News - Middle East: The Israeli regime has banned the operations of UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, terminating the body’s decades-long crucial relief practices across the Palestinian territories and putting millions of lives at risk.

In a statement on Monday, the regime’s foreign ministry said, "On the instruction of Foreign Minister Israel Katz,” it had notified the UN of the “cancellation of the agreement” between the regime and the agency.

Katz, meanwhile, repeated the allegations, which the regime had first leveled against the body in January that its employees had been involved in an October 2023 retaliatory operation staged by the Gaza Strip’s resistance movements against the occupied Palestinian territories, during which hundreds of Zionists were taken captive.

He alleged that the organization’s staff had “participated” in the operation and that many of the body’s employees are "Hamas operatives,” referring to one of the Gaza-based resistance groups that staged the retaliation.

UNRWA “is part of the problem in the Gaza Strip and not part of the solution," he added.

The body has been rendering essential relief services across the Palestinian territories and to Palestinian refugees elsewhere for more than seven decades.

The ban culminates Israeli authorities’ unrelenting efforts at smothering the flow of direly-needed aid supplies into the territories, including Gaza.

The Israeli parliament last month approved a proposal to shut down UNRWA’s operations in the occupied Palestinian territory.

It also comes amid a 13-month-long genocidal war by the regime against the coastal sliver that has claimed the lives of more than 43,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and displaced almost the entirety of the territory's 2.4-million-strong population.

The war has featured numerous attacks against facilities belonging to UNRWA.

'Collapse of international humanitarian work'

Reacting to the ban, UNRWA said the measure would lead to the "collapse" of international humanitarian work in war-torn Gaza, calling the operations the UN agency’s “backbone.”

The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement also strongly denounced the move, considering it to be “a new insult and disregard for the United Nations, its institutions, resolutions, and the entire international system.”

“This criminal step against UNRWA signals a new campaign of starvation targeting our people in the [occupied] West Bank and Gaza. It falls within the open war against our people, aimed at displacing them, eliminating their cause, and undermining Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes from which they were expelled,” it said.

The “hostile” decision “constitutes a serious assault on one of the main witnesses to the 20th-century crime of displacing our people and establishing the occupying regime on the ruins of our destroyed cities and villages,” the group noted.

Late last month, both the UN and UNRWA also condemned Knesset (the Israeli parliament)’s approval of two laws that branded the agency as a “terror” group and banned it from operating on the occupied Palestinian territories.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called UNRWA’s work “indispensable” and said there was “no alternative” to the agency.

UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, meanwhile, said the Knesset’s move set a “dangerous precedent” as it opposed the UN Charter and violated the regime’s obligations under international law.

The laws were also slammed by Palestinian groups, China, Russia, a number of European countries, and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Source: Press TV