Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, condemned the campaign of incitement against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which resulted in some countries suspending their financial support to the agency.
In a press statement on Sunday, Aboul Gheit said that the incitement campaign led by Israel aimed to eliminate the role of the UN agency, which had been targeted by attacks on its headquarters and staff as part of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip.
He expressed his surprise that some important Western countries had decided to stop their funding to the agency at this critical stage, based on allegations against a few individuals, which, even if true, did not reflect the nature of the organization, which had about 300,000 employees, most of whom were Palestinians.
He said that this campaign was not new, and that there had been attempts to end the work of the agency, which served millions of Palestine refugees in its five areas of operation, in various ways over the years.
He said that the campaign’s goal was to make the international community abandon its responsibility to provide relief to the Palestine refugees, and to shift the burden to the countries that supported the Palestinian cause, especially the Arab countries.
Aboul Gheit reminded that UNRWA was established by a UN resolution in 1949, and that the international community and the donor countries had the responsibility to support the Palestine refugees until a fair solution to their issue was reached.
He said that renouncing this responsibility amid the brutal war that Israel waged on the Palestinian civilians meant leaving them to starve and be displaced, fulfilling the Israeli plan to erase their cause once and for all, and striking a fatal blow to the Palestinian community, which had a large proportion of refugees in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
