On the road with the German director of UNRWA for the West Bank
Initially established as a temporary organisation after the mass displacement of Palestinians and the 1948 war – events Palestinians call the Nakba – the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has since become a symbol of an unresolved conflict, and a legal and political battlefield in itself – one which has intensified massively since October 2023, not just in Gaza.
Allegations that UNRWA employees in Gaza were implicated in the October 7, 2023 massacres in southern Israel – some directly – led to an intense renewed focus on the agency’s inner workings, the firing of some employees, a UN report into whether the UNRWA was fulfilling its duty of neutrality, an active Israeli information campaign against it, a pull-back of international donations (some have resumed; others have been more recently withdrawn) and ultimately an Israeli law banning it from Israeli-controlled East Jerusalem (including closing its headquarters) and various other measures making its operations elsewhere harder to maintain.
At the end of January, just before his visa was revoked by the Israeli government – along with that of the agency’s other international employees – a journalist from the Zurich-based NZZ followed the German director of UNRWA’s West Bank operations on a final tour of some of the agency’s projects around Nablus.
The ‘refugee camps’ in the occupied West Bank – the inverted commas are in the original – are now “solid concrete houses densely-packed together”, NZZ notes. Roland Friedrich, dressed in a tweed jacket and red corduroys, declares that UNRWA here is “a kind of mini-government”. But he can’t control who puts up Hamas-supporting posters and receives no special treatment when passing through an Israeli checkpoint outside the city. Friedrich has since had to move to Jordan.
“That UNRWA as an organization should be close to the Islamists of Hamas is an absurd accusation,” Friedrich tells NZZ, pointing to Hamas complaints about co-educational teaching in UNRWA schools. The Israeli government, he says, sent a list of names and ID numbers to UNRWA in 2024, but “that is no proof of anything”.
Getting rid of UNRWA as an organisation, as Friedrich suggests the Israeli government might want to do, would not get rid of the Palestinian refugee problem either practically or legally. If UNRWA were to be disbanded, one of his colleagues says, Palestinians would suffer, but it would not change their status.
Friedrich doesn’t believe managing operations remotely, from Jordan, is sustainable in the long-term. The NZZ speaks to an anonymous Israeli source who says that over time the Palestinian Authority will have to take over. Friedrich discounts the idea UNRWA could be replaced or supplanted, given its scale and its own operation of schools and health centres.
A doctor at an UNRWA clinic says he would rather not give NZZ his name. He tells the newspaper that these clinics have more users than ever. They are free, he explains, while private clinics or those run by the Palestinian Authority are not: “It would be a disaster for people here if we couldn’t operate”.
Friedrich walks past a poster showing two young Palestinians recently killed by Israeli security forces and considered martyrs locally. Get rid of UNRWA, NZZ notes, and maybe there’d be more such pictures, not fewer.
Full original article by Rewert Hoffer available here.
‘Auf verlorenem Posten: Unterwegs mit dem UNRWA-Direktor für das Westjordanland’, NZZ, 30 January 2025
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung is one of Switzerland’s leading German-language newspapers.
