UNRWA's indispensable role: HRW warns against exclusion in Gaza

On 11 July 2026, Human Rights Watch declared that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) remains "indispensable" to humanitarian operations in the Gaza Strip, and that public calls to exclude the agency threaten to deepen an already catastrophic civilian emergency.

That single sentence from a New York-based watchdog does more than restate what aid officials have argued for months. It reframes a long-running political fight — over UNRWA's mandate, its funding, and its future in Gaza — as an immediate humanitarian variable. The argument: the agency cannot be replaced on any timeline that matters for the people currently without food, shelter, or medical care.

What HRW is actually arguing

Human Rights Watch's position, as carried by its own communication on 11 July, is that UNRWA operates at a scale no other UN body, international NGO, or private contractor can match inside Gaza. The agency runs schools, primary health clinics, and refugee registration systems that predate the current war by decades, and which local Palestinian families have organised their lives around. Strip those out, the argument runs, and you are not simply shifting the delivery mechanism — you are erasing the institutional memory that any successor operation would need to rebuild from zero.

This is not a marginal claim. It sits at the centre of how humanitarian coordinators in Gaza calculate who can be reached, where, and through which channel. Any agency walking into that gap would face the same access constraints, the same damaged road network, the same scarcity of fuel — but without UNRWA's pre-war footprint.

The political backdrop

The current pressure on UNRWA predates the latest escalation. Several donor governments suspended funding in early 2024 after Israeli allegations that a number of agency staff were involved in the 7 October 2023 attacks; UNRWA responded by terminating those staff members and the Office of Internal Oversight Services opened an investigation. A subsequent independent review, led by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, found no evidence that UNRWA as an institution is a terrorist organisation, while recommending a series of governance reforms.

Calls to exclude UNRWA from Gaza have continued, and intensified in some quarters, even as funding has been partially restored. Israeli officials have argued for alternative delivery channels that bypass the agency altogether. The HRW statement lands directly in that dispute, on the side of those who argue that there is no viable substitute at scale.

Why the numbers matter

The humanitarian case is not abstract. Gaza's population of roughly 2.1 million people is almost entirely dependent on aid for basic needs; the UN has formally warned of famine conditions in parts of the territory. UNRWA's school buildings have served as displacement shelters for hundreds of thousands of civilians. Its health centres, even where damaged, remain a primary point of contact for vaccinations, maternal care, and chronic-disease treatment.

If those functions were to lapse, or to be transferred to agencies lacking the same physical presence, the gap would not be administrative. It would be measured in untreated injuries, in children out of school for another year, in families without documentation to access what aid does arrive. HRW's framing is that this is the scenario the current political momentum is steering toward.

What remains contested

HRW's warning is not the only available reading. Israeli officials maintain that the agency's institutional ties to a population that includes members of armed groups, however few, disqualify it from a central role in a post-conflict Gaza, and that a more diversified aid architecture would be both more accountable and more politically sustainable. Donor governments, for their part, are unlikely to restore UNRWA's funding to pre-2024 levels without further governance changes that the agency says it is already implementing.

What the public record does not yet show is a detailed, independently verified plan from any government for what would replace UNRWA in Gaza, on what timeline, and at what cost. The humanitarian case is straightforward; the political case for an alternative has not yet been substantiated. Until it is, the most defensible read of the available evidence is that UNRWA's exclusion would, as HRW puts it, deepen a catastrophe that is already underway.

How Monexus framed this: the wire reporting on 11 July surfaced a single, clear institutional warning from Human Rights Watch. The piece treats that warning as the lede, situates it in the longer political fight over UNRWA's mandate and funding, and weighs the humanitarian case against the political objections — without endorsing either side's maximalist framing.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/gazaalanpa
• https://t.me/alalamarabic