The Axis of Genocide: Ziofascist Israel’s and Other States’ Attacks on UNRWA
An article in four sections: 1) The Axis of Genocide, 2) A Chronology of Ziofascist Israeli Attacks on the UN, UNRWA and Staff, 3) The Axis of Genocide’s Attempted Destruction of UNRWA, 4) The USA’s March 2024 Defunding of UNRWA.
1. The Axis of Genocide
The Ziofascist terrorist state of Israel suffered a January 26, 2024 defeat at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which ordered certain much-needed measures for the protection of Palestinians. Pursuant to their systematic abuser’s DARVO strategy of 1) deny, 2) attack, and 3) reverse victim and offender, Israel and other Ziofascist-captured regimes — the so-called ‘axis of genocide’ aka the actual “axis of evil”— reacted by attacking UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Dec. 8, 1949-present).
A few excerpts from the racism-motivated atrocities from the Axis of Genocide around the globe:
2. A Chronology of Ziofascist Israeli Attacks on the UN, UNRWA and Staff
In accordance with its inherent nature, the lawless Ziofascist terrorist state of Israel has a long history of attacks on international law and respective bodies such as the UN and UNRWA which pose obstacles to Israel’s insane crime spree:
These attacks on in particular UNRWA buildings and staff increased in intensity and frequency after the events of October 7, 2023 when Hamas gave Israel a taste of its own ‘medicine’ by in turn taking Israelis as hostages.
October 22: 29 UNRWA staff murdered
October 27: 53 UNRWA staff murdered
November 6: 88 UNRWA staff murdered
As per the Ziofascist Israelis’ usual propaganda trick of trying to claim that Hamas is everywhere and everyone, the despicable Ziofascist Israeli UN ambassador, Likud party member and former minister Gilad Erdan tried to claim that UNRWA is heavily affiliated with Hamas in order to excuse terrorist Israel’s killing spree against UNRWA workers:
The WHO Secretary General Tedros Ghebreyesus looks on in disgust while Gilad Erdan reels off his Ziofascist propaganda:
November 13: 100 UNRWA staff murdered
Another disgusting spectacle is provided by the UN Secretary General António Guterres himself who fails to mention that Ziofascist Israel murdered and keeps murdering the UNRWA workers:
December 1
By December 1, the UN and UNRWA still get taunted for being too cowardly to state which state terrorist entity is murdering its staff with impunity:
December 1 is also the time when UNRWA gets accused of Hamas connections by Ziofascist Israel and begins to respond:
December 13: 133 UNRWA staff murdered
Partially due to the failure of ‘the international community’ (i.e. the West) to call out Ziofascist Israel for its attacks on UNRWA buildings and staff, these attacks and murders continue:
3. The Axis of Genocide’s Attempted Destruction of UNRWA
January 4, 2024
Ziofascist Israeli calls for the destruction of UNRWA had already been issued earlier and possibly to probably as a response to South Africa filing charges against the genocidal terrorist state of Israel at the ICJ on December 29, 2023. The female Ziofascist who did that is a ‘Noga Arbell,’ an ardent Ziofascist hasbara propagandist whose Twitter/X feed consists of nothing but Israeli state propaganda, who haunted Mario Nawfal’s big Twitter/X spaces and who is almost certainly with Israeli intelligence:
Noga Arbell: “UNRWA is the source of the idea. The idea is that more and more terrorists are born in all kinds of methods. And it will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA, and this destruction must begin immediately.”
January 17
Interestingly and by January 17, the Palestinian genocide supporting US regime still regarded UNRWA as legitimate and as doing “invaluable work to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza at great personal risk to UNRWA members”:
The Ziofascist US secretary of state Antony Blinken made a similar statement on November 5, 2023:
January 26 and later
After the January 26 ICJ ruling against the Ziofascist Israeli terrorist state however, the attacks against UNRWA increased and as per Ziofascist Israel’s usual DARVO strategy of 1) deny, 2) attack and 3) reverse victim and offender:
“It is shocking to see a suspension of funds to the Agency in reaction to allegations against a small group of staff, especially given the immediate action that UNRWA took by terminating their contracts and asking for a transparent independent investigation. The United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the highest investigative authority in the UN system, has already been seized of this very serious matter.
