One year after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its landmark UNRWA Advisory Opinion on 22 October 2025, affirming Israel's legal obligations to facilitate UNRWA's humanitarian work, Al-Haq publishes a position paper documenting Israel’s continued and escalating attacks on UNRWA across the OPT.
Israel has escalated its campaign to dismantle UNRWA, to erase Palestinian existence, and continues to entrench and expand its aggressive annexationist settler colonial apartheid regime in Palestine. This widespread and systematic attack — marked by the physical demolition of UN premises, the killing of UNRWA staff, and a global disinformation campaign — constitutes a deliberate strategy to render the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) uninhabitable, force mass Palestinian displacement, destroy the Palestinian group and deny Palestine refugee return.
The UNRWA Advisory Opinion of 22 October 2025 is unequivocal: Israel, the Occupying Power, is obligated under international humanitarian law to ensure the unhindered provision of essential aid to Palestinians and must not obstruct UNRWA's operations. The Court explicitly rejected Israel's claims regarding UNRWA's impartiality as unfounded, affirming that the agency remains indispensable to the survival of Palestinian refugees (para. 154). Despite this authoritative decision, Israel has not only maintained its discriminatory legislative acts but has adopted additional discriminatory legislative measures and escalated its aggressive attacks on UNRWA across the OPT. Despite the ruling, “Israeli authorities have not granted the [UNRWA’s] international staff visas or permits to enter the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including the Gaza Strip, since the end of January 2025”.
On 20 January 2026, the Israel Occupying Forces (IOF), accompanied by bulldozers, forcibly entered the UNRWA headquarters compound in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and began demolishing it. Standing at the entrance to UNRWA in Jerusalem, Aryeh King, the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, issued a video statement announcing, “in the great battle for all of the land of Israel, we will drive out, annihilate, kill and eliminate all the people of UNRWA”. UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the demolition in the strongest terms, reaffirming that the compound remains inviolable UN premises. This act followed the entry into force of Israeli legislation designed to ban UNRWA operations, effectively severing the UNRWA’s ability to coordinate humanitarian access and provide vital healthcare, education and social services to Palestine refugees.
On 25 August 2026, the IOF raided “UNRWA’s oldest vocational training centre [that] has served Palestine Refugees for more than seven decades”–– where 20 UNRWA staff members were on-site in Qalandia, Jerusalem. Israel’s Minister of National Security, Ben Gvir, filming himself behind the desk of the director of the training centre in Qalandia, stated, “UNRWA is out . . . The terrorists must be expelled from every place in the State of Israel”.
Israel continues to relentlessly target UNRWA in a concerted campaign of genocidal attacks on UNRWA’s staff, healthcare facilities, and refugee infrastructure, including shelters and educational facilities. As of October 2026, at least 394 UNRWA staff members and support staff have been killed in Gaza, and (nearly all) of UNRWA’s facilities have been bombed, damaged and destroyed, many repeatedly.
Israel’s dismantling of the agency has coincided with a widening humanitarian funding crisis across the Gaza Strip. Just this month, a lack of donor funding forced the World Food Programme (WFP) to end monthly assistance to 500,000 people in Gaza, despite acute and worsening needs of an entire population once again experiencing “acute food insecurity”. The loss of WFP food parcels for half a million Palestinians — compounding the destruction of UNRWA's capacity — illustrates how the systematic defunding and delegitimisation of UN humanitarian actors is producing a cascading collapse of the entire aid infrastructure in Gaza. This specifically breaches the ICJ’s Provisional Measures Orders in South Africa v Israel requiring that Israel facilitate humanitarian aid into Gaza “at scale”.
Al-Haq's position paper argues that these attacks are not merely administrative or military in nature; they are integral to Israel's broader policy of making Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem unfit for Palestinian life. By eliminating UNRWA —the primary provider of education, healthcare, and food aid to millions of refugees— and by creating conditions in which other UN agencies are forced to scale back life-saving assistance, Israel seeks to accelerate the forced displacement of Palestinians and systematically deny their right of return, while destroying the Palestinian group. The targeting of UNRWA is thus a direct assault on the Palestinian right to self-determination and existence.
The failure of the international community to enforce the ICJ's Palestine and UNRWA Advisory Opinions has emboldened Israel to act with total impunity. In particular, the so-called ‘Board of Peace’ targeting of UNRWA –– stating that “UNRWA has no place in the new Gaza” –– is an extension of Israel’s genocidal occupation of Gaza.
Al-Haq calls upon Third States and the UN General Assembly to move beyond mere declarative statements and take concrete action. Al-Haq urges Third States to impose sanctions, implement a comprehensive arms embargo, and pursue accountability mechanisms against Israeli officials responsible for international crimes. It further calls on donor states to urgently restore and increase funding to UNRWA and other UN humanitarian agencies, including WFP, to prevent the complete collapse of the humanitarian response in Gaza and Israel’s genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people.
States must act urgently to enforce international law to prevent the complete dismantlement of the international humanitarian system in Palestine, a return to famine, and to end Israel’s continued genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people.
Al-Haq’s position paper “One Year After UNRWA Advisory Opinion Israel Escalates Attacks Against UNRWA to Force Mass Palestinian Displacement in Conditions Unfit for Survival” can be found here.