The occupation army was accused of using Palestinians as "human shields".. Western newspapers: Israel's ban on UNRWA will be a disaster for Gaza

The Guardian newspaper warned that Israel's ban on vital UNRWA services would be a disaster for Gaza in the absence of an alternative, noting that Israeli legislation against UNRWA would cut off aid to 2.3 million people.

The British newspaper said in a report that despite the enormous international pressure exerted to prevent UNRWA’s work from being jeopardized, the Israeli parliament voted this week to ban the organization and declare it a terrorist organization, meaning all forms of cooperation and communication between the UN agency and the Jewish state were cut off.

At present, it is not clear how the new laws, which are supposed to come into effect within 90 days, will affect aid in Gaza, where UN officials say humanitarian efforts for 2.3 million people are “entirely dependent” on UNRWA’s staff, facilities and logistical capabilities. Another 900,000 Palestinians in the West Bank rely on the organization for essential services, which the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority has no capacity to take over, leading to fears that it could collapse altogether.

“I have studied UNRWA for many years, and I can say with absolute certainty that there is no alternative to it,” says Dr. Maya Rosenfeld, a sociologist and anthropologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It is unlike any other UN agency in the scope and scale of what the international community and Israel are asking of it when there is no solution to the conflict.”

“Emergency service providers can step in for the short term, but they cannot replace what UNRWA does in the long term, it is too big to fail,” she added.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could veto the new bills if he is persuaded to do so by his Western allies who support UNRWA’s activities. The legislation is also being challenged by petitions filed by human rights groups to Israel’s Supreme Court.

According to the agency’s website, 96 schools in the West Bank serving 45,000 students, as well as 43 health centers, food distribution services to refugee families, and psychosocial support services, are at risk. Before the war in Gaza, UNRWA ran 278 schools serving 290,000 students, 22 health centers, and distributed food parcels to 1.1 million people. It is now a critical emergency lifeline.

The anti-UNRWA legislation, which passed by a vote of 92 to 10 in the Knesset late Monday, represents an all-time low in Israel's relationship with the United Nations, which it has long accused of bias, the newspaper reported.

The report warned that if the ban is implemented, Israel will stop issuing entry and work permits to UNRWA's foreign employees, and will end coordination with the Israeli military to allow aid shipments into Gaza, effectively preventing the delivery of aid to the besieged area.

“Hundreds of thousands of people will slide from acute food insecurity into mass starvation,” said Chris Gunness, who was UNRWA spokesman from 2007 to 2020.

In besieged northern Gaza, where Israel last month renewed a brutal air and ground offensive that critics say is designed to force the estimated 400,000 remaining people to flee south, conditions are already the worst since the war began.

In Jerusalem, if the ban is imposed, UNRWA will be forced to close its headquarters in the half of the city annexed by Israel, effectively ending its presence there. And in Shuafat, the only one of 27 refugee camps across the Palestinian territories on the Jerusalem side of Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank, 16,500 people will be immediately cut off from health and education services.

According to the newspaper, the reliance on the United States and the voluntary nature of funding have made UNRWA vulnerable in the past. The Trump administration cut funding in 2018, claiming that other countries were not paying enough and that the agency was an “obstacle to peace.”

Using Palestinians as human shields

In turn, the American newspaper "The Washington Post" accused Israel of using Palestinians as human shields in Gaza, according to what Palestinians and soldiers say who spoke about being forced to carry out life-threatening tasks by Israeli forces in Gaza.

The newspaper reported that four Palestinian men spoke out publicly to provide vivid accounts of what they described as Israel’s use of Palestinian detainees as human shields in Gaza — defined by the Geneva Conventions as the use of civilians or other detainees to shield military operations from attack — in this case, by forcing them to carry out life-threatening tasks to minimize the risk to Israeli soldiers.

Their accounts, which are almost simultaneous, are detailed, corroborated by other witnesses, and consistent with the testimony of an Israeli soldier who fought in Gaza, and with interviews collected by Breaking the Silence, an organization that works with soldiers who served in the occupied Palestinian territories. They described a practice in which Palestinians are detained, interrogated and eventually released, suggesting that the Israeli military does not believe they are militants.

Breaking the Silence also provided what it said was visual evidence of the practice. A photo from northern Gaza released by the group shows soldiers standing next to two prisoners it says were being used as human shields. The men sit on a shattered window ledge in a destroyed building — bound, blindfolded and with their heads bowed.

According to accounts provided by Breaking the Silence, Palestinians were used as human shields throughout the conflict.

Palestinians said they were also forced to enter the sprawling network of tunnels built by Hamas ahead of Israeli forces, in case they were booby-trapped. One person interviewed by The Washington Post in January described being sent underground in the western part of Gaza City with a camera around his waist and a rope he was told to pull if he needed to stop.