UNWRA Chief Philippe Lazzarini on the U.N. Agency’s Future in Gaza

For 75 years, the United Nations agency known as UNRWA has been the backbone of health and education for Palestinians with refugee status, a population that now totals 6 million people, including about 1.4 million in Gaza. In the past, whenever fighting broke out, the organization would also serve any civilian seeking shelter in the enclave’s 300 primary schools—protected by the blue flag of the United Nations.

That status remained the norm for the first months of the cataclysmic current war. Then, in January, Israel charged that a dozen employees of UNRWA, which stands for United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, had participated in the atrocities of Oct. 7. The allegation had the effect of directly associating the agency, long criticized by Israel for its support of Palestinian political aspirations, with a terrorist entity. In response, more than 16 nations paused contributions; the U.S., formerly the agency’s largest donor, continues to hold back funding. In October, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed a pair of bills barring cooperation with UNRWA, which distributes much of the humanitarian aid that gets to Gazans.

If implemented, the laws will further impede efforts to bring food and other assistance to the 2 million civilians trapped in Gaza, where the threat of famine is growing. Longer term, the law aims to undo a U.N. apparatus that Israel has regarded as problematic ever since it was established to provide for the needs of the 700,000 Palestinian refugees who were pushed off the land that became Israel. Under U.N. treaties, refugees remain refugees until they can return to their country of origin—a pardox that lies at the heart of the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel.

“The Israelis got a state. The Palestinians got UNRWA,” says Philippe Lazzarini—a two-decade employee of the U.N. who in 2020 was named the 15th, and now possibly the last, chief of an agency that has expanded with the population it serves. The organization’s mandate also covers refugees' descendants who now live in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Lazzarini, whose humanitarian career also includes a lengthy stint at the Red Cross and whose UNRWA office is in East Jerusalem, says he has been barred from entering Israel since June. He spoke with TIME on Nov. 12 in New York City. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TIME: Your agency employs 32,000 people. Most are Palestinian. How does UNRWA vet its employees?

LAZZARINI: Basically, exactly the same as any other U.N. agency. Your education certificate. You have to come with a clean criminal record. We will also do a check with the database of other U.N. agencies and look at your employment record. On a yearly basis, we are submitting the list of our staff to the host country, including to the State of Israel. Since the so-called Catherine Colonna report [a neutrality review ordered by the U.N. in the wake of Israel’s allegations] we are submitting the list on a quarterly basis. We also make sure that any of our employees are fully in line and compatible with any possible sanction list. And also through the banking system; we know that the financial system is quite waterproof.

Would you need to declare that you're not a member of any armed organization?

That's a very good question. You don't have to declare that you are not a member of an organization. You have to declare that you will have no public political activities. I cannot force you to have a belief, not to believe, and so on. But you cannot have a public stand or public activity, including on social media. We clearly detail the difference between your freedom of thoughts and the expected behavior for you as a civic servant.

On Sept. 30, an Israeli airstrike in Tyre, Lebanon, killed Fateh Sherif, and his family; Israel called him the head of Hamas in Lebanon. He was also a principal of an UNWRA school.

The famous Fateh Sherif. In March, it came to my attention that he might be a member of Hamas. On the very same day, I took the decision to suspend the person, to put him under investigation—suspension without pay, obviously—with the objective that, if true, he would be dismissed. [The internal investigation was still ongoing at the time of the strike.] It triggered some reaction from the community, and they put pressure on the agency. They prevented the staff from getting to headquarters in Beirut and to one or two centers we had in [refugee] camps. I went to Lebanon, and met all the political factions and the Lebanese authorities, and I told them that I will not tolerate any pressure of any kind—that we have a suspicion, we will investigate, and if you continue, I'm more than happy to hand over the keys to the political faction. The pressure stopped.

Read more: A Palestinian Photographer Reflects on One Year of Life and Death in Gaza

Israel is not stopping, though. The Knesset bill would put you out of business in Gaza and the West Bank, wouldn’t it?

