Israel risks breaking international law by banning UNRWA
4 min read
For more than a year now, the world’s attention has rightly been on the brutal war in Gaza.
But the situation in the West Bank is approaching a tipping point too; we must not look away.
The West Bank, so called due to its position to the west of the river Jordan, makes up the largest chunk of the Palestinian Occupied Territory. Gaza, further west, makes up the rest.
In 1995, the West Bank was divided into three divisions.
Areas A and B, where the Palestinian Authority was in charge, contained major centres for Palestinians such as Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jericho.
Area C constituted 61% of the West Bank and contained the only Israeli settlements outside East Jerusalem. Under the Oslo II Accord, this land was to be gradually transferred to the Palestinians. That exchange has never taken place.
The newly formed International Development Committee visited the West Bank in November. Now designated a Red Zone by the UK Government, access was only allowed with armoured vehicles.
Checkpoints were seemingly everywhere, but checks were focused on Palestinian drivers, not us. Checkpoints had huge impacts on people’s lives, we learned. They could be closed at short notice, creating long queues, only opening for certain hours and placing huge restrictions on people’s daily movements.
Checkpoints are particularly common around settlements, where Israelis move into purpose-built housing on land previously occupied by Palestinians. These settlements are often large estates with modern infrastructure, not temporary dwellings or small shanty towns.
Building them can involve the demolition of Palestinian housing, removal of Bedouin camps, restrictions on access to farmland and water sources and can be accompanied by violence. They are considered illegal under international law. Every settlement, even if it is just one house, has the protection of IDF soldiers or local militia.
Settlements have increased dramatically in recent years. A report this year from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that around 24,300 housing units within existing Israeli settlements in the West Bank were advanced between November 2022 and October 2023. This was the highest on record since monitoring began in 2017.
Demolitions by settlers have increased too. Between 7 October 2023 and 31 October 2024, more than 1,800 Palestinian structures were abolished, of which 44% were inhabited residences. These demolitions left nearly more than 900 people displaced.
These numbers may seem insignificant, but they are not. Every demolition leaves a family without a home, a child without a safe space to learn and play.
Each settler home undermines the chance of peace, putting the possibility of a two-state solution further and further out of reach.
As the UK’s own Permanent Representative to the UN put it in September: “expansion of settlements, in clear violation of international law, undermines prospects for peace and must cease immediately.”
Without such a cease, the chance of a just and lasting peace diminish by the day as there will be no viable Palestinian state left.
Given what we know about the state of play in the West Bank today, is our Government truly doing enough to stand up to this behaviour? The Prime Minister has made clear that Israel is an important ally to the UK. But is such disregard for international law really how an ally behaves?
We can see this too in Israel’s planned ban of the UN aid agency UNRWA. Legislation banning the organisation has passed through the Knesset, and is due to come into effect next month.
Outlawing UNRWA would be simply devastating for Palestinian refugees' livelihoods. The agency provides 96 schools, serving 47,000 students, and 43 health centres. It also delivers aid to 150,000 refugees out of the 800,000 population. No other organisation stands ready to take its place, leaving these many vulnerable people at great risk. And it is unclear whether the Israeli Government has made plans to fill that gap, even though it is the occupier’s legal duty to do so.
As I wrote in my recent letter to the Foreign Secretary, the effective outlawing of UNRWA risks contravening several international laws. The international community cannot afford the ban to be implemented; not only would it have potentially catastrophic ramifications for the wider region, but it would undermine our rules-based system.
How strong is our Government’s commitment to international law? When push comes to shove, will they stand up against what must surely amount to illegal behaviour in the Middle East? And will we, as Parliamentarians, stand up for the concept of the United Nations, the Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law?
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