On Friday, the United States suspended funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main lifeline for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Multiple western countries then followed the US’s lead. The given reason? The Israeli government alleges that a dozen people working for UNRWA (which employs around 13,000 people in Gaza alone) were involved in the assaults of 7 October that killed around 1,200 people in Israel.
There should be no question that the 7 October attacks were atrocities. But to punish the UNRWA – and, by extension, the Palestinian people as a whole – because of accusations against 12 people is unconscionable. It is an act of political retaliation that puts the lives of millions of people needlessly at risk and an abdication on an international scale of the United States’ supposed western liberal values.
The decision is an insult to the most basic tenets of law and morality as understood by the US, international law and the legal systems of countless other countries, especially the principles that accusations are not facts; guilt is individual, not collective; and people are innocent until proven guilty. All of that has just been thrown in the trash with a lit match by the US and many other western powers.
Not only have the US and allies including Britain, Germany, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Australia and Canada abruptly suspended funding to an institution that provides millions of civilians with essential needs, they’ve done so on the basis of accusations leveled by Israel, which is hardly a disinterested party.
In fact, Axios, citing a senior Israeli official, reports that much of the intelligence underlying the accusations comes from Israeli interrogations of prisoners. Human rights groups frequently........