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The Palestinian group Hamas has lashed out at the US-created Board of Peace over its refusal to work with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), accusing the body of adopting Israel's long-standing demand to shut down the agency. Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem said on Saturday that the Board's position amounts to "a complete alignment with the Zionist position", a move he framed as designed to terminate UNRWA's operations, stop it from delivering assistance to Palestinians and wipe out the right of return.
The Board's own public line was more guarded than Hamas's interpretation. In a post on X on Friday, the Board said that "UNRWA's involvement in Gaza is unchanged", while also declaring that it would only work with "trusted partners who will deliver for the people of Gaza and contribute to a deradicalized Strip". The statement added that UNRWA "fails on those litmus tests" — a formulation that left observers weighing whether the agency had been excluded in practice even as officials insisted its status had not formally changed.
For Hamas, the rhetorical gap between those two positions is the substance of the dispute. The group argues that exclusion from Gaza's day-to-day operations is functionally identical to elimination, particularly at a moment when the Board has been assigned to oversee reconstruction and governance arrangements in the territory. In Qassem's view, the Board's posture is all the more hypocritical because, in his words, it is "strange for the Peace Council to adopt this hostile stance towards UNRWA while simultaneously failing to provide aid to Gaza or compel the occupation to abide by the ceasefire agreement and halt the daily killings of Palestinians in the Strip".
The agency at the centre of the row was established in 1949 and has for decades run education, health and relief services for Palestinian refugees, as well as documenting and preserving their national rights. Palestinians widely regard UNRWA as the institutional guardian of the right of return to their homeland — a right Israel has consistently sought to negate by dismantling the agency, arguing that the refugee question should be resolved through a political settlement rather than preserved as a permanent legal claim.
The contrast with life on the ground in Gaza is stark. Palestinian students returned to an UNRWA school in Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip for the first day of the new school year on September 19, a scene that underscores how heavily the agency's education network still bears the weight of a shattered local infrastructure. Roughly a week later, on September 25, smoke billowed from a site hit by an Israeli strike in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis — the kind of disruption that has upended schooling, shelter and basic services across the territory.
Behind the scenes, the picture is more ambiguous than the public messaging suggests. The Associated Press reported on Friday that Board of Peace members had in fact shown more willingness to engage with UNRWA than their public statements indicated. At the Board's briefing to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, officials named several UN agencies as partners in Gaza's administration; UNRWA was conspicuously absent from that list.
One Board official, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity, confirmed that members of the body had met UNRWA officials several times. According to that official, the agency's programmes could continue operating if they served Gaza's residents well — while insisting that "UNRWA's days are over". The internal/external split underscores how contested the agency's status has become within the very mechanism Washington created to run post-war Gaza.
Palestinians involved in the new governing arrangements appear to favour keeping the agency on board. Philippe Lazzarini, who led UNRWA until earlier this year, told the AP that members of the Palestinian technocratic committee appointed by the Board to govern Gaza want to work with UNRWA — a significant endorsement from the people who would have to administer aid and services on the ground.
Lazzarini has been sharply critical of the Board's performance. In a post on X on Thursday, he accused the body of failing to deliver on its mandate, saying Israeli authorities are still blocking basic aid to Gaza "as part of a wider plan to keep Gaza unlivable for Palestinians". He also took aim at the Board's appetite for planning: "Grandiose plans is what the Board of Peace does best. Plans however will not keep the people of Gaza warm this winter," he wrote, urging that crossings into Gaza be opened and supplies allowed in at scale.
His warnings are echoed by the daily casualty reports. Gaza's Ministry of Health said on Saturday that Israeli attacks killed seven Palestinians across the Gaza Strip in the past 48 hours, including one person who succumbed to wounds sustained earlier. In northern Gaza, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian in Jabalia, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, while an Israeli drone strike near Joulis Street and al-Nouri Tower in the Nuseirat refugee camp killed another person and wounded others.
The violence continued elsewhere in the strip. In al-Mawasi, in Khan Younis, an Israeli drone strike wounded several Palestinians, including a girl, while Israeli artillery shelled areas east of the city. An Israeli quadcopter also opened fire on Salah al-Din Street in central Gaza, wounding three people, among them another girl — a pattern of attacks on civilians that critics, including disability advocates, say is leaving an urgent need for mobility aids such as wheelchairs to be permitted into Gaza.
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces stormed the Ramallah-based Birzeit University, raiding one of its buildings while students were sitting final examinations, Wafa reported. In Tulkarem, forces arrested resident Bashar Odeh after raiding his home in Shuweika and interrogated others during home searches in Zeita. In the Bethlehem governorate, troops closed the military gates at the entrances to western villages, stopping residents — including pedestrians — from passing. Raids also continued in other localities, including the Qalandiya and Am'ari refugee camps.
Taken together, the dispute over UNRWA is less a diplomatic footnote than a test of whether the Board of Peace's reconstruction model can function at all. The agency remains the largest provider of schooling, primary health care and basic services for Gaza's population, and any marginalisation would immediately translate into gaps that no alternative partner has yet demonstrated the capacity to fill. Hamas has framed the Board's move as an act of alignment with Israel; the Board insists nothing has formally changed. With the siege-era aid blockage unresolved, crossings still restricted and winter approaching, the gap between those two claims is likely to define who bears the consequences on the ground.
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