“UNRWA is the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival. Many are hungry as the clock is ticking towards a looming famine. The Agency runs shelters for over 1 million people and provides food and primary healthcare even at the height of the hostilities.
“In its ruling yesterday, the International Court of Justice ordered that “Israel must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”. These measures are aimed at preventing irreparable damage to the rights of Palestinians.
“The only way that this can be done is through cooperation with international partners, especially UNRWA as the largest humanitarian actor in Gaza. Some 3,000 core staff out of 13,000 in Gaza continue to report to work, giving their communities a lifeline which can collapse anytime now due to lack of funding.
“It would be immensely irresponsible to sanction an Agency and an entire community it serves because of allegations of criminal acts against some individuals, especially at a time of war, displacement and political crises in the region.
“UNRWA shares the list of all its staff with host countries every year, including Israel. The Agency never received any concerns on specific staff members.
The involved Western genocidal regimes share some interesting commonalities. For starters, they include all the imperialist-colonialist-fascist genocider countries from World War 2, including my own country Austria — the country of birth of Adolf Hitler—which was a part of the German Nazi “Reich” or empire back then:
Other things that all the regimes which support genocidal colonialist Israel have in common is that they have their own sordid history of genocide and colonization:
A third commonality is that the infamous and highly influential Rothschild banking dynasty spread out from Germany to Italy, Austria, France and most importantly Britain about 200 years ago; that it was involved in the founding of Israel through the 1917 Balfour Declaration or the funding of the Knesset (i.e. the Israeli parliament) and that, coincidentally, every single one of the regimes of these five countries is very Ziofascism-friendly, including in terms of having suspended funding for UNRWA.
One consequently has to wonder if some Zionist entities exercise political control over these five countries through financial control, for instance by holding a significant portion of these countries’ debts or by issuing their money or some such thing.
A fourth characteristic which all of the above regimes of the axis of genocide share is that — with the exception of the USA itself —they all exist deeply within the sphere of influence of the Ziofascist-captured US empire. That of course also applies to the EU and Europe as a whole and leads to according consequences:
Humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank will continue unabated through partner organisations.
Currently, no additional funding to UNRWA is foreseen until the end of February.
The European Commission will determine upcoming funding decisions for UNRWA in light of the very serious allegations made on 24 January relating to the involvement of UNRWA staff in the heinous 7 October attacks.
The Commission will review the matter in light of the outcome of the investigation announced by the UN and the actions it will take. The Commission welcomes the information provided by UNRWA as well as the launch of the investigation.
Reactions:
At least some European nations are not part of the axis of genocide though:
Why the axis of genocide attacks UNRWA
Jonathan Cook and others on what the Ziofascist settler-colonialist terrorist state of Israel and the axis of genocide intend to achieve by attacking UNRWA:
The West’s flimsy pretext for what amounts to a war on UNRWA is that Israel claims 12 local UN staff — out of 13,000 — are implicated in Hamas’ break-out from the open-air prison of Gaza on October 7. The sole evidence appears to be coerced confessions, likely extracted through torture, from Palestinian fighters captured by Israel that day.
The UN immediately sacked all the accused staff, seemingly without due process. We can assume that was because the refugee agency was afraid its already threadbare lifeline to the people of Gaza, as well as millions of other Palestinian refugees across the region — in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria — would be further threatened. It need not have worried. Western donor states cut their funding anyway, plunging Gaza deeper into calamity.
[…]
They did so without regard to the fact their decision amounts to collective punishment: some 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation and the spread of lethal disease, while another 4 million Palestinian refugees across the region are at imminent risk of losing food, health care and schooling.
According to law professor Francis Boyle, who filed a genocide case for Bosnia at the World Court some two decades ago, that shifts most of these western states from their existing complicity with Israel’s genocide (by selling arms and providing aid and diplomatic cover) into direct and active participation in the genocide, by violating the 1948 Genocide Convention’s prohibition on “deliberately inflicting on the group [in this case, Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light. Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.
[…]
2. UNRWA is separate from the UN’s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees. Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two UN refugee agencies is because Israel and its western backers insisted on the division back in 1948. Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.
Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO’s mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes. So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly.
