cities into neighborhoods crowded with small dwellings and apartment blocks. In its first decade, UNRWA tried to help individual refugees set themselves up as shoemakers, blacksmiths and carpenters, while at the same time pursuing ambitious regional water plans, inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority, in hopes that they would create long-term agricultural jobs. Those efforts to quietly resettle the refugees outside historic Palestine failed, largely because Arab countries didn’t want to integrate the refugees and the refugees did not wish to resettle — they wanted to go home. As a result, the bulk of UNRWA’s work in recent decades has focused on education and health care. Before the war, more than a half a million children attended its 700 schools, and two million patients sought care at its 140 health centers every year.

In the panoply of U.N. agencies, there is nothing else like it. No other agency is dedicated to such a specific group or runs school and health systems. More than 97 percent of its employees are Palestinians who earn much less than other U.N. workers and do not receive diplomatic passports. Although the organization has existed for decades, it remains officially “temporary.” The U.N. General Assembly renews its mandate every few years, but the U.N. provides only a tiny portion of its budget. The rest comes from donors. “U.N. in name only,” one UNRWA official says.

Jamie McGoldrick, a senior U.N. official in Jerusalem during the early part of the war, describes it as “a strange beast.” He told me: “It’s a bit like a crazy uncle outside the system that works to the extent that it can work and keeps the lid on things in Palestine. It just keeps the pressure down by providing services, offering jobs, putting money in the economy, you know, doing things for the community of which it’s a part.” He added: “But it was never envisaged to be something that would hang around forever.”

Over the years, Israelis have leveled a range of criticisms at UNRWA. Government officials charge that far from being a neutral U.N. agency, it is a Palestinian organization in international garb. They accuse UNRWA’s top leaders (most of whom are Westerners) of violating U.N. neutrality rules by criticizing Israel. One research organization based in Israel issues periodic reports arguing that UNRWA schools encourage militancy and antisemitism, highlighting the appearance in their schools of regional maps that exclude Israel or lessons on Palestinian figures whom Israel considers terrorists. UNRWA officials say that they use local textbooks so students can easily transfer to regional high schools but that they supplement them with UNRWA’s own materials and expunge any content that violates U.N. principles.

The most common criticism, however, is that UNRWA allows Palestinians to pass their refugee status to each new generation, ensuring that their numbers continue to increase and turning calls for the “right of return” into a growing existential threat to the Jewish state. U.N. officials point out that this policy is not unique to the Palestinians. It is common practice for people displaced by long conflicts, like those in Afghanistan and Myanmar, to pass their refugee status to their children. More than one-third of the 625,000 registered Syrian refugees in Jordan were born there, and the Syrian war began only 13 years ago. The phenomenon is more pronounced among Palestinians, because they were displaced seven decades ago and have no state to which to return.

Still, in some ways, the U.N. does treat Palestinians differently. When the U.N. created global standards for the treatment of refugees in 1951, Egypt and Iraq successfully pressed to keep the Palestinians under UNRWA, rather than under the new global refugee agency, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or U.N.H.C.R. The rationale was that the U.N. bore a unique responsibility to the Palestinians, given the failure of its plan to partition historic Palestine between Arabs and Jews. To this day, UNRWA applies different rules from U.N.H.C.R. While most refugees lose refugee status when they acquire citizenship elsewhere, Palestinians do not. Most of the more than 2.2 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan are Jordanian citizens but officially remain refugees, as can those who have obtained citizenship in the United States or elsewhere. And while U.N.H.C.R. actively seeks to resolve refugees’ status through voluntary return, integration wherever they have fled or resettlement elsewhere, UNRWA can only provide aid. This, many Israelis argue, fuels the notion that Israel’s creation inflicted a grave historical wrong on the Palestinians that can be rectified only through Israel’s destruction.

Of course, many Palestinians believe that they were subjected to a grave historical wrong. And despite UNRWA’s inability to provide them with a permanent solution, the refugees have long viewed the agency as proof that the U.N. remains invested in resolving their plight.

This spring, in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank, I met Mustafa Sallam, 63, a vegetable seller. He was born in the camp but considered his true home a village near Lod, in central Israel, which his parents fled in 1948. In the 1980s, while working in Israel, Sallam stopped there to look around. “There were still some traces, but they are all gone now,” he told me. “If my grandson went, he wouldn’t recognize it.” Still, he longed to reclaim his parents’ land. “Day and night, we think about return,” he said. “Each family dreams about it.” That may not happen during his lifetime, he allowed, but he has five children and 25 grandchildren, the youngest 4 months old, all registered with UNRWA. Perhaps, someday, they would live on that land. “From generation to generation, we keep struggling,” he said. “We fought, we went to prison, and they will, too — for the sake of our homeland.”

