UNRWA USA 12d ago

✍️ A message from UNRWA USA CEO Mara Kronenfeld: My iPhone is pulling up photos of where I was 4 years ago. I was in Gaza. Each year around this time photos show up on my phone that stab. Seeing the relative calm of the Gaza City port, the smiling kids of Jabaliya Camp, the UNRWA schools filled with devoted and loving teachers and articulate hopeful student parliamentarians, the UNRWA IT service center which was training TVET graduates in the cloud economy and placing them in remote jobs. All of this was happening at the same time Palestinians in Gaza were living under a grueling 18 year blockade of air, sea, and land by the Israeli authorities. All of this was happening after the May 2021 attacks on Gaza -- when one whole family line was nearly wiped out except for a newly orphaned boy - it seemed, at the time, like the worst kind of violence imaginable. That was then and this is now. These photos of 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 are gutting. But what really twists my brain and takes the breath out of me is how a whole industry of coordinated misinformation and propaganda is nearly succeeding in erasing Palestinian lives and hope in Gaza - of making the profane and genocidal somehow possible to the powers that be. This propaganda has been aimed at UNRWA for many years. It has been aimed at UNRWA, sad to say, for the very reason that it has kept Palestinians alive and, with it, the hope of a future sovereign Palestinian state. The reason for the active misinformation and disinformation on UNRWA's education system is precisely because this education system has been so effective in graduating top quality students. Gaza had a 98% literacy rate prior to October 2023 -- in large part due to UNRWA's effectiveness. And unfortunately the attacks didn't stop at the United Nations, but have become a bellwether for the changes in the international commitment to human rights and international law – so painstakingly fostered since World War II. The pain that this could have been a different way. That Gaza didn't have to be demolished, destroyed, degraded, and devastated. That 80-150k Palestinians in Gaza didn't have to be killed. That 2 million people didn't need to be further squeezed into less than 40% of the land of Gaza and overcome by rats, communicable disease, lack of regular access to food and medical aid…and self-determination. The pain that these faces are not abstract entities but real people we knew and loved. And for the faces of the children I met that day in Jabaliya camp -- are they still alive? Were they blown up with tens of thousands of their friends? Are they sick with hunger?