The U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza: An Infernal Tale of a Jewish Teacher and an Israeli Girl Who Was Born Innocent
The UNRWA employees, all Palestinians, have been dead in Gaza since October 7, when Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israel. The Israeli military responded with a punishing air campaign and ground incursions into Gaza that health authorities there say have killed more than 11,000 people, including thousands of children.
Men and women were there. There were many teachers. Others included school principals, warehouse workers, engineers, a software developer, a gynecologist and a man in charge of staff safety. The communications director for UNRWA, the agency that cares for Palestinian refugees and their descendants in the Middle East, said that he was killed along with his wife and eight children.
UNRWA, or the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, was created in 1949 to aid the more than 700,000 Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced from their homes during the war surrounding Israel’s founding in 1948. Of all the places UNRWA works, Gaza is where it plays the largest role, given that 1.4 million of the territory’s 2.2 million residents are registered refugees.
The Times’ Special Report on the Gaza Strip Attacks on Oct. 7, and Israel’s Support of a Non-Racisatic State of State
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If there is a path forward toward peace — whether in two states or one state — it will begin with all of us moving beyond stereotypes. Palestinians are not the same as Hamas.
It has been over a week since the killing of hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Anger and thirst for vengeance are two of the things country’s leaders seem to use in language that critics in Israel say crosses the line into inciting a race war.
The Oct. 7 attacks broke that state of play. The occupation was unsustainable and the impossibility of governing both peoples was laid bare for all to see.
The rise in incendiary statements comes against a backdrop of rising violence in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, Israeli soldiers have killed 150 Palestinians, including 44 children, in clashes. According to the United Nations, a child has been killed by Jewish settlers that are armed and informally allied with the military.
In some areas where Gazans are not allowed to enter, parents and grandparents who lived a short time away from the city are still present. They still invoke rich memories from their childhood or adolescence, when they walked through citrus groves in Yaffa or olive fields in Qumya — the latter of which, like many villages whose people were expelled into Gaza during the 1948 war, was later transformed into a kibbutz.
In the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, a settlement council has distributed hundreds of assault rifles to civilian groups in settlements in the northern West Bank, which was part of a larger effort by the minister. So far, the ministry has purchased 10,000 assault rifles for such teams around the country. It’s part of the atmosphere of escalating violence that has killed more than 130 Palestinians living in the West Bank since Oct. 7.
The Myths of the West Bank: Why Israel’s Attack and Palestine’s Safety isn’t for Israelis, but for the Palestinians
For the past month, normal life in Ramallah — a city in the West Bank usually known for its young population and its vibrant nightlife — has been brought to a standstill.
The third myth is found on both sides of the conflict and is approximately: It’s too bad we have to engage in this bloodshed, but the people on the other side understand only violence.
Life isn’t that neat. The tragedy of the Middle East is that this is a clash of right versus right. That does not excuse Hamas’s massacre and savagery or Israel’s leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza, but underlying the conflict are certain legitimate aspirations that deserve to be fulfilled.
The engineer in Gaza told me that they were normal people trying to survive. He despises Hamas and would like to see it removed from power, but he says that Hamas fighters are safe in tunnels while he and his children are the ones most at risk: “We’re the civilians paying the price.”
The other side of the equation includes desperate human beings who are only hoping that their children can live and thrive in their own nation.
The second myth is that Palestinians can be put off indefinitely, strung along by Israel, the United States and other countries. It worked for a time because of Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan, which was to avoid a Palestinian state and then have it explode.
It’s difficult to know the counterfactual, whether a Palestinian state would have been better for Israeli security. In retrospect, Palestinian statelessness has not made Israel safe, and it is possible that risks will increase if the Palestinian Authority collapses from corruption, inefficiency and lack of legitimacy.
Israel’s president has said that one of the Hamas attackers had instructions to release chemical weapons, a reminder of the threat that terrorism experts have been worried about for years.
Hamas understands violence but it isn’t the same as violent settlers in the West Bank, who represent all Israelis. I would be happy if Israel were able to end extremists in Gaza. But so far, I’m afraid that the ferocity and lack of precision in Israel’s attack has fulfilled Hamas’s goal of escalating the Palestinian issue and changing the Middle East dynamic (and Hamas is indifferent to Palestinian casualties).
Why there is no non-combatant civilians in Gaza? “I see death a hundred times a day” by Benjamin Netanyahu
“There was heavy bombing in our area,” he wrote in English in one message. We ran for our lives, but I lost two of my children in the dark. Me and my wife stayed all night searching for them amidst hundreds of airstrikes. They fainted in the morning after we miraculously survived an airstrike. Please keep us in your prayers. The situation is beyond description.”