Aiming at dismantling an agency like UNWRA has nothing to do with issues related to neutrality. It's all about aiming at stripping the Palestinian from the refugee status, weakening the aspiration of the Palestinian to self-determination, and therefore also weakening the idea of a two-state solution. At the beginning of the war, when you had this equation of “Hamas equals Gaza” that paved the way for all the dehumanization and making the unbearable bearable. Now you equate Hamas to Gaza to UNRWA—get rid of all three. The attacks on UNRWA are not just attacks on the agency. These are attacks on anyone who is promoting respect for international humanitarian law, on anyone promoting the idea that we are living in a rule-based world.

How so?

When the war turned also into a war of propaganda or a war of narratives, it's convenient not to have international journalists on the ground. And [Israel] also tried to silence the outspoken voices of what remains from the U.N. I personally have not been allowed to go back to Gaza since January. I'm not allowed to go to Jerusalem since June. But the agency conveyed the suffering and the plight of the Palestinian people, and a lot had been used later for submission to the International Criminal Court [which on Nov. 21 issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as for Hamas leader Mohammed Deif]. That’s why I warn that beyond the attack on UNRWA—that aims to unilaterally change the political power parameters in the context of Israel and Palestine—these are also attacks against the United Nations system and the broader rule-based order, the multilateral system we have inherited after World War II. If we do not push back, sooner or later this will become the new norm. We have more than 50 conflicts going on across the world. Not acting here will certainly inspire others to apply the same recipe.

In past Gaza wars, that rules-based system held fast. UNRWA was considered neutral ground, even though it has always spoken out for Palestinians.

We are here to advocate for the rights of Palestinian refugees. We are a voice. Look at the situation in Gaza. Either you believe the Palestinian narrative, or you believe the Israeli narrative. So if you are a privileged witness of what is going on, and you see such blatant disregard of international humanitarian law, you have tell what's going on. If you don't, you enter into a situation where people decide to believe what they want to believe.

What's fascinating when you look at this conflict is the extraordinary polarization. [On one side,] you have a total empathy or compassion for what happened to Israel, and rightly so. People are deeply, deeply traumatized. And this needs to be understood. But if you look only through this lens, you justify the disproportionate response on Gaza and the human tragedy that we are witnessing. Or [on the other side,] if you look at the human tragedy in Gaza, and you primarily feel for the Palestinian, you say the Israeli disproportionate response is horrible—“I cannot feel what they felt, because it cannot be justified.” There is this mutual absence of empathy. It fuels this polarization. And it's a very dangerous now, in the Arab world, in the Arab Street, or, even more broadly, in the Global South.

Read more: How UNRWA Aid Helped My Entire Family Survive

You’ve lost a lot of people.

It's unprecedented in the history of the United Nations. More than 240 staff killed. It's unprecedented that more than 200 premises would be damaged or completely destroyed, and hundreds of people died when they were seeking the protection of the U.N. emblem. We had also convoys regularly being prevented to move, or being attacked despite deconfliction.

The political side of Hamas has been running Gaza since 2007. Haven’t they had issues with UNRWA as well?

They criticize our summer camps. Our camps were super, super popular. We brought together girls and boys for sport, music. And they just hated it. They were also very unhappy with a recent code of ethics that we have distributed to the agency, because obviously a U.N. code of ethics promotes diversity and gender equality and so on.

What are the practical implications of the Knesset laws barring any Israeli contact with UNRWA?

There are laws which, years later, are still not implemented. So that could be a possibility. Do we really want to throw the baby with the water? The areas where we are irreplaceable are education and health. On the West Bank alone, we have 17,000 staff, 50,000 pupils in our schools, 400,000 people on our health care center. We stop tomorrow, those people are out of schools, and 400,000 people will not have access to health care.

In Gaza, no one is going to school but half the people are under 18. They live in the rubble, deeply traumatized. If we have a cease fire tomorrow, priority number one is to find a way to bring them back into a learning environment. Israel doesn’t want the Palestinian Authority there. By law, Israel, as the occupying power, has the responsibility to provide education.

Is this just a matter of UNWRA having a problematic reputation?

If U.N. member states believe that it is a branding issue, nothing should prevent them [from changing the name]. As long the branding does not weaken the future right of the Palestinian refugees, that can be an option.

But it’s false to believe that if the provision of services by UNWRA stops, there would be no refugees. The issue of a state, the status of refugees, right of return—all these political issues will not be addressed if you make UNRWA disappear.