UN to Israel: Replacing UNRWA relief agency would be your responsibility

The United Nations says replacing its Palestinian relief agency UNRWA in Gaza and the West Bank is not the world body's responsibility, signalling it was Israel's problem, according to a letter excerpt seen by Reuters.

The UN formally responded in a letter to Israel's decision to cut ties with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a move that UNRWA has said leaves its operations in Gaza and the West Bank at risk of collapse.

Under a new law, Israel told the UN on Sunday it was ending a 1967 cooperation agreement with UNRWA that covered its protection, movement and diplomatic immunity. The law will also ban UNRWA's operations in Israel from late January.

"I would note, as a general point, that it is not our responsibility to replace UNRWA, nor do we have the capacity to do so," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' chef de cabinet, Courtenay Rattray, wrote to a senior Israeli foreign affairs official late on Tuesday.

The mention of responsibility is a veiled reference to Israel's obligations as an occupying power.

The UN views Gaza and the West Bank as Israeli-occupied territory. International humanitarian law requires an occupying power to agree to relief programmes for people in need and to facilitate them "by all the means at its disposal" and ensure food, medical care, hygiene and public-health standards.

Israel's mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Rattray's letter.

"If UNRWA is no longer able to operate it would be the responsibility of the Israeli authorities to replace its services that it delivers to civilians, in education, in health, and all sorts of other areas," UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric later clarified to reporters.

Top UN officials and the Security Council describe UNRWA as the backbone of the aid response in Gaza, where Israel and Palestinian militants Hamas have been at war for the past year, leaving the enclave in ruins and on the brink of famine.

"UNRWA may be defined by a single word – failure," Israel's UN Ambassador Danny Danon told a meeting of the General Assembly on UNRWA on Wednesday. "This idea that UNRWA could not be supplemented is absurd."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long called for UNRWA to be dismantled, accusing it of anti-Israeli incitement. Israel also says UNRWA staff took part in the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which sparked the war in Gaza.

The UN has said nine UNRWA staff may have been involved and had been fired. Later, a Hamas commander in Lebanon — killed in September by Israel — was found to have had an UNRWA job.

Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour told the General Assembly: "The agency is indispensable and irreplaceable."