Prison camp
3. Nonetheless, things did not go exactly to plan for Israel. Given its refusal to allow the refugees to return, and the reluctance of neighbouring Arab states to be complict in Israel’s original act of ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian population in UNRWA’s refugee camps ballooned. They became an especial problem in Gaza, where about two-thirds of the population are refugees or descended from refugees. The tiny coastal enclave did not have the land or resources to cope with the rapidly expanding numbers there. The fear in Israel was that, as the plight of the Palestinians of Gaza became more desperate, the international community would pressure Israel into a peace agreement, allowing for the refugees’ return to their former homes.
That had to be stopped at all costs. In the early 1990s, as the supposed Oslo “peace process” was being unveiled, Israel began penning the Palestinians of Gaza inside a steel cage, surrounded by gun towers. Some 17 years ago, Israel added a blockade that prevented the population’s movement in and out of Gaza, including via the strip’s coastal waters and its skies. The Palestinians became prisoners in a giant concentration camp, denied the most basic links to the outside world. Israel alone decided what was allowed in and out. An Israeli court later learnt that from 2008 onwards the Israeli military put Gaza on what amounted to a starvation diet by restricting food supplies.
There was a strategy here that involved making Gaza uninhabitable, something the UN started warning about in 2015. Israel’s game plan appears to have gone something like this:
By making Palestinians in Gaza ever more desperate, it was certain that militant groups like Hamas willing to fight to liberate the enclave would gain in popularity. In turn, that would provide Israel with the excuse both to further tighten restrictions on Gaza to deal with a “terrorism threat”, and to intermittently wreck Gaza in “retaliation” for those attacks — or what Israeli military commanders variously called “mowing the grass” and “returning Gaza to the Stone Age”. The assumption was that Gaza’s militant groups would exhaust their energies managing the constant “humanitarian crises” Israel had engineered.
At the same time, Israel could promote twin narratives. It could say publicly that it was impossible for it to take responsibility for the people of Gaza, given that they were so clearly invested both in Jew hatred and terrorism. Meanwhile, it would privately tell the international community that, given how uninhabitable Gaza was becoming, they urgently needed to find a solution that did not involve Israel. The hope was that Washington would be able to arm-twist or bribe neighbouring Egypt into taking most of Gaza’s destitute population.
[…]
5. Israel’s efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new. They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the UN refugee agency is a thorn in Israel’s side — and all the more so in Gaza. Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world. It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel’s goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable. UNRWA’s well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel’s campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them. That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians’ identity-less future: “The old will die and the young forget.”
Divide and rule
But UNRWA’s role is bigger than that. Uniquely, it is the sole agency unifying Palestinians wherever they live, even when they are separated by national borders and Israel’s fragmentation of the territory it controls. UNRWA brings Palestinians together even when their own political leaders have been manipulated into endless factionalism by Israel’s divide and rule policies: Hamas is nominally in charge in Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah pretends to run the West Bank.
In addition, UNRWA keeps alive the moral case for a Palestinian right of return — a principle recognised in international law but long ago abandoned by western states.
Even before October 7, UNRWA had become an obstable that needed removing if Israel was ever to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That is why Israel has repeatedly lobbied to stop the biggest donors, especially the US, funding UNRWA. Back in 2018, for example, the refugee agency was plunged into an existential crisis when President Donald Trump acquiesced to Israeli pressure and cut all its funding. Even after the decision was reversed, the agency has been limping along financially.
6. Now Israel is in full attack mode against the World Court, and has even more to gain from destroying UNRWA than it did before. The freeze in funding, and the further weakening of the refugee agency, will undermine the support structures for Palestinians generally. But in Gaza’s case, the move will specifically accelerate famine and disease, making the enclave uninhabitable faster.
But it will do more. It will also serve as a stick with which to beat the World Court as Israel tries to fight off the genocide investigation. Israel’s barely veiled claim is that 15 of the International Court of Justice’s 17 judges fell for South Africa’s supposedly antisemitic argument that Israel is committing genocide. The court quoted extensively from UN officials, including the head of UNRWA, that Israel was actively engineering an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray notes, the coerced confessions against 12 UNRWA staff serve to “provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court”.
Extraordinarily, the western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.
Equally a boon to Israel is the fact that leading western states have so quickly pinned their colours to the mast. The funding freeze cements their fates to Israel’s. It sends a message that they will stand with Israel against the World Court, whatever it decides. Their war on UNRWA is intended as an act of collective intimidation directed towards the court. It is a sign that the West refuses to accept that international law applies to it, or its client state. It is a reminder that western states refuse any restraint on their freedom of action — and that it is Israel and its sponsors who are the true rogue states.