That kind of talk exasperates Jewish Israelis, who see the demand for the “right of return” as a demographic Trojan horse. And because it is UNRWA that registers each new refugee — even if the last family member to set foot in Israel was a great-grandfather — they regard the agency as a co-conspirator. That it does so with the imprimatur of the U.N. makes the sting worse.

“UNRWA needs to go, because UNRWA is the flaming sword that hangs above the Jewish state,” Einat Wilf, a former Labor member of the Israeli Knesset and anti-UNRWA campaigner, told me over Zoom from her home in Israel. The agency, she said, should be abolished. “Close it, defund it, in order to send a message to Palestinians that the war of 1948 is long over, the state of Israel is here to stay, and they need to move on.”

Current and former UNRWA officials say the agency cannot be blamed for the world’s failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Many say UNRWA is part of the problem, and it perpetuates the conflict, but we all know that what perpetuates the conflict is the absence of a political solution,” Lazzarini says.

Many Palestinians, and some UNRWA officials, told me that they view Israeli attacks on the agency as fueled by the hope that getting rid of UNRWA will somehow get rid of the refugees. “UNRWA for us is an international umbrella to preserve and protect our rights,” Tayseer Nasrallah, a refugee and a veteran leader in Fatah, the main faction in the Palestinian Authority, told me when we met in his office in the Balata camp in May. The agency, along with the camps and the refugees themselves, were evidence of the original Palestinian displacement, a history he accused Israel of trying to erase. He considered the Israeli attacks on UNRWA to be “aimed at liquidating the issue of the Palestinian refugees so that there is no core to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.”

Since the Israeli government first charged that 12 members of UNRWA participated in the Oct. 7 attack, it has leaned heavily into the accusation that UNRWA in Gaza is deeply infiltrated by militants. When I spoke with Weissbrod and other Israeli officials in Jerusalem, they claimed that Israeli forces had collected Hamas membership lists and other intelligence in Gaza indicating that more than 2,000 UNRWA staff members belonged to militant groups, and some 450 of those were fighters. They declined, however, to share these lists or any other evidence with me, saying it was sensitive intelligence. When I asked why Israel, with its security agencies so sharply focused on Hamas, had not discovered this before the war, they said UNRWA had not been an intelligence target. “This is one of the wake-up calls that we had in Israel after Oct. 7,” Weissbrod told me.

In January and February, the United Nations began two inquiries: one, a review of UNRWA’s neutrality; another, a more formal investigation of potential staff participation in the assault on Israel. Israeli officials considered them insufficient. In May, Weissbrod complained to Guterres, the U.N. Secretary General. In a letter he shared with me, he wrote that Israel had provided extensive information, but that the U.N. had failed to address the scope of Israel’s allegations. “The practical ramification is grave,” he wrote. “No U.N. agency is investigating the most extensive infiltration ever of a U.N. body by a terrorist organization.”

UNRWA denies that its Gaza staff is full of Hamas operatives, and a spokeswoman says that they welcomed both inquiries. But even before they were both complete, Weissbrod sent a second letter, in July, directly to Lazzarini. It included the names and identification numbers of 100 UNRWA employees whom Israel said were fighters from Hamas. He demanded that UNRWA take immediate action. Lazzarini wrote back four days later. The agency, he said, needed evidence to substantiate Israel’s concerns before it could act; he suggested that they establish a way to facilitate information sharing. Israel never responded.

There is little reason to expect that an organization like Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for 17 years while secretly digging an extensive tunnel network and developing increasingly innovative ways to attack Israel, would refrain from infiltrating a well-resourced organization like UNRWA. Hamas and UNRWA have long inhabited a complicated Venn diagram. In theory, both want the agency to provide services: UNRWA because that’s its job; Hamas because it lessens the burden of governance on the group. In practice, the goals of the organizations clash: UNRWA seeks to improve the lives of refugees; Hamas seeks to destroy Israel and considers widespread Palestinian suffering a necessary cost, even a weapon, in its fight.

Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner general. “Many say UNRWA is part of the problem, and it perpetuates the conflict,” he says, “but we all know that what perpetuates the conflict is the absence of a political solution.”
Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Current and former UNRWA officials paint a complex picture of their interactions with Hamas, referring to it as “the de facto authority,” or simply “the de factos.” Like any U.N. agency, they say, UNRWA can work only with the cooperation of whoever is in charge. That means dealing, like it or not, with both accommodating governments and hostile regimes like the Taliban.

Hamas has at times imposed its will in egregious ways. In 2014, according to one current and one former UNRWA official, an UNRWA legal adviser was pursuing investigations that included looking into the potential involvement of agency staff with Hamas. During a trip to Jerusalem, he received anonymous emails warning him not to return to Gaza. He did anyway. A bouquet of flowers soon showed up at his apartment with a note that read: “You are someone who is not welcome in Gaza.” It warned him to leave within 24 hours. He stayed. A few days later, a man on a motorcycle threw a hand grenade, with a note to the adviser attached, into UNRWA’s Gaza compound. The grenade did not explode — the pin was left in — but UNRWA pulled the adviser out of Gaza, fearing that his presence posed a threat to him and those around him. (One current and two former UNRWA officials involved in the matter say that the outcome of those investigations is unclear.)

More often, however, the two organizations have coexisted uneasily. Matthias Schmale, who is now the United Nations resident and humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, led UNRWA’s Gaza office from 2017 until 2021. He told me that right before he arrived in Gaza, a student fell into a hole at an UNRWA school. When the staff pulled the child out, they realized they had accidentally discovered a Hamas tunnel. Schmale complained to Hamas that the tunnel endangered children and violated U.N. rules. The group did not protest, so UNRWA filled the hole with concrete. Later in his tenure, engineers detected an underground cavity under the proposed site of a new UNRWA school. UNRWA moved the project elsewhere.

Schmale says he never faced broad accusations from Israel regarding Hamas infiltration of UNRWA, but he did recall receiving an anonymous tip that an UNRWA school employee was moonlighting as a Hamas fighter. UNRWA verified the information, and Schmale fired him. During his four-year tenure, he says, he dismissed seven other staff members for breaking U.N. rules, which include bans on self-enrichment, overt political activity and using corporal punishment in schools. The school employee was the only case that involved Hamas, and the tip did not come from Israel.

More common, Schmale says, was trouble with UNRWA’s local staff and their union. In 2018, the Trump administration froze funding for UNRWA, calling the contributions the United States made “disproportionate” and deeming the agency unsustainable, given the “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries.” UNRWA was suddenly deprived of more than $350 million, a quarter of its yearly budget. Schmale was obliged to lay off 130 employees. In response, the union blockaded him in his office and called for his removal. Eventually, Hamas’s security forces escorted him out. “I never thought that Hamas police would protect me from my own staff,” Schmale says. When the protests continued, Schmale had a meeting with an adviser to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s Gaza leader at the time (and a plotter of the Oct. 7 attacks), and told him that the “de facto authorities” were responsible for keeping UNRWA staff safe. Soon after, the demonstrations stopped.

Later, however, Hamas turned on him. After a short war between Israel and Hamas in 2021 ended, Schmale, in an interview on Israeli television, appeared to agree with the suggestion that Israel’s strikes had been precise. “I also have the impression that there is a huge sophistication in the way the Israeli military struck over the last 11 days,” he said. He emphasized the severity of the strikes, noting that 60 children had been killed, including 19 UNRWA students, but his comments nonetheless sparked outrage in Gaza. Hamas called his words “a complete distortion in favor of the Zionists” and informed UNRWA that it could no longer guarantee his security. His boss pulled him out, ending his posting.

When I asked Schmale about Israel’s latest accusations, he said that his Gaza employees had complex views about Hamas. Many hated it as a government but supported its fight against Israel as legitimate resistance. Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006, he noted, and because the agency staff was broadly representative of society, it would be naïve to expect that some portion did not support Hamas.

“Would I be totally surprised if at the end of the day there is proof that 2,000 UNRWA staff are members of Hamas?” he said. “No, I wouldn’t be. It would be a bit shocking if it is such a high number”— and he would need to see serious evidence, he said — “but it makes sense given the circumstances of Gaza.”

Over the last year, Gilad Erdan, until recently the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., issued regular tirades against the agency and the U.N. itself, once from the floor of the General Assembly. The Israeli military frequently posts images, videos and recordings on social media that it says link UNRWA with militant activities. In February, it took journalists, including some from The New York Times, to see a tunnel that ran beneath an UNRWA school to a room full of computer equipment below UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters. The military said that it was a Hamas communications hub that drew its power from UNRWA and that agency employees must have known about it.

