In the past year, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini has made himself directly complicit in stripping Palestinian staff of their rights, protection, and dignity.
Here is the record:
🔴 1. At the start of the Gaza war, he ordered international staff to evacuate UNRWA facilities and abandoned the Palestinian staff with nothing but a two-word text: “Good luck.” That message exists. We have the proof.
🔴 2. UN rules guarantee national staff relocation within the duty station and 30 days of DSA. In Gaza, the safe haven was Rafah. He excluded them, denying protection. As a result, hundreds were killed.
🔴 3. UN rules entitle all staff to death/disability compensation in acts of war. Each family should have received ~$123,000. Lazzarini willingly excluded Palestinian staff while fully covering internationals. He then handed grieving families $300. Not just a deliberate act of degradation, but a total disregard for Palestinian staff rights under UN rules.
🔴 4. Over 550 UNRWA staff have been killed by Israel. Their provident fund savings (between $50k–$100k each) remain blocked by UNRWA. Lazzarini hides behind “legal impediments” while surviving families barely struggle to survive.
🔴 5. Lazzarini instructed the suspension of salaries of 650 education staff who fled Gaza after their homes were bombed and their families slaughtered. This means over 5,000 dependents cut off from their only lifeline.
A few days ago, after Israel ordered the displacement of over one million Palestinians from Gaza City, the UN Spokesperson, reporting on OCHA’s tracking admitted they had monitored the movement of about 10,000 people to the south.
The Spokesperson also said that for the vast majority, leaving was “simply not possible,” with transportation costs exceeding $1,000. Lazzarini does not get to decide the fate of UNRWA national staff. This money is not his. It is the hard-earned savings of staff who gave more than 20 years of their lives to the Agency. He has no right to hold his own staff hostage when those funds could mean the difference between staying trapped under the killing machine or escaping with their children and saving their lives.
And yes, many will come and attack, thinking that the Agency is bankrupt. That is simply not true, and they do not have the right information and that is part of the problem. Lazzarini and the Western-led management continue to hide the truth, and people believe what they say. This money sits in the savings of the Agency, built over more than 20 years, and it does not depend on donor or external funding. These are the life savings of Palestinian staff who gave decades of their lives in service.
No Commissioner-General has the right to steal them.
The problem is not UNRWA as an organization. The problem is a Western-led senior management, imposed and sustained through external political influence, that has become nothing less than an accomplice to Israel, advancing its strategy to dismantle the Agency and to strip Palestinian staff of their rights under international law.
The remedy is clear: UNRWA must be decolonized. Its governance must be returned to those it was created to serve, free from foreign control and political manipulation. Anything less perpetuates illegality, denies staff their rights, and turns the Agency into an instrument of oppression rather than protection. Decolonization is not optional. It is the only lawful path forward.
And one must ask: why are Arab senior officials not leading this Agency, while it remains in the hands of Western-led, U.S.-backed appointees?
What legitimacy can an Agency claim when its leadership is imposed from outside, serving foreign agendas instead of its own staff and the people of Palestine?
Answer that, before you speak of neutrality or reform. And to Lazzarini: stop evading your responsibilities. Do what is right, for once, by the very staff whose rights you have trampled.
