The crisis that threatens the future of the main United Nations agency in Gaza, amid a humanitarian disaster, began at a routine meeting between diplomats in Tel Aviv.

The sequence of events began on Jan. 18, when Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, met with a top Israeli diplomat in Tel Aviv. Mr. Lazzarini meets roughly once a month in Israel with the diplomat, Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director general at the Israeli Foreign Ministry who oversees relationships with U.N. agencies. This was meant to be a routine discussion about the delivery of food, fuel and other aid supplies to Gaza, according to a U.N. official briefed on the meeting.

Instead, Mr. Weissbrod came supplied with the shocking intelligence about UNRWA, which had been given to him by officers in the military, according to four officials familiar with the situation.

UNRWA is the largest aid agency on the ground in Gaza, providing shelter to more than half the population and coordinating the distribution of the meager aid and fuel supplies that arrive by truck every day from Egypt and Israel. If UNRWA collapses without a plan for its replacement, some Israeli officials fear they will be forced to fill the void.

Yet, a week after the allegations were published, the agency’s survival is in question.

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  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    5•10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The allegations were grave: 12 employees of the organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, were accused of joining Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel or its aftermath.

    Mr. Lazzarini meets roughly once a month in Israel with the diplomat, Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director general at the Israeli Foreign Ministry who oversees relationships with U.N. agencies.

    Among the dozen employees of Mr. Lazzarini’s agency said to have been involved in the Hamas attack or its aftermath was a counselor at an UNRWA school in southern Gaza, accused of abducting a woman from Israel.

    The agency was founded in 1949 to care for Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes during the wars surrounding the birth of the state of Israel, in a displacement known in Arabic as the Nakba, or catastrophe.

    Within the military, generals and officers dealing with the Gaza Strip debated the wisdom of fueling the discussion about UNRWA, lest it prompt more countries to withdraw funding in the middle of a war.

    According to a government readout, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said in a speech to foreign ambassadors on Thursday that UNRWA had “lost its legitimacy to exist.”

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