Israeli officials contend that UNRWA has failed to vet its staff for Hamas members and keep militants out of its facilities. UNRWA’s own rules bar staff from being members of or participating in any group that “promotes violence, terrorism or the overthrow of a government or a state,” and UNRWA says that its vetting process is similar to that of other U.N. agencies. It has for years regularly submitted lists of its employees in the West Bank and Gaza to Israel.

As for tunnels under UNRWA schools or staff members doubling as fighters, Lazzarini says UNRWA’s ability to investigate is limited. “How can you ask an agency mandated to invest in the human development of the people of Gaza to have at the same time the military expertise and all the technology available to look at what’s going on underground?” he says. “We are an organization providing education and primary health care. We are not an organization tasked with collecting intelligence in this kind of environment.”

Months of war have transformed the agency in Gaza. Most of UNRWA’s buildings have been affected by the bombing, and two-thirds of its schools are damaged or destroyed. Israeli forces have demolished a number of schools in controlled detonations, at least one while soldiers looked on and cheered. UNRWA’s staff were forced to flee their Gaza headquarters early in the war, and the complex is now trashed, its perimeter wall gone, its facade marred by bullets and shrapnel. Israeli forces have occupied it twice, the agency says. UNRWA estimates that more than 560 people have been killed and more than 1,790 wounded in strikes in or near its shelters.

About 5,000 of its employees work in the aid operation. People who used to teach math or history or dispense medication or offer prenatal care now struggle to transport, store and distribute food and fuel throughout Gaza. Many of them also sleep in tents. And more than 200 have been killed — the highest number of U.N. workers ever killed in a conflict.

UNRWA staff members describe the situation as “almost apocalyptic,” with teachers, drivers and clerks shouldering grim new burdens. Brian Baker, UNRWA’s security risk-management director, told me that during a drive through Gaza this spring, he saw people swarming aid trucks for food and pallets to use as firewood. The trucks had stopped near an Israel military checkpoint, and the soldiers fired at the crowd. Baker’s team performed first aid on a man who had been shot through the abdomen. Then they retrieved a dead body that no one else had been able to reach because it was near the Israeli checkpoint. But animals had seemingly gotten to it before they did; its head and arm were missing. On three separate occasions, UNRWA says, Israel has sent trucks carrying dead bodies, more than 220 total, to Gaza and called UNRWA to receive them. (When asked, the Israeli military did not comment on the bodies.)

“U.N. staff shouldn’t be dealing with containers of dead bodies,” Baker says. “Nobody signed up for that. Nobody signed up to pick up half-eaten bodies.”

As Israel’s interactions with UNRWA have grown increasingly bitter, it has dispatched foreign, defense and intelligence officials to make the case to donors that UNRWA is hopelessly riddled with Hamas. The effort has largely failed. On March 8, six weeks after the Israeli allegations that UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 assault became public, Canada resumed funding the agency, citing UNRWA’s critical role in Gaza. Sweden, Australia, Finland, France and Japan soon followed. Germany, UNRWA’s second largest donor before the war, restored its funding in April; Britain followed in July.

The United States remains the only significant holdout because this March Congress blocked all funds for UNRWA for the remainder of the fiscal year. A senior Biden administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in accordance with government protocols, told me in May that the White House opposed the congressional freeze and did not try to dissuade other countries from working with UNRWA. “Right now in Gaza, when it comes to humanitarian assistance, UNRWA is the only game in town,” the official said.

In my conversations with officials from six major donor countries, some said they found Israel’s claim that Hamas had extensively infiltrated UNRWA unconvincing. Others considered the allegations plausible but said they trusted the U.N. investigations, even though the war prevented investigators from entering Gaza, limiting their ability to fully explore Israel’s claims. Many countries resumed funding even before those inquiries were complete.

The first U.N. inquiry, headed by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, looked into UNRWA’s neutrality. Its report, released in April, found that UNRWA had “a more developed approach to neutrality” than other aid groups and U.N. agencies. It acknowledged the difficulty of remaining neutral with a predominantly Palestinian staff during a long-running conflict, cited individual breaches and suggested ways for UNRWA to better vet its staff and investigate violations. UNRWA vowed to implement all the recommendations. The second, by the U.N.’s top investigative body, looked at 19 UNRWA employees whom Israel accused of participating in the Oct. 7 attack. These included the 12 accused in January and seven others who were added later. The inquiry concluded in August that the evidence was absent in one case and insufficient in nine others. In the nine remaining cases, however, it found that the accused “may have been involved.” A U.N. spokesman said that they probably did take part.

