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GAZA CITY — The US-led Board of Peace (BoP) has declared that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) will play no role in Gaza, a move that mirrors a long-standing Israeli campaign to remove the organisation from the territory and that Hamas says amounts to wholesale adoption of the Israeli position.
The board, created by US President Donald Trump to supervise the reconstruction of Gaza following nearly three years of devastating war, said it will work only with partners it considers trustworthy and capable of meeting the population's needs — a standard it says UNRWA does not meet. "The Board of Peace's policy as it relates to UNRWA's involvement in Gaza is unchanged," the board wrote on X on Friday. "We will only work with trusted partners who will deliver for the people of Gaza and contribute to a deradicalised Strip. UNRWA fails on those litmus tests."
The announcement came three days after the BoP unveiled a 66-project reconstruction blueprint on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York, with $2.4bn earmarked for initial efforts to begin Gaza's recovery. The multibillion-dollar plan is presented as the first concrete step under a so-called "ceasefire" that took effect nearly a year ago, although major elements of that arrangement remain stalled — including the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the disarmament of Hamas.
A board official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said members had held several meetings with UNRWA officials. The official acknowledged that the agency's existing programmes could continue if they genuinely served Gaza's residents, while insisting that "UNRWA's days are over" — language suggesting the exclusion is not, at least on paper, an immediate halt to all operations on the ground.
UNRWA's acting Commissioner-General Christian Saunders, speaking in Gaza on Friday, rejected the logic of the decision. "UNRWA remains an institution of considerable humanitarian and strategic value, with capabilities and expertise that are difficult to replicate today," he said, adding: "To disregard these capabilities at a moment of such profound need is neither logical nor responsible."
Former UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini made a similar argument earlier in the week, warning that scrapping the agency would have a "devastating" effect on ordinary Palestinians. "They want to get rid of the agency, but on the other hand they know that if you get completely rid of the agency today, it might have a further … devastating impact on the population," he told AP on Friday. In a separate post, Lazzarini said "grandiose plans are what the Board of Peace does best", pointing to the scale of suffering across Gaza.
The scale of the agency's footprint explains why the ruling matters. UNRWA employs roughly 11,000 Palestinians in Gaza and remains deeply embedded in the delivery of healthcare, education, and water and sanitation services. For decades it has provided assistance and schooling to Palestinians in Gaza, occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as to refugee communities in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. With mass displacement still under way and aid flows into Gaza heavily restricted, the loss of that capacity would be felt immediately and across every sector that survives day to day.
The agency was established in 1949 to serve tens of thousands of Palestinians uprooted from their homes by Jewish militias from areas that now form part of Israel. Palestinians broadly view it as the institutional safeguard of their right of return; Israel has long campaigned for its dissolution. That campaign has moved from rhetoric to legislation: the Israeli parliament approved a legal ban on the organisation's activities in October 2024, and Israeli authorities have since continued to move against its infrastructure, including the demolition of a compound in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem in January 2026.
Hamas was swift to condemn the decision, with spokesman Hazem Qassem calling it "a complete alignment with the Zionist position" on Saturday. He said the exclusion was designed to shut the agency down, stop aid from reaching recipients and undermine the refugees' right of return. Qassem also questioned the logic of a peace body taking such a position, calling it "strange for the peace council to adopt this hostile stance towards UNRWA" while the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains catastrophic.
The BoP's decision lands amid wider warnings about Gaza's economic collapse. UN estimates circulated during the same UN General Assembly gathering put Gaza's recovery needs at $71.5bn, described at the time as the most severe economic crisis anywhere in the world. The source article for this report is published by Al Jazeera and was produced with AP reporting.
Analysts say the episode illustrates a structural tension running through the postwar architecture. The board's stated criteria — reliability, delivery capacity and "deradicalisation" — are undefined, leaving the door open for the kinds of long-term, politically motivated exclusion that have characterised the debate over UNRWA for more than a decade. Whether the gap between the board's public language and the private assurance that programmes may continue can be bridged in practice is likely to be tested in the weeks ahead, as the first tranche of reconstruction funding is allocated and agencies on the ground must decide what arrangements are still possible.
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