Pressing her face to the blue bars of a pharmacy window, Fatmeh Jahaleen pleaded for just a few extra boxes of medication. She relies on the pharmacy inside an East Jerusalem clinic run by the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, for a monthly supply of blood pressure and kidney medications, as well as insulin.
“Where am I supposed to get my medicine? This would cost me 400 [Israeli shekels – £90] a month otherwise. We can’t afford that; we are refugees,” she said.
Then there are the blood tests she needs every three months, which would otherwise cost her another 150 shekels (£30), or her regular treatment at an eye hospital that was covered by Unrwa that would otherwise prove costly.
Across Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a disaster looms for Unrwa with a ban imposed by Israel’s parliament due to come into force at the end of this month.
“Are you sure that Unrwa will close?” Jahaleen asked, slapping her hands against her thighs in distress. “I really don’t know what to do – only God can help us if they close this clinic.”
When the Israeli parliament passed the bill to ban Unrwa last October, Fathi Saleh, the director of services for the Shuafat refugee camp on the outskirts of Jerusalem, arrived at his office to find hundreds of terrified people demanding to know what could happen if the agency was forced to close.
“Cutting the services we provide is like cutting the oxygen supply to people here,” he said. “It will devastate people.”
Saleh is a child of the camp, whose office sits on the site of a municipal cafeteria for children, where he supervises the same schools, medical services and sanitation workers that he has used his entire life. Even so, what will happen on 1 February when he arrives at his office deep within the camp remains a mystery.
The ban could mean no dial tone when he picks up the landline, a red seal of wax on the door blocking entry to his office or, worse, the presence of Israeli security forces who regularly raid the camp. All the Unrwa staff know is that it will not be them who decides their fate.
“Anything is possible,” he said. When people show up at his office with questions, he reassures them that Unrwa will continue to provide the same health services, schooling and rubbish collection to the estimated 30,000 refugees – both registered and unregistered – who live in Shuafat “until we are no longer able to do so”.
The Shuafat refugee camp is home to tens of thousands of people crammed into a 2 sq km cluster of squat tower blocks, a web of electricity cables strung between them, all hemmed in by high concrete barriers, a watchtower and a checkpoint. The prospect that Unrwa trucks may be blocked from removing the rubbish piled daily on to the row of skips in the camp’s streets makes Saleh fearful.
“This camp generates 20-25 tonnes of rubbish every day; imagine the catastrophe that will occur if we can’t remove that, just from this camp. Within days that is 100 tonnes of rubbish that would be on the streets here. What will happen?” he asked.
The 7 October 2023 attacks, where Hamas militants broke out of the besieged Gaza Strip, killed 1,139 people and took 250 more hostage, changed Israel’s relationship with Unrwa overnight. Israeli officials had long complained about the organisation, founded in 1949 to aid Palestinian refugees by providing a range of services such as education, making it unique among UN agencies. But in the months after 7 October 2023, the Israelis accused Unrwa staff of having links to Hamas, and of involvement in the attack.
An investigation into 19 Unrwa staff members conducted by the UN’s official oversight body led to the sacking in August of nine employees who “may have been involved in the armed attacks of 7 October 2023”, according to Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for the UN secretary general. Unrwa has more than 30,000 staff.
The UN’s efforts were seen as insufficient by Israel, where Unrwa’s offices in East Jerusalem were set ablaze amid protests outside. The ban on Unrwa was regarded as a triumph among Israel’s increasingly hardline right wing, as it stipulates a complete cut to any communication between Israeli institutions and the UN agency, now designated a terrorist organisation.
Earlier this week, the Israeli government ordered Unrwa to vacate its offices by 30 January, while one rightwing deputy mayor, Aryeh King, called for protests outside that day, adding “the countdown continues, three more days until Unrwa is expelled from Jerusalem”.
The Unrwa commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini, told the UN security council earlier this week that the closure would affect 70,000 patients and more than 1,000 students in East Jerusalem alone.
The Shuafat camp is the only Unrwa-run camp officially on Israeli territory, meaning that should the UN agency be forced to close there, the Jerusalem municipality would be under pressure to assume some of its roles. Saleh said the municipality had not informed him of any potential handover plans.
Suad Shwefi, 67, who chatted as she shopped for vegetables in the street in Shuafat, said her family had “no information whatsoever about what will happen” to her 13 grandchildren’s education – they are all halfway through the school year in Unrwa schools that are, crucially, a short walk away.
Udi Shaham Maymon, a spokesperson for the Jerusalem municipality, said they were working to provide alternatives. He emphasised it was for East Jerusalem residents, who have long complained the municipality neglects their needs, to opt in.
Contingency plans are ready to absorb 650 students into other schools in Jerusalem “in case Unrwa does close”, he said, adding that it would be simple to expand rubbish collection services to include the camp. The municipality could offer access to some family care centres, he added.
But elsewhere the risk of chaos looms large, particularly in the West Bank, where more than 45,000 students are in Unrwa schools, hundreds of thousands flock to Unrwa’s 43 primary care centres and the UN agency provides basic services such as rubbish collection in 19 Palestinian refugee camps. These camps are not administered by the ruling and impoverished Palestinian Authority, meaning they could be totally without services.
In Gaza, Unrwa has also long been the largest aid organisation, coordinating the distribution of relief to more than 2 million people, requiring some level of Israeli cooperation to operate in the besieged territory.
Nurses and an administrator at Unrwa’s clinic in Shuafat said Israeli forces at the checkpoints that dot their route to work from the West Bank town of Ramallah were quick to make their hostility clear. Soldiers who used to wave their cars marked with the Unrwa logo through the checkpoint without even looking at their UN-issued identity cards, now single them out for extra checks and hassle.
“We used to proudly show our Unrwa identity cards at checkpoints, because it was respected. Now we hide them,” said one administrator, Adel Karim. “If we show the soldiers there our Unrwa cards, they tell us that they don’t recognise it and we have to show them our Palestinian identity cards.”
A nurse, Abu Omar, said: “On 1 February we will come to work; there is no other option. As long as the door to the clinic is open, we will come and perform our duties. If they come to kick us out of the clinic, we won’t leave voluntarily.” He smiled as he leaned back on a desk, bemused by the overwhelming situation. “Most of us have worked here for 10 or even 15 years – where are we supposed to go?”
Saleh said he felt the ban was an attack that went beyond the day-to-day services that Unrwa provides. “If this ban comes into force it will be a sad day for the UN charter,” he said. “This is an attack on the United Nations.”
