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Social order in Gaza is likely to collapse further if Israel goes ahead with its threat this month to end all cooperation with the UN refugee agency for Palestinians, Louise Wateridge, its senior emergency officer, has warned.
Wateridge – who has just returned from Gaza – described the territory as increasingly fractured and said the two Knesset bills due to come into force at the end of the month blocking cooperation with the agency will make it impossible for Unrwa to operate or to distribute aid in a war zone.
“If we’re no longer able to communicate to the Israeli authorities, we no longer have a deconfliction process in place, so none of our buildings will be de-conflicted or protected any more, and we simply won’t be able to be there,” she said.
She said the levels of lawlessness already occurring in the Kerem Shalom crossing had so far not spread across Gaza due to the societal ties Palestinians have with each other and their relationship with Unrwa.
“If people don’t have flour one day, people understand and trust that the agency will do what they can, because it’s their cousin or brother that works at Unrwa, so they know that the agency is trying to help, and it’s not that agency’s fault.
“If that agency is removed, it takes this buffer away, and what’s to say people don’t fight more? I’m surprised social order hasn’t collapsed more than it has. People have been pushed to the brink.”
Wateridge said the threat to Unrwa’s future was coming at a time when the general consensus in Gaza is that they’ve been abandoned by the international community. “If you speak to any person, any civilian, they feel in absolute despair,” she said. “There’s a quadcopter, then there’s a drone, it’s like a fish bowl, and you’re just having to dodge being killed. And while you’re dodging being killed, you have to get water and food for your family, and now you have to keep warm.”
She said she knew of no plan B for what might happen after the deadline for the Israel Defense Forces to end cooperation. Two bills were passed by the Knesset in October to ban Unrwa from “any activity” and to declare it a terror group after allegations by Israel that members of the Unrwa staff in Gaza were involved in the 7 October Hamas attacks that led to the deaths of more than 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of hundreds more. The UN launched an investigation into the Israeli claims and fired nine Unrwa staff as a result.
“If Unrwa is no longer functioning, there’s just not any other agency that can come in,” she said. “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”
She warned civil order was already breaking down in parts of Gaza. “There are areas in Kerem Shalom and around that border that are just absolutely lawless. There’s no other way to describe it. Local criminal families are operating here. We’ve had drivers killed which is absolutely appalling, and then all of the aid looted.”
She said IDF actions in Gaza were making “the living conditions as miserable as possible in every way you can imagine” after 15 months of war.
“The bombing and the strikes are one part of this war, and another huge part of the war is the undignified living. Just every aspect of society has gone.”
She added: “My friend’s sister had hepatitis A this summer, and she didn’t have fluids. There’s no fluids in the hospital, so she’s just suffering in this tent, in this heat. You hit the side of these tents, and all these cockroaches come out, and all these bugs scuttle away, and it’s just miserable, and now in winter the tents are flooded, they’ve got snakes in them, there’s rats in them, and the water is coming in, and people are sleeping on the floor with water dripping on their head in the freezing cold.”
She described meeting one tearful student who showed her the book she was studying. “She was living in a toilet in a school and she had made it home. She was using a torch light to study. She said ‘we don’t have internet. I don’t have online classes. My future is ruined. I was supposed to be going to university, and now I’m living in a toilet in a school. I am trapped’ … After so long of the war, people are realising the long-term depression and frustration that … their homes are gone. They have nothing to go back to.”
In the central town of Deir al-Balah, she said, “we have around 20,000 people inside the schools, so say five or six families in a classroom, and then outside the schools there’s around 60,000 people in the perimeter of the school because they try to access the aid supplies that the school provides … Despite all the attacks that have been on the facilities throughout the war, they do tend to go towards these facilities, but it will be about 12 bathrooms for 60,000 people.”
Northern Gaza remains off-limits to the agency, she said. In its latest update, Unrwa said that between 6 October and 30 December 2024, the UN attempted to reach besieged areas in the north 164 times; of these, 148 attempts were denied by the Israeli authorities and 16 were impeded.
Wateridge said many Palestinians displaced from the north arrived without any male members of the family, with the women saying they had either been arrested or shot.
“Some women you speak to are very quiet about it, and very subdued and almost defeated, and some are very angry. They will shout at us, which is completely fair enough, but they shout and scream in our faces and say, ‘Why? Why aren’t you doing more? Why are we just being pushed around from place to place, being told to go to a safe place when nowhere is safe?’”
