June/July 2002, pages 24, 75

Special Report

UNRWA Director Hansen Begins Third Term, Continues to Speak Out

By Ian Williams

One may not have guessed from most American media reports, but anyone who watched European dispatches from Sharon’s April West Bank horror show would have seen reporters’ shock at how the Israeli forces targeted the entire Palestinian infrastructure—offices, TV stations, schools and hospitals. Since 1967 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has provided the services in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that the occupying power—Israel—legally is obliged to supply. This means that the world community, in a sense, has been helping relieve the Israelis of the cost of occupation. No reader of this magazine will be surprised to discover that gratitude has not been a key element in the Israeli response.

Just embarking on a third three-year term—despite lobbying from the usual suspects angry at his outspokenness—UNRWA director Peter Hansen spoke to the Washington Report as his staff, along with all the other humanitarian agencies, was still being prevented from entering the Jenin camp.

Asked about what seems to be Israeli targeting of UNRWA’s staff and facilities, Hansen replied fervently, “Well, first of all it not only seems that it has been targeted at UNRWA, it indeed has been targeted at UNRWA. When the attacks on the camps started with the famous mouseholing—burrowing through houses—that mouseholing had a direction, which in each case was the UNRWA schools, that were captured and broken into in order to serve as a base of operations for the Israelis…to use their firepower over the alleyways and to provide a place from which the tanks could be directed. And finally and most unacceptably, they provided a place for them to round up all males between 15 and 60, who were subjected to blindfolding, handcuffing and interrogation and so on.

“It is not a theory or a guess that this activity has been targeted at UNRWA installations,” Hansen continued. “In several cases, our health centers were taken too, with very vandalistic behavior inside them—and they were also used as bases. They have been destroying and smashing medicines and instruments—I saw myself a dentist’s chair that was kicked over so that the bolts in the floor had been pulled out.”

Nor, he explained, was it just UNRWA buildings: “Our staff have very often been targeted and subjected to even worse treatment at the checkpoints than anyone else. I have seen it myself at the checkpoints, where everyone else is let through; trucks with Israeli and even Palestinian license plates go through, while I have waited for hours. Our vehicles, whether with medical supplies or whatever, are held for hours.

“We procured four new ambulances made to Israeli specifications,” Hansen noted. “They should have been on the road the very next day. It took eight months—eight months!—of paperwork and delay before the ambulances were allowed to drive in Israel.”

All of the new UNRWA ambulances have now been fired upon. One of the drivers, in fact, was shot dead, provoking Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s strongest complaint yet to Ariel Sharon.

Asked if he could think of any particular reason for such malice, Hansen was at a loss. “Well, I don’t know now,” he mused, “some people think it is because we have been speaking out, and so we are being punished for that, and other organizations may be more pragmatic and adaptable to Israeli demands.

“We are not going to do that,” he stated, however, “because I do not think that it is up to me to alter and change and give dispensation from international humanitarian law. That goes far beyond what I ought to do. And in many cases what the Israelis are asking for in terms of concessions from international law would be very wrong, since it would be setting new standards for us to work under.”

The Israelis, he points out, charge taxes and port dues on humanitarian aid. Even when their own obfuscation holds up cargoes, they then charge fees for the delay.

Israeli-UNRWA relations have never been easy, and Hansen, a mild and soft-spoken Dane, recalls that he was “naïve” when he first arrived in 1996. Soon, however, he saw any temporary, “emergency” concession to Israeli demands rapidly ossify into permanence.

Even so, things have become much worse. The harassment and targeting is, Hansen says, “much more recent, and I frankly don’t understand it. If they had caught any UNRWA staff doing anything incompatible with our mission, it would be very embarrassing. But even with our staff of 12,000, we have had no charges brought that could be pursued—and that, I think, is a minor miracle when you are dealing with so many Palestinians.

“I must say that we got much more attention and many more attempts at cooperation from the Labor government than from the present government,” he added, “but I cannot ascribe that to politics. But, quite frankly, I don’t understand it and I am very disappointed with the treatment.”

The organization is perpetually cash-strapped, and even more so now that its schools and clinics will need rebuilding and refugees need feeding and new housing. “The emergency fund stands only at $46 or $48 million and we had estimated a minimum $117 million even before the crisis,” he told the Washington Report. “We have not estimated how much extra the present crisis will cost, but it will certainly be a lot more than that. So it begins to look real serious.”

The scarce good news in a horrifying situation is how the Arab world is adopting UNRWA as its own, after decades of regarding it as pretty much the expected duty of the West for the mayhem it inflicted with partition. Not just governments, but individuals have been rushing forward with cash. “We have been gratified with the results,” Hansen said. “For example, Syria, not the richest country in the region, has raised about $2.5 million from private collection, which in terms of its per capita income is by far the most generous response.

“We have opened up a Web site, <http://www.unrwa.org/>, with the bank account, aimed at Europe and especially at the Gulf, where an anonymous donor has already given $250,000, and we hope that many more will follow such an example. Al-Jazeera is running public announcements six times a day with the bank account details, and so is the UAE satellite station.”

American readers can send checks made out to UNRWA and with “for deposit only” written on the back, to the following address: External Relations Office, UNRWA HQ, Gaza, c/o UNRWA Liaison Office, New York, One United Nations Plaza, Room DC1-1265, New York, NY 10017; phone (212) 963-2255, fax (212) 935-7899.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.

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