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philippe lazzarini
'Gaza Is Being Obliterated,' Says Top UN Official, as World Leaders Stand Aside
"There is no safe place in Gaza, let alone a humanitarian zone," said UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini. "It is a large and growing camp concentrating hungry Palestinians in despair."
Sep 09, 2025
A top United Nations official on Tuesday called out the international community for continuing to let the Israeli military decimate civilian infrastructure in Gaza and massacre human beings with impunity.
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), wrote in a social media post that Israel was making Gaza unlivable, and he slammed the country for ordering Palestinians to evacuate from Gaza City given that nowhere in the enclave appears safe from its bombing campaigns.
"Gaza is being obliterated, reduced to a wasteland," he wrote. "Gaza is being emptied from its starving population forced to move into the so called 'humanitarian' area of Mawasi. There is no safe place in Gaza, let alone a humanitarian zone. It is a large and growing camp concentrating hungry Palestinians in despair."
He then turned his ire toward other nations who have continued to sit idly by as the destruction of Gaza worsens.
"Warnings of famine have fallen on deaf ears," he said. "Will warnings of this deepening catastrophe also fall on deaf ears? Cease-fire, before it is way too late. End the impunity before atrocities become the new norm."
Lazzarini was not the only observer of the Gaza conflict to raise alarms about Israel's actions on Tuesday.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, highlighted Israel's Monday destruction of Gaza City's Al-Ru'ya Commercial Tower—which was home to human rights organizations, aid groups, childcare centers, and other civil society groups—to argue that Israel is deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure in the city as a pretext for ethnically cleansing all of Gaza. Israel has brought a series of high-rise buildings to the ground with targeted missile strikes this week.
"Israel keeps blatantly destroying the civilian infrastructure of Gaza with barely a pretense of attacking Hamas," he said. "This is about rendering Gaza unlivable to justify (on 'humanitarian' grounds) the mass forced deportation of two million Palestinians."
Nicola Perugini, an anthropologist and political scientist at the University of Edinburgh, noted that Israel has already "destroyed 80% of civil defense equipment," which he said was being done to "maximize civilian casualties" in Gaza.
On Tuesday, a mass exodus from Gaza City was underway as Palestinian civilians attempted to flee following evacuation orders for the entirety of the city that were given by the Israeli military.
"Staying in the city is extremely dangerous," Avichay Adraee, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, said on social media.
Independent journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous responded to the IDF threat by saying, "There it is. Israel's military order to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza City of Palestinians."
The latest Gaza developments come just days after several UN experts, including United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, demanded the UN General Assembly convene to pressure Israel to end its siege of Gaza, which has caused famine and starvation in the enclave.
"Israel must immediately end its obstruction of safe, effective and dignified humanitarian assistance," they said. "But lifting these restrictions alone will not be enough to save Gaza's devastated population. What is urgently required is an end to Israel's siege and the declaration of an immediate ceasefire. At this critical moment, the world needs the General Assembly—the highest body of the United Nations—to take decisive leadership and act to prevent further catastrophe."
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'Assault on Children': UNRWA Condemns Israeli Raids on East Jerusalem Schools
"Now, nearly 800 girls and boys—some as young as 6 years old—are left in shock and trauma."
May 08, 2025
Israeli occupation forces enforced a ban on the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees on Thursday by storming three schools in East Jerusalem, terrorizing children and staff as they shuttered the facilities and drawing condemnation from human rights defenders.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, heavily armed Israeli security forces raided the schools in the Shu'fat refugee camp in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, detaining one UNRWA employee and forcing around 550 children out of their classrooms as the invaders closed the facilities.
"As a result, UNRWA was forced to evacuate all children across the six schools it runs in East Jerusalem," UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said. "Now, nearly 800 girls and boys—some as young as 6 years old—are left in shock and trauma."
"Storming schools and forcing them shut is a blatant disregard of international law," Lazzarini added. "These schools are inviolable premises of the United Nations. By enforcing closure orders issued last month, the Israeli authorities are denying Palestinian children their basic right to learn. UNRWA schools must continue to be open to safeguard an entire generation of children."
The International Court of Justice—which is also weighing a genocide case against Israel over the U.S.-backed Gaza onslaught—is considering whether the Israeli government's ban on UNRWA violates international law.
Hundreds of UNRWA staffers and their relatives have been killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. Israel has bombed many UNRWA schools-turned-shelters in Gaza, including a Tuesday "double-tap" airstrike on school in the al-Bureij refugee camp that killed at least 30 of the more than 2,000 people sheltering there.
UNRWA officials also accuse Israeli forces of torturing kidnapped agency workers in a bid to elicit false confessions that they took part in the October 7, 2023 attack. UNRWA and much of the international community have condemned such allegations as baseless.
In the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, Israeli forces launched Operation Iron Wall in January. Israel says the invasion is targeting resistance fighters largely based in West Bank refugee camps. However, tens of thousands of people have been forcibly displaced by the offensive, which has killed numerous civilians.
According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 900 Palestinians including nearly 200 children have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since October 2023. Attacks by Israeli settler-colonists, sometimes aided by Israeli troops, have also killed, wounded, displaced, and terrorized West Bank residents as Israel's far-right government forges ahead with plans to steal more land from Palestinians, ethnically cleanse them, and open the door to further Israeli colonization.
