‘Let’s see what happens,’ UN says of Israeli laws shuttering UNRWA office

(Jan. 29, 2025 / JNS)

With a pair of laws, which the Knesset passed in October, slated to go into effect on Jan. 30 shuttering the U.N. Relief and Works Agency office in Jerusalem, reporters asked at a United Nations press briefing on Wednesday whether the U.N. agency would comply with the Israeli laws.

“Let’s see what happens when the sun rises over Jerusalem tomorrow,” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, told reporters.

The global body has “taken measures to ensure” that UNRWA staff members subject to the new legislation are “safe and that premises and records are also safe,” Dujarric said at the press briefing. Asked if Israel has told the United Nations that it will guarantee protection of UNRWA staff, Dujarric said, “I would not say that we’ve gotten any assurances.”

The U.N. spokesman echoed comments from Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of UNRWA, and said that the agency “will continue to deliver on its mandate until it physically cannot.” 

The Palestinian-only aid and social services U.N. agency, UNRWA has long been accused of direct ties to Hamas and other Gazan terror groups. Tensions between the U.N. agency and Israel increased dramatically after the Jewish state discovered and publicized that  U.N. staff took part in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attacks.

The new laws scheduled to go into effect tomorrow terminate UNRWA operations in Jerusalem and bar contact between Israeli officials and the U.N. agency.

Dujarric’s remarks at the press conference come a day after the U.N. secretary-general’s office provided JNS with a copy of a letter that Guterres sent on Monday evening to Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the global body.

Hours after participating with Israeli officials in a Holocaust remembrance ceremony, Guterres appeared to threaten the Jewish state’s U.N. membership rights in the letter to Danon. (JNS sought comment from the United Nations and from the Israeli mission to the global body.)

“I regret this decision and request that the government of Israel retract it,” Guterres wrote Danon of the Israeli laws, “considering the legal framework applicable to the activities of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and the agency’s irreplaceable nature.”

“Any actions that prevent UNRWA from continuing its activities would severely undermine the provision of an appropriate humanitarian response in the occupied Palestinian territory,” Guterres wrote.  (Israel has said that other agencies, both within the United Nations and outside of it, could assume UNRWA’s responsibilities.)

In what appeared to be a veiled threat, Guterres quoted the U.N. charter and said that Israel “continues to be required” to “give UNRWA every assistance in any action it takes in accordance” with the U.N. charter “in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them.”

Brett Schaefer, a senior research fellow in international regulatory affairs at the Heritage Foundation, told JNS that any threat to strip Israel’s U.N. membership at the Security Council would “almost certainly” be met with a U.S. veto.

A suspension of Israel’s rights would run through the U.N. General Assembly “but would be unwise, as it would likely elicit strong opposition from the United States and harm the organization without changing the current dilemma for UNRWA,” Schaefer said. 

“Despite the letter, the United Nations and the secretary-general cannot compel Israel to change course,” he told JNS. “With the UNSC unlikely to act, it would require individual states to enforce it—again possibly resulting in U.S. retaliation.”

The United Nations has long insisted that Israel must allow UNRWA, which is under a U.N. General Assembly mandate, to operate and to facilitate its work. Several member states and the Palestinian Authority, which has permanent “observer” status, have called for the United Nations to penalize Israel or potentially stripped of its membership due to its prosecution of the war against Hamas and its actions toward UNRWA.

Guterres has said that Israel, as a matter of international law, “is not entitled to exercise sovereign powers” in eastern Jerusalem which the United Nations deems occupied territory. UNRWA’s Jerusalem field office is located in the eastern portion of the city.

The U.N. chief also complained that Israel unilaterally provided UNRWA with “less than a week of formal notice” that it needed to cease its operations and vacate its Jerusalem premises. U.N. officials have acknowledged for months that those provisions were contained in the anti-UNRWA laws. 

Guterres wrote that efforts were made to convince Israel to “enter into consultations on matters arising” from the legislation. Those went unheeded, Guterres said. JNS has asked the U.N. secretary-general’s office several times in the last three months if the global body has or would contact Israel seeking accommodations to the laws. U.N. spokesman didn’t confirm any such outreach.

“The referred consultations and negotiations on matters arising from the relevant Israeli laws should take place without delay,” Guterres wrote in the letter this week. “The United Nations stands ready to enter into such consultations and negotiations.”

Guterres also insisted in his letter that UNRWA facilities in Jerusalem remain the property of the United Nations. Israeli officials have said variously that UNRWA had never secured proper permission to operate its field office in Jerusalem, that it owed massive property taxes and that it added both land and facilities to its field office without clearance.

“The secretary-general should recognize that UNRWA is a compromised entity that no longer enjoys the trust of governments essential to its operations,” Schaefer told JNS. 

“Other U.N. and non-U.N. entities can provide humanitarian support to the Palestinian people,’ he said. “The secretary-general should spend time more productively by facilitating this shift and supporting the termination of UNRWA.”