Funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza has fallen victim to other than humanitarian considerations.
The announcements by several major humanitarian donors of a pause in their funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) met widespread shock and dismay. Many expressed their outrage online and, following the example of the New York University law professor Rob Howse, made it known that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was, unwittingly leading to the first viral fundraising campaign by the international legal community.
As the largest humanitarian organisation operating in the Gaza strip, UNRWA provides crucial infrastructure for others to deliver aid. Hollowing out UNRWA thus threatens all humanitarian operations in Gaza amid a humanitarian catastrophe. It is not the first time the organisation has faced existential funding shortfalls, due to drastic donor decisions. While it was able to recover from this in the past, at this juncture its future is far from certain, despite it being needed more urgently than ever.
The timing of this new ‘UNRWA scandal’ is noteworthy. News broke shortly before the order from the International Court of Justice, in the case of South Africa versus Israel, which not unexpectedly found there to be a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza.
The decisions to pause funding for UNRWA, or not to approve new funds, were prompted by allegations that 12 agency employees may have been involved in the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas. In response to these allegations, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, announced on January 26th—the day of the ICJ order—that the contracts of the 12 staff (two were already dead) had been terminated with immediate effect and several investigations, including criminal, activated. Before the allegations, the organisation had already agreed to a review of UNRWA’s operations by an independent panel of experts.
Threat to survival
Despite these steps, as of today, the United States, Canada, the European Union, Germany, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Finland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and New Zealand have all halted support. This list includes 11 of the 15 largest UNRWA donors, accounting in 2022 for 76 per cent of the organisation’s budget—Germany alone accounts for 17 per cent. Such is the magnitude of the threat the funding suspensions pose, not only to all operations of the organisation but to its very survival.
This is not the first time UNRWA has been exposed to immense donor pressure. Following the leak in the summer of 2019 of a confidential report by its ethics office detailing serious misconduct by senior officials—including the then commissioner-general, his deputy and the chief of staff—funds from various donors were suspended or reduced.
Under Donald Trump’s presidency, the US, UNRWA’s largest donor to date, had slashed its contribution, from $300 million in 2017 to $30 million in 2018 with no funding at all for 2019. The administration claimed in 2018 that ‘the fundamental business model and fiscal practices that have marked UNRWA for years—tied to UNRWA’s endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries’ were ‘simply unsustainable’.
At the time, Germany, the EU and other donors reluctantly showed enough financial commitment not to let UNRWA go bankrupt. By 2022, after a leadership change at the agency and in the White House, the US recommitted and once again became UNRWA’s largest donor, with others which had stepped away in 2019—such as Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium—following suit.
The diverging reactions of donors to the 2019 UNRWA affair, arguably more indicative of structural problems than the current episode, reveal a general dilemma the humanitarian world faces when it comes to funding. Some donors, including the US, have never demurred in recognising humanitarian assistance as a matter of not only humanitarian needs but also foreign-policy interests. This manifests itself institutionally, with the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance at the US Agency for International Development—which distributes foreign aid, guided by the president and the secretary of state—just being one branch alongside others geared towards development policy, such as the Anti-Corruption Center and the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Governance.
Other donors find themselves often caught between principles and politics. This oscillation is well-illustrated in the German Foreign Office’s Strategy for Humanitarian Assistance Abroad. The office describes such assistance as an ‘ethical responsibility’ which ‘does not pursue any interest-driven goals’ and refers to the UN humanitarian principles as a ‘key prerequisite for humanitarian assistance’. Yet it also says that humanitarian assistance ‘is a defining and integral component of Germany’s foreign policy’, that ‘decisions are taken in consultation with other humanitarian donors and partners’ and that general ‘foreign-policy considerations can also play a role in the decision-making process’. The competence for humanitarian assistance lies with the Federal Foreign Office (although it is separated from development assistance, which lies with the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development).
Conflicted position
In the context of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, Germany’s conflicted position as a donor is unfolding its fullest, and perhaps ugliest, effects yet. Having in September 2023 proposed that the Foreign Office budget €978 million for humanitarian assistance for 2024, the Bundestag increased this last month to €2.23 billion—at least in part in response to the anticipated humanitarian needs in Gaza. While some may be tempted to see this as an expression of a donor’s commitment to humanitarian principles, past budgetary choices by the German parliament, as well as the current UNRWA funding suspension, tell a different story.
Despite its economic power, Germany was historically by no means a generous humanitarian donor. This changed only in 2015 in the wake of the ‘refugee crisis’, which brought more than one million refugees to Germany. Under the heading Außenpolitik mit Mitteln (foreign policy with means), the budget for humanitarian assistance abroad increased from €500 million in 2015 to €1.3 billion in 2016. As the then Christian-democrat chancellor, Angela Merkel, remarked in her speech on the budgetary proposal for 2016, Fluchtursachenbekämpfung (tackling the causes of flight) required a change in foreign policy and development assistance. To put it bluntly, the idea was that improving conditions in refugees’ region of origin would decrease the influx to Germany.
In a similar spirit, now with overtly racist rhetoric, Friedrich Merz, today’s leader of the Christian Democrats in opposition, made it clear last October that any refugees from Gaza would not be welcome in Germany, as they were first and foremost the responsibility of countries in the region—and, anyway, there were already ‘enough anti-Semitic young men in the country’. Humanitarian assistance as a means of Fluchtursachenbekämpfung is thus not primarily about meeting human need but limiting movement by those deemed ‘undesirable migrants’.
With significant parts of the German population still struggling to be as sympathetic towards Palestinian civilians affected by the war in Gaza as they are towards the victims of the Hamas attacks, the German government has elected decisively to part with its ambition of being a ‘principled humanitarian donor’ in favour of playing to its constituencies. For the people of Gaza this decision is cruel and deadly, and not founded on international law or practice. In the long run, it will also weaken Germany’s position in the international community—as the country is finding itself, once again, on the wrong side of history.
Lys Kulamadayil is an international lawyer and Swiss National Sciences Foundation Ambizione fellow, based at the Geneva Graduate Institute.