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UNRWA Chief Accuses Israel of Torturing Staff as US Backs Ban on Agency at World Court
Nearly 300 UNRWA workers have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023, and dozens of other agency staffers have alleged torture during Israel Defense Forces detention.
Apr 30, 2025
As the International Court of Justice this week weighs an Israeli ban on a United Nations agency that provides lifesaving aid in Gaza, the program's leader called out attacks on its workers while the United States defended Israel—the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance.
The ICJ is holding a week of hearings in The Hague, Netherlands following the U.N. General Assembly's December passage of a Norwegian-led resolution asking the tribunal, which is also known as the World Court, for an advisory opinion on Israel's legal obligation to "ensure and facilitate the unhindered provision of urgently needed supplies essential to the survival of the Palestinian civilian population."
Among the 38 nations and three regional blocs scheduled to address the 15 ICJ judges, only the United States and Hungary have so far defended Israel, whose forces have killed nearly 300 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) workers during their nearly 19-month annihilation of Gaza.
"An occupational power retains a margin of appreciation concerning which relief schemes to permit," U.S. State Department legal adviser Joshua Simmons argued before the court Wednesday, referring to Israel's 58-year occupation of Palestine, which the ICJ ruled an illegal form of apartheid in a June 2024 advisory opinion.
"Even if an organization offering relief is an impartial humanitarian organization, and even if it is a major actor, occupation law does not compel an occupational power to allow and facilitate that specific actor's relief operations," Simmons continued, noting "serious concerns about UNRWA's impartiality, including information that Hamas has used UNRWA facilities and that UNRWA staff participated in the October 7th terrorist attack against Israel" in 2023.
"Given these concerns, it is clear that Israel has no obligation to permit UNRWA specifically to provide humanitarian assistance," Simmons added. "UNRWA is not the only option for providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza."
In what UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini described at the time as an act of "reverse due process," the agency fired nine employees in February 2024 following Israeli allegations that they were involved in the Hamas-led attack on Israel in which more than 1,100 Israelis were killed and 251 Israeli and foreign survivors were kidnapped.
Lazzarini admitted to terminating the staffers without due process or an adequate investigation of Israel's claims. A subsequent probe by the U.N. Office of Oversight Services "was not able to independently authenticate information used by Israel to support the allegations."
On Tuesday, Lazzarini reminded the world that "over 50 UNRWA staff—among them teachers, doctors, social workers—have been detained and abused" by Israeli forces since October 2023.
"They have been treated in the most shocking and inhumane way," he continued. "They reported being beaten up and used as human shields. They were subjected to sleep deprivation, humiliation, threats of harm to them and their families, and attacks by dogs. Many were subjected to forced confessions."
Those forced confessions spurred numerous nations including the United States to cut off funding to UNRWA. Almost all of the countries have since restored funding as Israel's claims have been debunked or questioned over a lack of evidence.
The U.S.—which has not restored funding for UNRWA—earlier this week abandoned its long-standing position that the body is immune from lawsuits, opening the door for cases by October 7 survivors and victims' relatives stemming from dubious claims of agency involvement in the attack.
In addition to accusing Israeli troops of torturing its staffers, UNRWA has also documented tortures allegedly suffered by Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, including interrupted drowning—also known as waterboarding—being shot in the knees with nail guns, sexual abuse of both men and women, and being sodomized with electric batons. The Israel Defense Forces is investigating dozens of in-custody deaths, many of them at the notorious Sde Teiman base in the Negev Desert.
While Israel's physical assault on Gaza has killed hundreds of UNRWA workers, its diplomatic war on the U.N. has seen the agency banned from operating in Palestine and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared "persona non grata" in Israel after he included Israel on his 2024 "list of shame" of countries and armed groups that kill and injure children during wartime.
The U.S.-backed 572-day war waged by the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court—has left more than 184,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Nearly all of the embattled enclave's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced and Israel's "complete siege" of the coastal strip has fueled widespread starvation and illness.
This week's ICJ hearing comes amid the tribunal's ongoing genocide case against Israel, which was brought by South Africa and is backed by dozens of nations either individually or via regional blocs. The court has issued three provisional orders in the case, all of which Israel has been accused of flouting.
Responding to the U.S. intervention in this week's ICJ hearings, Palestinian Ambassador to the Netherlands Ammar Hijazi told Middle East Eye that "everybody knows that Israel is using humanitarian aid as a weapon of war and is starving the population in Gaza because of that."
U.N. agencies and international humanitarian groups have warned in recent days of the imminent risk of renewed famine in Gaza as food stocks run out.
“ #Gaza: children are starving. The Government of Israel continues to block the entry of food and other basics. A manmade and politically motivated starvation. Nearly 2 months of siege. Calls to bring in supplies are going unheeded.” — UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini
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— UNRWA ( @unrwa.org) April 27, 2025 at 1:39 AM
"The U.S. intervention is very narrow in its scope, when it highlights the rights of an occupying power but ignores the so many layers of duties of that occupying power that Israel is in violation of," Hijazi added.
Among the countries defending UNRWA during Wednesday's ICJ session were Indonesia and Russia, which is currently waging a war against Ukraine. Indonesian Foreign Minister Sugiono affirmed "the Palestinian people's right to self-determination," while Maksim Musikhin, legal director of Russia's Foreign Ministry, argued that "international law should be respected by Israel" and that UNRWA deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.
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