An employee raises the United Nations flag on the roof of the U.N. refugee agency’s health center in the Balata camp in the West Bank in March. The camp, the largest in the West Bank, is home to 33,000 Palestinian refugees, for whom the agency provides services including health care, education and sanitation. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
BALATA CAMP, West Bank — Even before war erupted between Israel and Hamas, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees was broke.
Its top official for the West Bank was driving a 15-year-old car with broken headlights. Summer camps the agency used to run had been canceled. Some of its trademark blue-and-white schools, which educate about 46,000 students across East Jerusalem and the West Bank, hadn’t been painted in a decade.
Now, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency is on life support, after major donors suspended funding in January in the wake of allegations that a dozen of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza took part in the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
The impact of what U.N. officials widely describe as an existential crisis for the agency will be felt most acutely in Gaza, where it’s the backbone of international efforts to stave off a man-made famine. But the turmoil is also disrupting life and sparking fear among Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, where the agency provides health, education and sanitation services for the descendants of refugees.
UNRWA is now under a multipronged attack: Israeli officials are seeking to evict it from its East Jerusalem headquarters, have blocked shipments of supplies and are shortening and delaying visas for international staff. New restrictions have hindered the movement of employees across the West Bank. And a high-level Israeli campaign has made UNRWA the target of harassment and protests, agency officials say.
Staff of the agency’s school for girls in the Balata camp talk outside classrooms. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
“The pressure on our offices is very, very high,” said Hanadi Abu Taqa, who leads the agency’s work in the northern West Bank.
Unable to plan, the agency has been forced to switch more workers to short-term contracts, accelerating a trend that has lowered the quality of education UNRWA provides, according to Fathi Saleh, director of services at the Shuafat refugee camp on Jerusalem’s edge.
The Israeli clampdown on the West Bank since Oct. 7 has meant hundreds of UNRWA employees can’t reach their posts at all, according to Abu Taqa. Israeli soldiers harass and detain UNRWA staff at checkpoints, sometimes for hours, she said — causing teachers to be late to class and medical teams to miss appointments.
In a statement to The Washington Post, the Israel Defense Forces said “there has been a significant increase in terrorist attacks” in the West Bank since Oct. 7. “As part of the security operations in the area, dynamic checkpoints have been put up over different places,” it added. “The mission of the IDF is to maintain the security of all residents of the area, and to act to prevent terrorism and activities that endanger the citizens of the State of Israel.”
Meanwhile, the needs of refugees have soared. The West Bank economy is collapsing, with many Palestinians formerly employed in Israel out of work. More families are relying on handouts and free medical services from UNRWA, said agency officials in the Balata camp, the largest in the West Bank.
Iman Abu Hamada, left, and her sister-in-law Khadra Hamada, center, wait with their infants to see a doctor at the UNRWA health center in the Balata camp. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
Israeli raids in camps regularly damage infrastructure, which UNRWA is often called in to repair. At the Balata health center, physiotherapist Najah Jibril has seen a surge of patients — many of them young men with bullet injuries sustained in street battles.
The military incursions have left children terrified and more dependent on UNRWA schools for psychological support, teachers and school principals said. Younger girls in Balata wet their beds at night or cover their ears when they hear a loud sound. The school performance of the older girls has plummeted. School supervisors say the girls have become more aggressive, taking out feelings of anger and helplessness on classmates.
The UNRWA school compounds provide a haven. Counselors organize group therapy sessions and try to channel the girls’ anxiety into play.
“In the school we are safe — me and the teachers and the students,” Wafaa Marahil, principal of the girls’ middle school, said. But outside, she added, “we never know what might happen.”
Anxiety is mounting that if UNRWA collapses, even that safe space could disappear. If her school is forced to close, Marahil, who graduated from there, said there are no municipal schools close by and most families wouldn’t be able to afford private institutions. She worries her students will be pushed to marry or enter the workforce early instead.
Students take part in a physical education class at the agency’s girls’ primary school in the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
Established in 1949 to assist Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the creation of the state of Israel, UNRWA is the only U.N. agency that provides direct, government-like services for a specific population and region — running schools, health-care centers, and food and housing assistance programs to millions of those refugees and their descendants across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
The agency receives very little core funding from the United Nations, relying instead on donations from member states and making it particularly vulnerable to geopolitical headwinds. When President Donald Trump stopped funding in 2018, the agency was left with a shortfall of more than $400 million.
But Trump “was a bit of an outlier globally at the time,” so other governments stepped in with additional funding, said Adam Bouloukos, UNRWA’s West Bank director. (President Joe Biden restored U.S. contributions when he took office in 2021.)