Israeli bank Leumi has today locked all of UNRWA’s accounts, claiming UNRWA is unable to provide sufficient receipts to be able to prove no funds are going to ‘terrorists’. The UN has said it has no alternative mechanism to fund UNRWA if international donations are cut off and a number of nations — including Norway, home of the Nobel Peace Prize — have said they will continue to provide funds. But if UNRWA is unable to access them where it needs them, it will be even more severely hampered.
Tayab Ali, director of the ICJP: “Defunding UNRWA at this point is inhumane and it’s immoral. I think that, in my view, it’s potentially a criminal act. Collective punishment, potentially. And I say collective punishment potentially because the action taken punishes the Palestinian people as a whole in Gaza. […] the Rome Statute of the ICC doesn’t consider it a prosecutable offence, but the offences within it are. […] But it also could potentially be a primary act of genocide in one way, or at least complicity in genocide. […] the United Kingdom is party to the United Nations Charter and thereby the ICJ International Court of Justice Statute.
[…]
If I was an intervening state, or even South Africa, I would give serious thought to triggering Article 63 of the International Court of Justice Statute […]”
“I would be advising states that are looking at intervening to consider making the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, the other countries that are defunding UNRWA, parties to those proceedings for defunding.”
February 7:
February 10:
Interestingly, reports that the Ziofascist Israeli occupation forces were preparing the scene at the UNRWA headquarters for a propaganda movie were already made by February 5:
A longer analysis and debunking of the Ziofascists’ anti-UNRWA propaganda:
February 11:
February 13:
The Axis of Genocide’s evidence or lack thereof
The axis of genocide’s excuse for attacking and defunding UNRWA and for guaranteeing a famine and exacerbating the genocide of Palestinians is that a whopping 12 out of 13.000 UNRWA workers — i.e. less than 0.1% — were accused of Hamas affiliation after the Ziofascist Israelis had tortured we don’t know how many Palestinian detainees who might have admitted to all sorts of things to make the torture stop:
The Ziofascist Antony ‘The Butcher’ Blinken of course plays along:
More from that article:
Blinken stressed that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees plays an “indispensable” role in providing assistance to civilians in the Gaza Strip and that “no one else can play the role that UNRWA has been playing, certainly not in the near term.”
This highlights the “imperative” for UNRWA to carry out an immediate investigation and to address the allegations “as thoroughly as possible,” Blinken said.
As further allegations swirled in local and international media about deeper links between the UN agency and Gaza terror groups, Channel 12 news on Monday night revealed additional details about the 12 UNRWA employees accused of taking part in the October 7 massacre, including their photos.
Another of the staffers, also an elementary school teacher, allegedly served as a Hamas commander and participated in the massacre in Kibbutz Be’eri, while a man employed by UNRWA as a social worker was allegedly involved in the kidnapping of an IDF soldier’s body on that day.
From another absurdly biased source who has close links to an IOF propagandist and who published her Ziofascist propaganda in the Wall Street Journal:
On January 26, Israeli allegations against a dozen UNRWA employees surfaced. The agency immediately fired nine of them and said that two others were dead, hoping their swift and pre-emptive action would stave off rash U.S. actions. Nonetheless, the United States and a host of other countries immediately suspended funding for UNRWA, over the actions of 12 of over 30,000 employees, 13,000 of whom are in Gaza.
It’s worth pausing over that last fact for a moment. Twelve out of 13,000 Gaza employees have caused all of this, and it’s based on evidence that has not been made public. You’d never know that from much of the media coverage, which is, once again, treating Israeli allegations as proven facts. Nor could you tell by the U.S. response. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves. But they are highly, highly credible.”
That is a stunning statement. They are simply taking Israel’s word for it, and on that basis, they are suspending aid to nearly two million people who need that aid more than anyone in the world.
Recall that Israel, in October 2021, labeled six Palestinian organizations as being connected to “terrorist groups,” specifically referring to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The “evidence” Israel presented was so threadbare that European countries dismissed it as baseless, and even the Biden administration, which has repeatedly supported Israeli claims based on no evidence that turned out to be false, could not accept the Israeli charges, though it avoided explicitly calling out Israel’s attempted deception.
