Labor's decision to pull UNRWA funding is just wrong

The Albanese Government's decision to pull UNRWA funding has rendered Australia complicit in the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, writes Hannah Thomas.

ON 26 JANUARY, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) handed down its provisional ruling ordering Israel to, among other things, not commit acts of genocide and take immediate steps to ensure aid could reach civilians in Gaza.

The logical response – from a government that loves throwing around phrases like “international rules-based order” – would have been to back the ICJ’s ruling publicly, demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire to allow aid to reach Palestinians in Gaza, increase aid to Palestine and stop military exports to Israel.

These responses were all logical – and not to mention morally necessary – many weeks ago, but the ICJ’s assessment that Israel’s military campaign is an existential threat to Palestinians in Gaza should have made these steps inevitable for the Albanese Government.

And yet, less than 24 hours after the ICJ’s ruling, Minister Penny Wong announced the Albanese Government wouldn’t be stepping in to prevent a genocide. The Albanese Government wouldn’t punish the entity committing the genocide; it would punish its victims.

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Based on allegations from the same entity freshly implicated by the ICJ, the Australian Government suspended funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), blindly and rashly following the United States and other “like-minded” countries.

Now, to the surprise of absolutely no one, these allegations have been exposed as baseless. As reported by the UK’s Channel 4, the dossier sent by Israel to UNRWA donors to justify its allegations didn’t contain a shred of evidence. And yet, the suspension of funding still stands.

Penny Wong and other Labor MPs dance around the issue, acknowledging the crucial, lifesaving work that UNRWA does, saying the Albanese Government is considering its next steps to increase funding for UNRWA in the future, while conveniently ignoring that they are currently crippling its operations at the most crucial of times. It is not clear what evidence they relied on to make the decision.

Every day that funds are suspended has grave consequences. The importance of UNRWA’s role is incontrovertible and utterly immense. In ordinary times, it is the only organisation with a mandate to provide relief and essential services to over 5 million Palestinian refugees in the region — a country’s worth of people.

In current times, more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza depend on UNRWA for their immediate survival. More than a million people are sheltering in UNRWA schools and facilities as Israel indiscriminately rains hell on Gaza. These UNRWA facilities have been mercilessly targeted by Israel, which has slaughtered over 150 UNRWA staff since 7 October 2023. The Albanese Government has not imposed a single consequence on Israel.

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It must be emphasised that even if the allegations were proven true, the decision would still be wrong. UNRWA already acted on the allegations before the Australian Government suspended funding: it sacked nine of those accused, while two are missing and one is dead. Even if UNRWA had not acted, punishing millions of Palestinians for the actions of 12 people would be unreasonable, but the point is that it has.

It is clear that the Albanese Government has already made us complicit in genocide through military exports to Israel, the significant diplomatic cover it provides Israel and its refusal to call for a ceasefire. But continuing to starve UNRWA takes things to a new level.

Francis Boyle, a human rights lawyer who successfully argued a genocide case at the ICJ for Bosnia and Herzegovina, states that countries cutting off funding to UNRWA have moved past aiding and abetting Israeli genocide.

He argues:

"These states are now also directly violating Genocide Convention Article 2(c) themselves: 'Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part'."

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Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said that by cutting UNRWA funding, countries like Australia had turned an imminent famine into an "inevitable" one.

The decision to suspend UNRWA funding was unforgivable and utterly incomprehensible. To maintain the suspension in the face of what have proven to be baseless allegations is even more unforgivable.

The Albanese Government must immediately reverse its decision and should also increase funding to the UNRWA to compensate for its wrongful suspension.