'No plan B' to aid Palestinian refugees: UNRWA chief

There is no alternative to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, its chief said on Monday, following Israel's order to ban the organisation that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza.

"There is no plan B," the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters in Geneva.

Within the UN "there is no other agency geared to provide the same activities", providing not only aid in Gaza but also primary health care and education to hundreds of thousands of children, he said.

He has called on the UN, which created UNRWA in 1949, to prevent the implementation of a ban on the organisation in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, which was approved by the Israeli parliament last month.

The ban, which is due to take effect in January, sparked global condemnation, including from key Israeli backer the United States.

UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Israel has long been critical of the agency, but tensions escalated after Israel in January accused about a dozen of its staff of taking part in Hamas's attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

A series of probes found some "neutrality related issues" at UNRWA and determined that nine of the agency's roughly 13,000 employees in Gaza "may have been involved" in the attack, but found no evidence for Israel's central allegations.

Lazzarini was in Geneva for a meeting of UNRWA's advisory commission to discuss the way forward at the organisation's "darkest moment".

"The clock is ticking fast," he told the commission, according to a transcript.

Describing Gaza as "an unrelenting dystopian horror", he warned that "what hangs in the balance, is the fate of millions of Palestine refugees and the legitimacy of the rules-based international order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War".

Anton Leis, head of Spain's international cooperation and development agency and chair of the advisory committee, told reporters that there was "simply no alternative to UNRWA", which he said had seen more than 240 staff members killed in Gaza since the start of the war.

"It is the only organisation that possesses the staff, the infrastructure and the capacity to deliver lifesaving assistance to Palestinian refugees at the scale needed, especially in Gaza," he said.

Lazzarini agreed, saying that "If you are talking about bringing in a truck with food, you will surely find an alternative," but "the answer is no" when it comes to education and primary healthcare.