The Commissioner-General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, is presiding over the deliberate dismantling of the Agency by terminating Palestinian staff en masse under false administrative pretexts in the final weeks of his mandate.
In Gaza today, acting on his direct instructions, letters of termination are being issued with immediate effect to more than 620 Palestinian teachers, staff who were suspended less than a year ago and deliberately placed into financial asphyxiation through so-called “exceptional leave.” They were removed from work, stripped of income, isolated from their duties, and left in enforced precarity. The same justification recycled without shame is nothing but the ongoing financial crisis.
The termination letters that we have seen and verified assert that
“after careful review, the Commissioner-General has decided, pursuant to Staff Regulation 9.1, to terminate in the interest of the Agency the contracts of staff,”
mechanically appending expressions of “regret” before declaring that employment is terminated “with immediate effect.”
These expressions are false. Each of them. The assertions of “careful review,” “regret,” and “the interest of the Agency” are not merely misleading; they are knowingly untrue and will be exposed before the UN Tribunal. The termination notices rely on formulaic language to mask decisions taken in bad faith, in advance, and for an improper purpose.
The invocation of “the interest of the Agency” is being used to justify the unlawful elimination of Palestinian staff. The claim of “careful review” conceals predetermined outcomes since February 2025. The expression of “regret” serves no legal function other than to cosmetically accompany an otherwise brutal administrative act. These terms are, in fact, misrepresentations deployed to manufacture legality where none exists. Their purpose is to insulate them from accountability, judicial scrutiny, and responsibility.
For twelve consecutive years, UNRWA has operated with an annual deficit ranging between USD 100 to 120 million. At no point during those twelve years was the mass termination of Palestinian staff advanced as a corrective measure. Not because it was overlooked, but because it was never a legitimate option.
UNRWA’s deficit is not an anomaly; it is a known, structural, and politically sustained condition. Donor states have long accepted, indeed, engineered a model in which the Agency functions under permanent financial shortfall. Savings measures, austerity cycles, hiring freezes, and programmatic compression have never eliminated that deficit, nor were they intended to. Yet the Agency has continued to operate, deliver services, and fulfill its mandate every single year under those conditions.
Nothing changed in January 2026 except the decision to terminate hundreds of Palestinian staff in Gaza, Jordan, and soon in Lebanon.
The mandate of UNRWA is not discretionary expenditure. It is a legal obligation to employ Palestinian refugees to serve Palestinian refugees across education, health, relief, protection, infrastructure, and microfinance. For those unaware: staffing with Palestinian refugees is not ancillary to the mandate; it is the mandate.
The termination of teachers is therefore not a budgetary adjustment. It is a deliberate act of mandate dismantlement, executed under the false pretense of financial necessity. What is being reduced is not cost, but Palestinian presence.
The Commissioner-General has no legal or moral authority to hollow out the mandate of UNRWA under the guise of financial management. Authority to administer the Agency does not include authority to dismantle it, and the CG’s budgetary discretion does not extend to extinguishing the very purpose for which the Agency exists.
The obscenity of these decisions is entrenched in the hierarchy that sustains them. The Acting Director in Gaza, a white Western European male installed through a procedurally unlawful appointment in direct violation of governing rules, as confirmed by an investigation under the Secretary-General’s authority, continues to occupy his position without consequence, earning over USD 17,000 per month, while terminating Palestinian teachers whose monthly salaries barely reach USD 1,000.
The administration now invokes urgency, inevitability, and the alleged absence of alternatives. None withstands scrutiny. The financial conditions cited are longstanding and well-known, and the timing exposes the design. Terminations are being carried out while collective appeals challenging the unlawful suspensions remain pending before the Tribunal, and while the Commissioner-General is approaching the end of his mandate.
More than 420 of these teachers have already filed a collective appeal with the UN Tribunal, challenging the legality of their suspensions and the denial of their salaries. The Commissioner-General’s sudden acceleration toward termination is nothing but a calculated attempt to render pending appeals moot by invoking Staff Regulation 9.1 and declaring, after careful review, that their contracts are ended in the interest of the Agency. Decisions are being rushed to pre-empt judicial review and to entrench faits accomplis before accountability can attach.
This is, in fact, the opening phase of a broader strategy that extends across UNRWA’s fields of operation, staff categories, and duty stations. The pattern is already replicating.
In Amman last Thursday, the Director of Security, another white Western European male whose appointment was also contested before the UN Tribunal, issued termination letters to 20 Palestinian security staff, barring them from UNRWA premises with immediate effect. Staff were informed that their functions would be outsourced to a private security company in order to “align with the rest of the UN system.”
That justification does not withstand even minimal legal scrutiny.
UNRWA is not a generic UN entity. Its mandate is singular and non-transferable: to employ Palestinian refugees in the service of Palestinian refugees. The outsourcing of Palestinian security functions to private contractors constitutes an ultra vires action. It exceeds administrative authority by displacing Palestinian staff from posts that are integral to UNRWA’s mandate. Procurement is being misused as a vehicle to achieve an outcome that management could not lawfully impose directly: the systematic exclusion of Palestinians from their own institution.
The invocation of “alignment” functions as a pretext to legitimize discriminatory impact, whereby Palestinian staff are removed en masse while senior international positions remain untouched. The financial disparity is undisguised. The Director of Security earns between USD 12,000 and 13,000 per month. The Palestinian staff he terminated earn approximately USD 800 per month. Senior management positions remain untouched; Palestinian livelihoods are declared expendable.
