India’s commitment to Gaza through the UNRWA

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is facing pushback from a number of large donor countries due to the alleged involvement of some of its employees in the October 2023 attack on Israel. India’s contributions to the agency, meanwhile, remain stable. This brief examines the nature and significance of India’s financial commitment to the UN body.

The violence that has engulfed Gaza since October 2023 has led to the loss of over 35,091 Palestinian lives at the time of writing. Most early assessments of the initial response from India, a close ally of Israel, described it as favouring Israel. For one, India abstained from a UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution in October 2023 proposing a humanitarian truce in Gaza. A more nuanced assessment of India’s engagement with the conflict, however, requires a scrutiny of other multilateral organisations. These include UNRWA, a self-declared “apolitical” multilateral agency, which is the focus of this brief.

The UNRWA is a vital multilateral organisation in Gaza, performing functions equivalent to those of a host-state or quasi-government since Israel’s occupation of the territory in 1967. The agency is mandated by the UNGA to provide services such as healthcare and education to Palestinians in Gaza amid the lack of adequate state machinery to support the territory’s population especially following Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007. Notably, the UNRWA is the only agency designed to care for a particular group of people—i.e., Palestinian refugees—who are geographically dispersed across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Additionally, more than 99% of its employees are Palestinian refugees and the agency generates jobs in the Gaza strip.

Unlike other UN agencies that rely on an international workforce, the UNRWA’s operations in Gaza are closely enmeshed with the social set-up of refugees. Despite its presence in multiple countries, it primarily operates in Gaza, with about 41% of its programme budget earmarked for that region in 2021. Most of its staff were located in the region before the Israel-Hamas conflict broke out in October 2023. This has also meant that, amid the ongoing conflict, the UNRWA has the strongest ground presence of health workers in the area, and has suffered a high number of deaths in the process— 189 staff members since October 7, 2023. This is the highest number of UN staff deaths in any conflict since the UN’s founding in 1945.

This paper can be accessed here.

This paper can be authored by Angad Singh Brar, ORF.