A number of experts criticised Sweden for its decision to suspend financial support to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) over Tel Aviv’s accusations that some of its staff participated in the Hamas military operation against Israel on 7 October.
Beatrice Fihn, a lawyer and former executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) who specialises in international law and works for the law firm Lex International in Geneva, told the local Expressen newspaper:
“It is catastrophic that Sweden has cut humanitarian aid to UNRWA, above all because it has not even seen any evidence of Israel’s accusations. There is no other organization that has the built-up capacity to get the necessary help out quickly.”
15 of UNRWA’s largest donors, including Sweden, suspended payments to the agency after Israel alleged that 12 of the organisation’s staff were involved in the cross-border incursion by the Palestinian group Hamas into Israel on 7 October, which triggered a war between the two sides.
UNRWA subsequently sacked nine staff but said this was because of how seriously it took the allegations, not whether they were true.
After examining the Israeli accusations, the British public television channel Channel 4 concluded that there was no evidence that they were true. Johan Forssell, minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, told Expressen:
“For me, it is important that Swedish aid should always maintain a high quality and never even come close to terrorism.”
UNRWA plays an absolutely central role and there is no short-term substitute for the organisation’s work, Jakob Wernerman, director of humanitarian aid at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), told the newspaper.
It is not only UNRWA that can carry out humanitarian work in Gaza, he added.
Johnny Ludvigsson, a senior professor of paediatrics at Linköping University, wrote a letter to the editor of Dagens Nyheter on Sunday calling on Sweden to resume payments to UNRWA. He said in his letter:
“Sweden, like some other countries, has stopped payments to UNRWA following suspicions that 12 of the agency’s employees participated in the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. After “suspicions” based on the fact that Israel, without evidence, made this accusation. And because UNRWA, to avoid criticism and to avoid any country stopping the payments, quickly dismissed these 12 individuals pending an investigation, Sweden has taken it as further evidence that these 12 (out of 30,000 employees) are guilty.”
UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East) was established in 1949 by a UN General Assembly resolution following the war of Israel’s founding, when 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.
Today it directly employs 30,000 Palestinians, meeting the civil and humanitarian needs of the 5.9 million descendants of these refugees in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and huge camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
In Gaza, the organisation employs 13,000 people and runs the enclave’s schools, primary health clinics and other social services, as well as distributing humanitarian aid. The importance of its services in Gaza has grown since 2005, when Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade that caused economic collapse and one of the highest unemployment rates in the world.