Yet now, Israel has presented a “dossier” that contains its case against the twelve UNRWA workers. The actual evidence has not been made public, and even the United States, as noted above, has admitted it can’t verify the Israeli claims. But the U.S. suspended UNRWA’s funding anyway and led seventeen other countries to follow suit.
[…]
The termination of the twelve employees was a pre-emptive act of desperation and panic. UNRWA was not shown the evidence — merely accusations about the workers. But in this time of incomprehensible human suffering in Gaza, they wanted to do all they can to avoid the worst, so they fired the nine workers who remain alive. It shows how dedicated they are to their mission.
UNRWA submits lists of all its employees in the West Bank and Gaza to Israel. Somehow, Israel had no problem with these twelve, despite their supposedly extensive knowledge of the membership of Hamas and other Palestinian groups.
[…]
Biden’s incompetence and mindless cruelty
For Biden, the hearings, as well as the general tone and tenor in Washington after years of bashing UNRWA, present a problem. If he doesn’t restore UNRWA’s funding, conditions in Gaza will grow much worse very quickly, and calls for a ceasefire will be overwhelming, as will Biden’s downward trend in polls. If he restores UNRWA’s funding, he will find himself under attack from Republicans as well as some Democrats.
In the wake of the hearing this week, one of Israel’s leading advocates in Congress, Brad Schneider (D-IL), bluntly stated, “We have to replace UNRWA with something else. I support getting rid of UNRWA.”
Not to be outdone in anti-Palestinian animus, the ever-eager AIPAC shill, Ritchie Torres (D-NY) tweeted, “UNRWA, long funded by your tax dollars, has been governing Gaza at the behest of Hamas so that Hamas, which sees governing as a distraction, could dedicate itself to murdering Jews in Israel.”
Had Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken not reacted in knee-jerk fashion to the unsubstantiated Israeli allegations, this would be less of a problem. They could have noted that UNRWA immediately fired the workers in question, that it had launched an investigation, and that its work was needed now more than ever. Biden could then have talked about reviewing UNRWA over the coming weeks and months, and made some political show of it without jeopardizing the aid to Gaza
Peter Oborne: “There is one agency preventing mass starvation in Gaza at the moment, that is UNRWA. Britain has just cut off funding to UNRWA on the basis of unevidenced claims made by Israel. My source tells me that David Cameron made the choice to suspend funding without making an independent investigation of Israeli claims. […] Israeli Defense Force and Israeli politicians have persistently, and as a matter of course, lied about what they are doing.”
March 1:
March 3, Canada:
March 8:
The document says several UNRWA Palestinian staffers had been detained by the Israeli army, and added that the ill-treatment and abuse they said they had experienced included severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.
“Agency staff members have been subject to threats and coercion by the Israeli authorities while in detention, and pressured to make false statements against the Agency, including that the Agency has affiliations with Hamas and that UNRWA staff members took part in the 7 October 2023 atrocities,” the report says.
By contrast
The Ziofascist Israeli genocide of Palestinians itself in turn is perfectly clear from hundreds and thousands of on the ground sources and gets broadcast every single day for months now. But no, that much clearer and infinitiely worse item is of no real concern for the hypocrisy-riddled axis of genocide:
Instead, they want you to focus on those 12 UNRWA workers and to ignore the about 20 times higher number of Palestinians and the about 10 times higher number of children which Ziofascist Israel and now also the axis of genocide keeps murdering every single day in the name of ‘democracy,’ ‘Western values,’ the ‘international rules-based order’ and Orwellian things like that.
4. The USA’s March 2024 Defunding of UNRWA
The U.S. government will defund the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians through next year — even as 1.1 million people in Gaza face threats of famine in coming months — on the basis of flimsy allegations by Israel against a tiny minority of the agency’s staff that have yet to be proven.
Congress passed the defunding measure as part of a $1.2 trillion spending package to avert a partial government shutdown. In addition to stripping funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, through March 2025, the bill includes the $3.8 billion the U.S. sends to Israel every year.
The bill also contains a long-standing provision that would limit aid to the Palestinian Authority, which governs the occupied West Bank, if “the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively supports such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”
After a late-night vote, the Senate sent the bill to President Joe Biden to sign it into law on Saturday.
