On April 1, the Israeli military repeatedly struck a humanitarian relief convoy from World Central Kitchen, the beloved charity founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, killing seven foreign aid workers. The airstrike shocked the world, and accomplished what more than 30,000 Palestinian deaths apparently could not: President Joe Biden finally called up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told him to stop killing so many civilians.
But the fact that the Israel Defense Forces had targeted and killed humanitarian workers was not, in fact, unusual. By April 1, the conflict had already killed more than 200 aid workers—a staggering number compared to other conflicts, and one that continues to rise. The difference this time around was that the victims were mostly white Westerners—and that Netanyahu actually apologized for it, saying he “deeply regrets the tragic incident.”
Compare this to two weeks earlier, when the IDF announced that it had “eliminated” a high-value target and posted a 10-second video of the killing. Aerial footage shows a person walking alongside a building, just meters away from other people, all of whom seem to be going about their normal daily business. Then a blast consumes the frame.
For the IDF, this was a coup. “Muhammad Abu Hasna, a commander in Hamas’ Operations Unit, was precisely targeted and eliminated in the area of Rafah,” it said on X. “Among other terrorist activities, Hasna was involved in taking control of humanitarian aid and distributing it to Hamas operatives.”
The reality on the ground was messier. According to the government in Gaza—which has been run by Hamas since 2007—as well as his uncle, Abu Hasna was not a “Hamas commander,” but a policeman, whose job was to safeguard aid distribution in coordination with the United Nations.
What the IDF didn’t mention was where the airstrike happened: at a United Nations food warehouse in Rafah. The collateral damage, which the IDF also didn’t mention, was a humanitarian aid worker who was stacking boxes of infant care supplies when he died. Inside the warehouse, blood-soaked boxes of Baby Life diapers testified to the terrorist nature of his work.
The aid worker who was killed was a 42-year-old man named Husny, who had a wife and two children. We don’t know his last name because he worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, which is tight-lipped about its employees—and for good reason, because they have been targets, both in a military and political sense, for decades now.
Husny was a casualty of the current war that began in October. But he was also the victim of a much longer conflict. For decades, the far right—both in Israel and the United States—has been waging a campaign of propaganda, disinformation, and outright lies against UNRWA, implying that it is indistinguishable from Hamas—in effect, that the U.N.’s oldest international refugee agency is a terrorist organization in its own right.
This antipathy toward UNRWA has long been common within the Republican Party. But now even many Democratic politicians—including President Biden—have taken a skeptical, if not downright antagonistic view of the relief agency, to the point that they recently agreed to ban U.S. funds to it for a full year. That has not only emboldened Netanyahu in his assault on UNRWA, thereby endangering other relief workers (including those from World Central Kitchen); it has also accelerated the already severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, pushing it from widespread starvation to outright famine.
This latest hostility toward UNRWA began in late January, when the Israeli government claimed it had intelligence that 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 humanitarian aid workers in Gaza had participated in the war crimes committed by Hamas and other groups on October 7, 2023.
While the claims were shocking, Israel’s evidence was paper-thin. Most of it was based on interrogations; Israel has a well-documented track record of torturing prisoners, and confessions extracted under torture are notoriously unreliable. And anyone familiar with Middle East foreign policy would have known that Israel’s military and its supporters have a two-decade history of making dubious, exaggerated, or wholly false allegations against UNRWA.
Despite all this, the Biden administration immediately withdrew its funding from UNRWA, and 15 other world governments followed suit. The money they suspended represented 70 percent of UNRWA’s budget. This action “is tantamount to increased participation in the on-going genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” warned the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a nonprofit named after Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide and campaigned tirelessly to outlaw this crime.
Since then, as Israel failed to provide evidence for its allegations, many countries have reinstated or even increased their aid to UNRWA. But the U.S., UNRWA’s biggest donor by far, went in the other direction. In March, Congress averted a government shutdown with a massive bipartisan funding bill. Largely lost in the news was a provision tucked inside the bill that extended the U.S. government’s suspension of UNRWA funding for another year, until March 2025. Biden signed the bill on a Saturday morning.
When I asked the White House about Biden’s position on defunding UNRWA, a National Security Council spokesperson responded: “UNRWA is indispensable to humanitarian operations in Gaza, and to the provision of assistance to Palestinian refugees in the region. That’s why President Biden restored UNRWA funding, that the Trump Administration had cut, upon taking office. However, the serious allegations against UNRWA staff, that some of them participated in the horrific events of October 7th, must be addressed. We continue to support UNRWA’s mandate while engaging with the UN on its investigation and independent review.”
Meanwhile, we’re witnessing the effects of this catastrophic decision. UNRWA is the lifeline for Palestinian refugees throughout the region, from Syria and Lebanon to Jordan and the West Bank. But it is especially indispensable for Palestinians in Gaza, who have already been under a land, sea, and air blockade by Israel—“a diet,” as an adviser to previous Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert infamously put it—since June 2007.
More than two million people are already facing starvation in Gaza, and UNRWA is the only agency capable of delivering aid with the speed and efficiency necessary to stave off worse. Even before October 7, UNRWA was bringing in 60 percent of the basic food commodities that entered the strip; 1.2 million people, just over half the population, relied on its quarterly food baskets.
By cutting off money to UNRWA, the U.S. government has intensified the lethal engineered famine that is already inevitable in Gaza. No airdrops or hastily constructed pier—the U.S. government’s two strategies for circumventing Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid in Gaza—can come close to stopping the mass starvation unfolding right now: For that, you need UNRWA’s reach and nearly 75-year history of delivering aid on the ground.
The problem with UNRWA is a problem inherent to any humanitarian aid work, which is partly why the Israeli military doesn’t distinguish between foreign aid workers and Palestinian ones: In delivering humanitarian aid, any outside body, whether UNRWA or other charities on the ground like World Central Kitchen, has to coordinate with the local government. In Gaza, that’s Hamas.
“Anyone who wants to operate in any country has to do some degree of logistical coordination with the authorities there,” said Anne Irfan, » …
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