Erdan, then the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., dismissed that investigation as “a disgrace” on X, saying Israel needed to “outlaw UNRWA, declare it a terrorist organization and expel its leaders from Israeli territory.”

For his part, Lazzarini told me that before the Gaza war took over his days, he began thinking about UNRWA’s future. He had become acutely aware of the growing gap between what countries expected UNRWA to do and the amount of money they gave it. In December, UNRWA will mark its 75th anniversary. If the dynamic doesn’t change, he says, the organization will reach “a breaking point.”

Other senior UNRWA officials I spoke to also wondered how much longer the organization could last, given the expanding number of refugees and the unanticipated needs that have arisen because of the region’s frequent crises. Most officials from donor countries said the best hope is a two-state solution that grants refugees citizenship in a Palestinian state. It is a nice vision, but one that feels increasingly remote, given the chronic divisions in Palestinian politics and the current Israeli government’s outright hostility to the idea. After so much violence, many people on both sides cannot imagine two states side by side.

Israel, on its own, can’t shut down UNRWA, but it can restrict its operations by denying visas to international staff members and barring them from Gaza and the West Bank. So far, the Israeli foreign ministry has scaled back its coordination meetings with UNRWA, and the agency’s Israeli bank account has been frozen, locking up $3 million. The Knesset is considering bills that would declare UNRWA a terrorist organization and force it to remove its field office from East Jerusalem, which oversees operations in the West Bank.

Baker, the UNRWA security chief, worries that Israel’s verbal attacks will inspire physical ones. “I’m ex-military. If my politicians are telling me, ‘All this group are terrorists,’ then don’t be surprised when your soldiers start attacking that group,” Baker says. UNRWA staff members told me that Israelis regularly flip them off when they see their blue-and-white U.N. cars. On May 9, someone set the tall grass in UNRWA’s East Jerusalem compound on fire. UNRWA’s West Bank director ran down with a fire extinguisher to put it out.

In Gaza, whenever the war ends, UNRWA will no longer be dealing merely with a deprived population confined to a narrow strip of land, but one irrevocably scarred by a war. It will have to care for its own traumatized staff and serve a society whose social fabric has been shredded. The Gaza health authorities say that more than 40,000 people have been killed, or 1.8 percent of the population. In April, U.N. Women estimated that the dead included 6,000 mothers, leaving behind 19,000 orphans. More than 91,000 Gazans, according to the Gaza health authorities, have been wounded. Many have lost arms or legs; some have lost both.

This spring, a senior U.N. development official, Abdallah Al Dardari, said that the damage to schools, health care and the economy had set Gaza’s human development back 40 years, a lost investment of nearly $50 billion. “We haven’t seen anything like this since 1945,” he said. In April, a U.N. mine expert estimated that Gaza was strewed with 37 million tons of rubble, containing an unknown number of unexploded munitions. Clearing that wreckage, he said, could take 100 trucks, working full time, 14 years.

Many Palestinians have given up hope that the Palestinian Authority, headed by 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, can lead them toward self-determination. Polls indicate that support for Hamas has risen, although it is anybody’s guess what will remain of the group when the war is over. The brutality of the war may only increase militancy and amplify the longing to return to an ancestral land.

In the Jalazone refugee camp in the West Bank in May, I met with the student parliament at an UNRWA-run girls’ school. For a half-hour, nine students between the ages of 13 and 15 told me about the hardships of the camp — the crowding, the lack of privacy, the Israeli Army raids — and about their dreams: to become doctors, lawyers, judges, psychologists and tour guides. Not once did they use the word Israel, instead referring to it as “the occupation” or “the Zionist occupation.” All but one were refugees. When I asked about the solution to their plight, they grew animated, speaking quickly in Arabic and English and cutting one another off as they called for Palestinian unity, the end of the occupation and the right of return.

“The only solution is for other countries to stand with us so that we can be liberated,” one ninth grader said. “It is our country and our land in the end. It does not belong to them, it belongs to us, and we will continue fighting until future generations so that we can take that land.”

Read by Peter Ganim

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