“Defunding the sole UN agency that provides a lifeline for some 5.9 million Palestinians, including a besieged refugee population of over 2 million in Gaza currently facing a genocide, is egregious and aims to liquidate the Palestinian cause. Since the United States announced on 26 January that it would suspend its funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa), other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, and Germany, have followed suit. @Middle East Eye The decision to defund Unrwa followed Israeli allegations that 12 of the agency’s 13,000 staff in Gaza (constituting 0.092 percent of Unrwa’s local staff in Gaza) may have been involved in Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood Operation of 7 October. Unrwa is funded almost entirely by voluntary financial contributions. Without the sustained contributions of states and governments, Unrwa cannot continue to carry out its operations. It is no coincidence that the defunding of Unrwa came swiftly after the ICJ had issued its interim ruling recognising that the risk of genocide by the state of Israel was plausible. The timing of this defunding campaign, despite the measures taken by Unrwa, can only be understood to be politically motivated as a form of retribution for the ICJ ruling, and as a war against the Palestinian people as a whole. Efforts to effectively dismantle Unrwa and end its mandate are not new. For a long time, the Israeli regime has called for the demise of the agency, which was established in 1949 to provide relief and works services to the 750,000 Palestinians displaced during the Nakba. Eliminating Unrwa would leave 5.9 million Palestinian refugees without schooling, healthcare, jobs and infrastructure projects in the Palestinian refugee camps where Unrwa operates. This would effectively mean the destruction of Palestinian civic life in the region, not just in the Gaza Strip, and all without the need for military action.” ✍️: MEE/Shatha Abdulsamad* *The views expressed in this column belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of MEE - @middleeasteye