“I see death a hundred times a day,” he wrote another time. “We defecate in the open and my children defecate on themselves and there is no water to clean them.”
What will we say to him if he succeeds in the war? How will we explain that we supplied bombs for this war, that we were complicit in his family’s terror and degradation?
It takes two people to seek humanity on each side, and they have to call out dehumanization on the other side. It also means renouncing what Netanyahu called “mighty vengeance” that transforms entire neighborhoods of Gaza into rubble, with bodies buried underneath.
I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No, buts. If you really believe in the human rights of Jews and Palestinians, then you won’t believe in human rights at all.
If you weep only for Israeli children, or only for Palestinian children, you have a problem that goes beyond your tear ducts. Children on both sides have been slaughtered quite recklessly, and fixing this crisis starts with acknowledging a principle so basic that it shouldn’t need mentioning: All children’s lives have equal value, and good people come in all nationalities.
Some Israelis fear that extremists will cause more casualties in Gaza as the war goes on and that a political battle is raging between the government of Mr. Netanyahu and the civic opposition.
Amichay Eliyahu, a right-wing minister in Israel, said on a radio station that there was no such thing as non-combatants in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu decided to suspend Mr. Eliyahu because his comments were not in line with reality.
Mr. Netanyahu says Israeli military is trying to keep civilians safe. But with the death toll rising to more than 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, those claims are being met with skepticism, even in the United States, which has pressed Israel to allow daily four-hour humanitarian pauses in the combat.
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, in scripture interpreted by scholars as a call to exterminate their “men and women, children and infants.”
“These are not just one-off statements, made in the heat of the moment,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and author of “The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine and the Legal Battle for Human Rights.”
Yehuda Shaul, co-director of Ofek, a think tank in Jerusalem, has collected 286 statements since Oct. 7 that he classifies as having the potential to incite unlawful behavior. His list includes Eyal Golan, an Israeli pop singer; Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Mr. Netanyahu; and Yinon Magal, a host on Israel’s right-wing Channel 14.
“I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals,” Ms. Netanyahu said during a radio interview on Oct. 10, referring to Hamas.
“It’s time for Nakba 2,” Mr. Magal wrote on X on Oct. 7, a reference to the mass displacement and flight of Palestinians before and after Israel’s creation in 1948, which Palestinians refer to as the “nakba,” or “catastrophe.”
In the West Bank last week, several academics and officials cited Mr. Eliyahu’s remark about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza as evidence of Israel’s intention to clear the enclave of all Palestinians — a campaign they call a latter-day nakba.
Eran Halperin, a professor of psychology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, argued that the use of inflammatory language by Israeli leaders is not surprising, and even understandable, given the brutality of the Hamas attacks, which inflicted collective and individual trauma on Israelis.
He stated that Israel’s survival is in the balance for the first time since 1973. There is a risk of conflict against Hezbollah and Hamas, and there is also the possibility of an uprising in the West Bank.
Hamas, Black Holes and Islam: Attacks on Israel in the Light of the September 11 September September 11th Oslo Assassination
“People in this situation look for very, very clear answers,” Professor Halperin said. “You don’t have the mental luxury of complexity. You want to see a world of good guys and bad guys.”
Casting the threat posed by Hamas in stark terms, Professor Halperin said, also helps the government ask people to make sacrifices for the war effort: the compulsory mobilization of 360,000 reservists, the evacuation of 126,000 people from border areas in the north and south, and the shock to the economy.
In the long run, Mr. Sfard said, such language dooms the chance of ending the conflict with the Palestinians, erodes Israel’s democracy and breeds a younger generation that is “easily using the language in their discussion with their friends.”
“Turning the wheel back requires a lot of education after a certain amount of rhetoric becomes acceptable,” he said. “There is an old Jewish proverb: ‘A hundred wise men will struggle a long time to take out a stone that one stupid person dropped into the well.’”
Yoav Gallant, the Defense minister, said that the Israeli military planned to wipe out Hamas in Gaza two days after the attacks.
Inflammatory language has also been used by journalists, retired generals, celebrities, and social media influencers, according to experts who track the statements. Calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed” had been mentioned about 18,000 times since Oct. 7 in Hebrew posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, said FakeReporter, an Israeli group that monitors disinformation and hate speech. The phrases were only mentioned 16 times in the month and a half before the war.
The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public discussion of ideas that would have been considered off limits before Oct. 7: talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, and the nuclear annihilation of the territory.
Incendiary statements are not limited to Israel, of course. Ghazi Hamad, a senior leader of Hamas, vowed on Oct. 24 that the group would wipe out Israel as a country, and appeared to exult in the barbaric acts that his militants had carried out against Israeli civilians. He said they are not ashamed to say it. We will teach Israel again and again as long as we need to.