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Israel’s campaign to discredit and destroy the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has no parallel in the history of the United Nations, its outgoing chief has told The Independent.
Philippe Lazzarini, who led UNRWA for six years, said the agency has faced the threat of a terrorist designation, legislation, international lawsuits, lobbying of donors and what he called an “extraordinary fierce disinformation campaign”, including paid adverts, all while nearly 400 of its staff have been killed in Gaza.
“The panoply, the range of instrument being deployed to get rid of this agency mandated by the General Assembly from one member state of the General Assembly is extraordinary, unprecedented,” he said.
“It’s been clear right from the beginning of the war there has been a political intent to say that UNRWA has to be dismantled.”
“There is no agency which has seen 400 of its staff being killed in three years,” he added.
Israeli officials denied the claims.
Gaza UNRWA (Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)
Mr Lazzarini, who is publishing a book about his tenure, said Israel’s efforts against UNRWA escalated after the bloody Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, when militants killed more than 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage.
The Israeli government accused 19 UNRWA staffers of being involved (which was later investigated by the UN with inconclusive results) and other personnel of being connected to militant groups. Since then Israel’s war with Hamas and unprecedented bombardment of Gaza, has killed nearly 74,000 and been labeled a genocide by UN commission of Inquiry. Israel vehemently denies this.
“Before October 7 we were considered as a kind of a necessary evil,” Mr Lazzarini said of Israel’s view of the agency. “We became an unnecessary evil after October 7.”
He said Israel’s long-term aim for the agency was to “get rid of the refugee status” of millions of Palestinians, and with it the right of return, one of the core issues at the heart of any final peace negotiations.
The Israeli embassy in London rejected Mr Lazzarini’s comments in a statement to The Independent.
“UNRWA’s failures cannot be dismissed as a public relations problem or deflected through Mr Lazzarini’s claims of victimhood. They concern the organisation’s accountability, neutrality and ability to fulfil its humanitarian mandate,” the statement read.
“Invoking UN credentials does not place an organisation beyond scrutiny, nor does its humanitarian mandate excuse failures to prevent exploitation by Hamas,” it added .
Founded in 1949, UNRWA operates in occupied Gaza and the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. It was initially formed to care for 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes during the conflict that surrounded the creation of Israel in 1948.
Now it supports some 5.9 million Palestinian that are currently registered as refugees and is the largest UN agency operating in Gaza, employing 13,000 people there. Primarily funded by voluntary donations from UN member states, in Gaza it runs hundreds of schools and shelters, and medical facilities as well as aid distribution.
Since October 2023, Israel has taken aim at the agency, alleging that UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza was located on top of militant infrastructure.
UNRWA said it has no knowledge of what lies beneath its buildings. The UN’s highest investigative body then launched a probe in early 2024 which ultimately concluded nine of the 19 staff accused by Israel “may have been involved” in October 7 but added “it was not able to independently authenticate information used by Israel to support the allegations”.
In October 2024, Israel’s parliament then passed a law banning the agency from operating in the country.
Although UNRWA still runs about half of Gaza’s public health centres, since March 2025 the Israeli authorities have also blocked it from directly bringing humanitarian personnel and aid into Gaza, amid the growing needs of the 2 million people who live there.
In 2025 Israel also seized UNRWA’s headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem although under the UN General Convention and the Charter UN premises are inviolable.
Then in January it demolished some of the structures within the compound, a move condemned as unlawful by UN secretary-general António Guterres and multiple countries including the UK.
Israel denied it had violated any law. Israel’s extreme-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, posted a video on social media of himself in front of the bulldozers, calling it a “historic day” and a “holiday”.
That, Mr Lazzarini said, was “an extraordinary blatant disregard of privileged immunity and international law”.
Mr Lazzarini said Israel had also waged a sustained disinformation campaign against UNRWA, including paid adverts on Google, as well as lobbying donors.
Washington had long been UNRWA’s biggest donor, but halted funding in January 2024 after Israel’s accusations. Reuters reported in December that Trump administration officials were in “advanced” discussions about hitting UNRWA with terrorism-related sanctions. This year Fox News reported that the Trump administration was investigating the body.
A year into the ceasefire, which Mr Lazzarini said was one largely in name, famine in northern Gaza has been reversed but little else has changed, he said, with people living in “subhuman” conditions.
(AFP/Getty)
More than 1,400 people have been killed by Israeli forces since the ceasefire, according to the Palestinian health ministry, while nearly two million still need shelter and 1.4 million face crisis-level hunger, according to Amnesty.
Mr Lazzarini fears scrapping the agency without a replacement, given it is responsible for teaching 300,000 children in Gaza, and running health services.
“If you get rid of UNRWA today without alternative, we will create a vacuum. You open the door for more misery, more distress, and possibly also more radicalism in the future,” he warned.