UK announces it will resume funding Unrwa
The UK government will restore funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), the foreign secretary announced on Friday.
David Lammy said in a statement to parliament that the UK would provide £21 million ($27.1 million) in new funding to the agency.
It came five months after Britain suspended financing the agency, along with several other western countries, after Israel accused 12 of the 30,000 Unrwa employees of participating in Hamas' surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October.
Lammy said that Unrwa was vital for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza, as well as re-building efforts in the besieged enclave when a ceasefire happens, following ten months of Israeli bombardment.
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"Unrwa is absolutely central to these efforts, no other agency can operate at the scale needed.
"It's already feeding over half of Gaza's population. It will be vital for future reconstruction and it provides critical services to Palestinian refugees in the region."
The decision comes three months after an investigation by former French minister Catherine Colonna into Israel's allegations about Unrwa.
The Colonna report, which was commissioned by the UN, found that Israeli authorities had not provided "any supporting evidence" to back up allegations of Unrwa staff links to Hamas.
The report said Israeli authorities had not responded to letters from Unrwa in March and April requesting names and evidence in order to open an investigation.
It also made recommendations for Unrwa, including to strengthen its internal audit function and improve external oversight of project management.
Germany, Australia, Canada, Sweden and Japan were among the countries to restore funding to Unrwa following the report.
'This government will act'
"I was appalled by the allegations that Unrwa staff were involved in October 7 attacks. But the UN took these allegations seriously. I've spoken to UN Secretary General [Antonio] Gutierrez and [Unrwa commissioner Philippe] Lazzarini," said Lammy.
He added that following the Colonna report, he was reassured that Unrwa was meeting the "highest standards of neutrality and strengthening its procedures, including on vetting".
"Unrwa has acted. Partners like Japan, the European Union and Norway have also now acted. This government will act too," Lammy said.
"I can confirm to the house that we are overturning the suspension of Unrwa funding. I thank them for this life saving work."
A source told MEE in March that around a week after the UK announced it was pausing its funding to the UN agency, then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron acknowledged the decision had been "too hasty" and was looking for face-saving measures to reinstate it.
"He acknowledged that they were too hasty, and now they want Unrwa to help them dig themselves out of it, because they didn't want to assist Israel in destroying the organisation," the source said.
MEE established in February that several of the donor countries, including the Netherlands and Latvia, made their decisions to suspend funding based solely on Israel's assertions.
Questions were raised about how the UK came to its decision, and whether it was presented with any evidence of the Unrwa staff's participation in the attack.
An informed source told MEE that Cameron had suspended funding “only on the basis of information in the public domain”. The Foreign Office declined at the time to answer whether this was true and on what basis it had acted.
Unrwa was established in 1949 - a year after the Nakba (or catastrophe) in which 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes during the creation of Israel - to provide healthcare, education and humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Today, Unrwa is the second-largest employer in Gaza, following Hamas. The agency has 30,000 employees in total, 13,000 of whom are in the Gaza Strip.
In the besieged enclave, it runs 183 schools, 22 health facilities and seven women's centres, among several other facilities.
Its schools are attended by 286,645 students in Gaza, while its medical facilities have 3.4 million average visits per year, according to UN data.
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