Israeli Security Diminished by Gaza War – Martin Griffith
The following interview was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 28 January 2025, the day before an Israeli law came into force banning UNRWA, the UN relief agency, from operating in Gaza, a Palestinian territory which Israel illegally occupies.
Evan Davis interviewed Martin Griffith, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the UN until 2024.
Griffith said, among other things: “I’m very worried that the first draft of history will say Israeli security has been diminished rather than improved by the consequences of this 14 months of war in the Gaza strip. Which is because, of course, we have a new generation of people in Gaza who have suffered terribly in the hands of the Israelis, never mind the origin and never mind the self-defence argument at this point: it has created a new security threat. So I am very worried that the anger in the region, the destabilization in the region of an unresolved Palestinian question, is going to be more potent, more aggravating and more dangerous after this conflict hopefully ends than before it started.”
The full text of the interview is shown below or you can listen by clicking the arrow in the box below.
Evan Davis: Thursday may be very consequential for Gaza. It’s the day on which an Israeli law bites. It’s the law to curtail operations of UNRWA, the UN relief agency. Israel has said that UNRWA staff were members of Hamas and involved in the October 7th attacks. Now we’ve all heard a lot about UNRWA since October the 7th and it does have a very big presence in Gaza and has through these months of conflict. The Israelis say they’re not going to change their mind about the law.
Well this afternoon the UN Security Council has been debating it. Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, warned that Israel’s ban would prove disastrous, worsening living conditions for millions of Palestinians.
but later the US representative, Dorothy Shay, said she supported Israel’s decision.
Dorothy Shay: “It is Israel’s sovereign decision to close UNRWA’s offices in Jerusalem on January 30. The United States supports the implementation of this decision. UNRWA exaggerating the effects of the laws and suggesting that they will force the entire humanitarian response to halt is irresponsible and dangerous. UNRWA is not and never has been the only option for providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza.”
ED: The US there at the UN supporting Israel’s barring of UNRWA.
well early today I spoke to Martin Griffith. he was Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the UN from 2021 to 2024 and first I asked what the coming ban actually means
Martin Griffith: UNRWA as an institution and as a body of staff will not be able to operate either in East Jerusalem or the West Bank or in Gaza because it also provides for no contact between UNRWA staff and UNRWA and Israel so we can’t fulfil these obligations in either place. so it is alarming and it is alarming in different ways, in terms of different issues.
ED: Well, let’s just look at what it actually means. Is it possible that literally everybody who is working for UNRWA, maybe apart from a small slice at the very very top, is it possible they can all switch allegiance to other aid groups who are currently working there and more or less carry on as they are under a different name?
MG: I think in principle that is possible. In practice I think it’s unlikely. one of the points that UNRWA has however been making to all of us is that their 13,000 staff in Gaza for example are not replaceable. So if somebody else wants to take over some of the UNRWA activities they’ll have to hire the same staff. So it’s feasible to think that this staff can change hats but I don’t know exactly. I don’t think anybody knows exactly, and that’s one of the problems about this particular moment, what Israel will do or think about that.
And secondly we don’t know, Evan, at least I don’t know, exactly what the plan is for other organizations, UN agencies and others, to take over certain UNRWA activities post Thursday. and that I think for humanitarians is very alarming.
ED: Is there a chance that, de facto, people who will be organizing deliveries, taking hold of them and distributing them in Gaza, will be the remnants of Hamas?
MG: What UNRWA has done historically was to provide the United Nations, the General Assembly, the international community, with an organization which provided a buffer and services in that buffer for Palestinians in a neutral and impartial way. But Hamas has not left Gaza, in fact there are some indications that they’ve even (as Tony Blinken said recently) recruited as many people as they may have lost.
Editorial Note: Blinken actually said “we assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost”.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/blinken-we-assess-that-hamas-has-recruited-almost-as-many-new-fighters-as-it-has-lost/
MG: So Hamas continues to be a force relevant to the people. And it’s a mystery, at the very least it’s a mystery, who would be in the position of governance to actually oversee distribution operations and Hamas has got to be part of the landscape. That’s alarming. That’s worrying.
ED: There’s an absolutely enormous task. We’ve all seen the pictures. I mean the reconstruction; it’s not the same numbers that were homeless after the Second World War in Germany but you’ve seen the pictures. It’s a task of that kind that is now facing Gaza. A very big difference with, say, Germany after the Second World War is there’s still absolutely no-one (who) seems to have any idea what the plan is, or whether there’s a plan, for who is actually going to be running Gaza out of all of this. there’s no stable political background in which reconstruction begins is there?
MG: There isn’t. I’m one of those who’ve said for a very long time, including in my time in the United Nations, that if you don’t have some level of certainty about who governs Gaza post war let’s say, post conflict, and certainly in the phase of reconstruction, there’s no real prospect for a meeting of minds between the parties.
ED: If you were looking at this, if history is judging what Israel wanted to do in Gaza and what it has done, what it has achieved in terms of creating safety for itself by removing military or militant threats to civilians in Israel. Well what at this point, what’s the first draft of history going to say about what Israel has done for itself ?
MG: I’m very worried that the first draft of history will say Israeli security has been diminished rather than improved by the consequences of this 14 months of war in the Gaza strip. Which is because, of course, we have a new generation of people in Gaza who have suffered terribly in the hands of the Israelis, never mind the origin and never mind the self-defence argument at this point: it has created a new security threat. So I am very worried that the anger in the region, the destabilization in the region of an unresolved Palestinian question, is going to be more potent, more aggravating and more dangerous after this conflict hopefully ends than before it started. And that’s a really, really sad observation. I don’t know in all my time involved in conflicts (over) these decades whether there is much real evidence to suggest that an insurgent group, an armed group, a rebel group, has been extinguished by military activity. dialogue is looked at as effete, I think, by some in the current world. but it’s a much more effective instrument for getting people to be safe at home.
ED: Well that was Martin Griffiths, former Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the UN. We did approach the Israeli government for a response to what he told us about how the security of the region had changed since the invasion of Gaza but we haven’t had a response.