The moral arithmetic speaks for itself.
In Beirut, preparations are underway for the same maneuver. Approximately 100 Palestinian staff are expected to face termination under identical pretexts, using the same administrative language and the same manufactured justifications.
These measures are being executed at the very beginning of the year, and in the final weeks preceding the Commissioner-General’s departure at the end of March, the formal conclusion of his contract. This is the terminal phase of a policy implemented with the knowledge that accountability will soon be evaded through exit.
Following the closure of UNRWA’s Jerusalem headquarters, the dismantling has shifted inward. Field offices and headquarters are now being systematically hollowed out through attrition, termination, and outsourcing. The pattern is consistent, sequential, and intentional. This trajectory mirrors, with precision, the long-articulated objective of the Israeli government: the dismantling of UNRWA not through formal abolition, but through internal erosion: reducing staff, extinguishing functions, and stripping the Agency of its Palestinian core while preserving the façade of institutional continuity.
What is unfolding is a systematic, progressive, controlled disintegration.
When the Commissioner-General assumed office, UNRWA’s staffing table reflected approximately 31,000 Palestinian staff positions, including 13,000 in Gaza. These figures are still cited publicly, with confidence and repetition.
They are false.
Insider data confirms that UNRWA’s staffing has fallen to approximately 23,000 positions. Posts have been abolished incrementally and without transparency, with the most severe acceleration occurring over the past two years. In Gaza alone, staff numbers have collapsed from 13,000 to approximately 9,000, a consequence of deaths caused by Israeli attacks, forced retirements, and now, deliberate mass termination.
The plan is no longer deniable.
UNRWA is being dismantled from within by a senior Western European management cohort that continues to invoke humanitarian language while administering collective punishment against Palestinians, many of whom are simultaneously mourning family members killed by the very government whose political objectives these measures now advance.
No Western European Director or senior official within UNRWA has demonstrated the moral courage to halt these actions. None has objected. None has refused to execute them. These officials retain their positions by implementing decisions without scrutiny or resistance. Their allegiance is not to the mandate, nor to Palestinian refugees, but to institutional survival. In that sense, they operate as mercenaries: well compensated, insulated from consequences, and valued only for their willingness to comply.
As for the Commissioner-General, he has nothing to lose. His term ends in March 2026. His exit is secured. The same is likely true for those closest to him. Decisions are taken with the certainty that consequences will not follow. Quite the opposite: they are likely to be rewarded; absorbed into other senior roles, compensated by Western governments that continue to support Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, and repositioned within the UN system to carry forward the same discriminatory practices under different institutional banners.
The decision to terminate 650 Palestinian staff in a single day, taken in the final weeks of the Commissioner-General’s tenure, is unprecedented in the history of both the United Nations and UNRWA. Such a measure: massive in scale, irreversible in effect, and executed at the very end of an executive mandate, raises serious questions about the continued propriety of allowing the Commissioner-General to exercise unfettered executive authority. When a senior official accelerates irreversible decisions at this scale immediately before departure, the issue is no longer administrative discretion but abuse of authority in anticipation of exit.
This conduct warrants scrutiny not only of the decision itself, but of the conditions under which it was taken. Reasonable questions arise as to whether assurances have been given, whether consequences have been neutralized in advance, and whether accountability has been effectively suspended. In any other institutional context, such circumstances would trigger immediate restraint, oversight, or the withdrawal of delegated authority.
Where, then, is the Secretary-General of the United Nations in all of this? What justification exists for permitting a departing Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, to take decisions of historic magnitude in the final months of his tenure, with consequences that will long outlast his presence and fall entirely on Palestinian staff?
In mythology, when power abandoned humanity, it was Prometheus who defied it, who stole fire knowing the cost, not for recognition, not for permission, but because survival demanded action. He did not wait for consensus. He acted because inaction meant destruction.
Who, then, will act for Palestinian UNRWA staff?
Who will defy the machinery rather than continue to service it? Who will intervene when legality is being weaponized and procedure is being used to erase livelihoods?
Palestinian UNRWA staff are being erased while the world watches it happen in real time. Some are burying their families. Others are sleeping in shelters. And now they are being told, formally, politely, with immediate effect, that even their livelihoods are no longer allowed to survive.
This is how a mandate is killed: quietly, disingenuously, and from within, by the very official, Mr. Lazzarini, charged with safeguarding it, in direct violation of the oath attached to his office.
So where is Prometheus now? Who will defy power when survival demands it, rather than administer harm in its name?
The humanitarian system rests on a single, non-negotiable premise: do no harm. What is unfolding here is its deliberate inversion: do more harm. Terminate more Palestinian staff. Remove livelihoods. Deepen displacement. Align administrative decisions with the Israeli government’s long-stated objective of dismantling UNRWA and reducing the Palestinian presence in Gaza.
Yes: Do More Harm: Systematically and with Intent: One Termination Letter At A Time.
Not because it is lawful. Not because it is unavoidable. But because those authorizing it are insulated from its consequences, and because they calculate that Palestinian lives, Palestinian labour, and Palestinian rights can be extinguished administratively without cost.
This is how senior officials like Lazzarini participate in erasure: by choosing harm, authorizing it on paper, and enforcing it without ever having to fire a single shot.
Palestinians will remember you because you failed to protect them, failed to uphold the mandate entrusted to you, and willingly chose to inflict harm upon them, no different, in the end, from those who openly act as their enemy.
I agree with your analysis. This should spur us to do further research and organising