In January, Israel alleged that 12 of the agency’s 13,000 workers in Gaza took part in the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, during which militants killed 1,200 people and took 253 hostages. UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini immediately fired the accused employees, even though Israel has not made public, or shared with the agency, evidence substantiating the claims.
After the allegations, 16 donors, including the United States, suspended funding.
A U.N. oversight body launched an investigation into the allegations, and a separate independent review committee is expected to present its findings on the agency’s protocols and practices this month.
Most donors have since restored funding, though their contributions are significantly lower than that of the United States. The agency also received some new public and private donations, allowing it to continue operating until the end of May, Lazzarini told Reuters last month. But the United States, which funded 30 percent of the agency’s budget, passed legislation last month barring contributions through at least March 2025 — leaving UNRWA short hundreds of millions of dollars and facing an uncertain future.
Primary school students play during recess at the agency’s girls’ school in the Balata camp. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
Without a significant influx of cash, the agency faces a “slow-onset implosion,” Lazzarini told reporters in Jerusalem in February. UNRWA leaders are discussing internally which services to prioritize in that case, Bouloukos said.
The debate around UNRWA’s future is inextricably bound up in the intractable questions around the rights of Palestinian refugees.
“This is why the Israelis want us out: UNRWA represents the refugee problem. If UNRWA goes away, then somehow the refugees just kind of go away, and the whole support for this population then also goes away,” Bouloukos said.
Israel is forging ahead with what UNRWA officials describe as a full-scale administrative assault against an agency it says is an arm of Hamas. (UNRWA officials reject this assertion.)
An Israeli bank froze an UNRWA account containing $3 million. Israel has also stopped issuing year-long residency permits to international staff, keeping them on two-month visas instead and causing some key positions to go unfilled for months, Bouloukos said. The Jerusalem municipality and a coalition of Israeli lawmakers are seeking to evict the agency from its Jerusalem headquarters — the site of frequent protests in recent months by right-wing Israelis calling for UNRWA’s abolition.
“The things we know and found out about UNRWA are actually shattering, because we feel that the blood of the people who were murdered and kidnapped is on our hands,” Debby Sharon, 60, said at a protest she helped to organize in front of the headquarters.
About 25 protesters gathered in front of the agency’s Jerusalem office and prevented humanitarian workers from entering on March 27, 2024. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
The right-wing deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Arieh King, said the city is ready to assume responsibility for schooling and sanitation in East Jerusalem refugee camps. UNRWA is “not giving any service that we cannot give,” he said.
King is frank about his desire to undermine an agency he says aims “to keep [Palestinians] in refugee status.”
UNRWA was meant to be temporary, built to one day hand over its activities to a Palestinian government. Its schools are based on the curriculum of the Palestinian Authority, the Ramallah-based body with limited governing powers over the West Bank. On a technical level, UNRWA could transfer its West Bank facilities to the Palestinian Authority “overnight,” Bouloukos said.
But the authority is itself broke and struggling to pay staff salaries.
As the occupying power in the West Bank, Bouloukos said, “it should be the Israelis that are cleaning the trash and doing all these other social services.”
Israel has shown no appetite for doing so in the West Bank.
“Israel is not an occupying power,” said a senior Israeli government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “UNRWA is completely tainted with terror and perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem. The enormous budget it has been allocated, largely from American taxpayers, will hopefully be provided to true humanitarian organizations that will sincerely serve humanitarian needs.”
An agency sanitation employee works at the Balata camp. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
Nana Jibril, head of the physiotherapy department at the agency’s health center in the Balata camp, treats a patient. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
But other U.N. agencies lack the capacity to easily take over the services UNRWA provides, U.N. officials say; UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, for example, does not run schools anywhere in the world, and changing its mandate would be complicated.
The nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA across the region, meanwhile, see the agency as a guarantor of their political cause.
“We are never able to de-link service provision from the right of return,” Bouloukos said.
Refugees in Jerusalem and the West Bank are closely following each twist and turn, fearful of the immediate impacts they say UNRWA’s closure would have on their lives.
When UNRWA workers in the West Bank went on strike last year, Ibtissam Khattab, 36, couldn’t bring her son Omar, now 2½, to the Balata health center for the daily physiotherapy he needs. The toddler’s nerve condition regressed, she said, and she could tell he was in more pain.
“If the agency is closed, where will he go? If I have to go to a private clinic, I have to pay for transport and treatment,” she said.
Lorenzo Tugnoli and Sufian Taha in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
A sanitation worker sweeps a street in the Shuafat (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
Fathi Saleh oversees UNRWA’s services in the Shuafat refugee camp. Saleh grew up in the camp, which is home to more than 16,000 Palestinian refugees, and graduated from the agency’s boys’ school there. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/for The Washington Post)
