On Thursday, January 30th Israel’s ban on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) took effect, prohibiting its services in east Jerusalem and severely impacting the agency’s operations in Gaza and the remainder of the West Bank. ARDD strongly condemns the implementation of the ban and warns against Israel’s intensification of settler-colonial erasure of Palestine.

Part and parcel of the continuation of the historic and ongoing Nakba inflicted on the Palestinian people, the UNRWA ban underscores the urgency and necessity to address the root-causes of the settler-colonization of Palestine. The ban sees the implementation of the two bills that the Israeli Knesset passed in October: the first prohibits the agency from operating within the 1948 borders. The second bars Israeli officials from engaging with UNRWA in any capacity.

For the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza, now cautiously breathing the absence of bombs amidst a man-poisoned environment, the ban will further obstruct the restoration of life through healing from nights spent beneath skies ablaze with fire and days suspended between slow and quick death in dwindling food rations. As the Agency is the backbone of large-scale humanitarian operations and distribution in Gaza, its dismantlement will cripple efforts to rebuild the warmth of homes and the safety of life-sustaining infrastructure that Israel’s annihilatory force has reduced to rubble. For the 1.1 million Palestinian UNRWA refugees in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the implementation of the ban will result in a marked acceleration in the deterioration of the conditions of life imposed by colonization. Forty-nine-thousand students will be forced out of UNRWA schools, and will be left either without education or, in Jerusalem, to the whims of Israeli curricula that distort, dehumanize and erase their history and culture. The denial of medical care to almost a million Palestinians undergoing treatment–adults and children alike– coupled with the loss of thousands of jobs will drive Palestinians into further economic precarity, dismantling family livelihoods, deepening the cycle of de-development, and ultimately eroding the native community’s ability to regenerate itself.

While the humanitarian consequences are set to be catastrophic, the Israeli attempt to dismantle UNRWA is very much a political maneuver: it aims at undermining the Palestinian people’s inalienable right of return to their homeland and weakening their collective identity and right to self-determination.

The status of Palestinian refugees and their collective and individual right of return are undeniable realities rooted in the ongoing settler-colonial project—an enduring injustice that remains unaddressed at its core. While this status and right do not, and cannot, depend solely on registration with UNRWA or any other international agency for legal recognition, it is clear that Israel’s, with international complicity, effort to dismantle UNRWA goes beyond targeting its role as a relief agency. It also seeks to eliminate an institutional space that could advance Palestinian refugees' political claims within the UN framework.

The UNRWA ban comes into effect as colonial violence has shifted to the West Bank, where colonization forces have launched a sweeping military campaign across Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas. This campaign mirrors the genocidal tactics used in Gaza, though at a different pace, employing airstrikes, sieges, destruction of vital infrastructure, mass arrests and detentions, and large-scale evacuation orders.

As UNRWA international staff has been evacuated from the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem, ARDD commends the resilience of UNRWA’s Palestinian and remaining international staff who have pledged to continue operating albeit the imminent threats posed by the colonial army.

We stress that UNRWA’s historical mandate to advance the Palestinian right of return and its humanitarian role and aid capacity across the region is irreplaceable, and must be supported until all the Palestinian refugees –whether registered or not registered with the Agency– will be able to return to their original 1,193 towns and villages. Until then, we urge the international community to take concrete steps towards this end.

In particular, we call on UN member states to:

• increase financial and political support to UNRWA;
• take effective political, diplomatic, and economic countermeasures against Israel, with a two-way arms embargo being the obvious highest priority;
• submit statements in support of UNRWA to the International Court of Justice in the framework of the advisory proceedings on the obligation of Israel in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations initiated by Norway.