This picture is published with the explicit consent of Nadia, the widow of Ahmad, an UNRWA staff member killed by Israel on 29 May 2025 on Al-Tina Street in Khan Younis, in front of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation parcels of death.
Ahmad was no stranger to service to Palestinian refugees. For 19 years, he worked as a psychosocial support officer in UNRWA’s Education Department, walking alongside the children of Gaza through their trauma. When the war erupted on 7 October 2023, Ahmad and Nadia were forced to flee their home more than 19 times, moving from the north to the south, governorate to governorate, under bombardment. Yet every day, Ahmad continued to report to duty. He never stopped serving.
In May 2025, while UNRWA salaries were suspended until 2 June, Ahmad went to check on the humanitarian parcels being distributed. He stopped to speak with a US army officer about the impossible conditions his people faced. Moments later, as he walked away, an Israeli sniper’s bullet pierced his chest. He was killed instantly.
His death reached Nadia not through the Agency he had served for nearly two decades, but through a photograph posted anonymously on Facebook. This is how she discovered her husband had been reduced to a martyr without a name.
Nadia is left with four children, stripped not only of a husband and father but of the family’s only income. Ahmad’s monthly salary was $1,200, their livelihood. When she reported her husband’s death to UNRWA management and sought the compensation to which she was entitled, the Agency offered no support; instead, it immediately cut off Ahmed’s salary, thereby exacerbating the family’s already meager financial situation and deepening her suffering and that of her children. And UNRWA’s position to her was blunt: no family of a staff member killed since 7 October 2023 has received compensation.
Under the UN Malicious Acts Insurance Policy (MAIP), every UN staff member killed in an act of war is entitled to compensation, which for an UNRWA national staff is approximately $123,000. This is not discretionary. It is a right enshrined in the UN rules. Every UN organization pays annual premiums to enroll its international and national staff in this policy.
Every UN organization, except UNRWA for its Palestinian staff.
UNRWA International staff are covered.
UNRWA Palestinian staff are Not.
This is systemic discrimination, sustained knowingly and purposefully by the Commissioner-General. It is an unlawful exclusion of more than 550 Palestinian families from the protections guaranteed by the UN Charter itself.
In addition, Ahmad’s Provident Fund savings, likely between $40,000 and $60,000 remain frozen. These funds belong to him and to his family. Nothing prevents the Agency from releasing them or, at the very least, continuing to pay his salary against the balance of his own savings until proper compensation is processed. This is a basic fiduciary obligation.
The Commissioner-General, Lazzarini, holds the authority to establish exceptional rules in response to exceptional circumstances. There is no circumstance more exceptional than Palestine today, only yesterday formally acknowledged by the United Nations as a genocide. Yet this authority has not been exercised to protect the very staff who continue to serve under fire, or the families of those who have been killed.
Instead, Lazzarini chose to invoke “exceptional rules” to suspend the salaries of more than 500 Palestinian teachers who fled Gaza to Egypt in a desperate attempt to survive. He acted swiftly when it came to punishment, but stands idle when faced with the obligation to ensure dignity and justice for the families of the slain hiding behind vile bureaucratic walls. This selective application of authority reveals not only negligence but a grave breach of duty.
This is now a matter of the Commissioner-General Lazzarini’s willful breach of duty and abdication of his duty of care toward Palestinian staff, committed openly and brazenly in the midst of a genocide. Why is the Commissioner-General allowed to inflict more suffering on Palestinian staff than Israel itself?
Nadia gave me this picture to show the world what UNRWA will not say: Israel killed her husband, and the Organization he served abandoned her and her children to starve, under Lazzarini’s watch, while the Secretary-General looks away.
To speak for Nadia is to speak for the 550 families of UNRWA staff killed by Israel and betrayed by the Organization they served.
#SpeakForNadia
