UNRWA staff member comforts a distressed child at a school shelter in Nuseirat camp, Gaza Strip, March 2025. (Ashraf Amra/UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees has welcomed an “unambiguous ruling” by the International Court of Justice affirming that the agency has not been infiltrated by Hamas, as Israel and its allies have persistently claimed, and that Israeli officials must cooperate with the U.N. to ensure Palestinians receive sufficient aid after a nearly two-year policy of starvation.
In an advisory opinion, the ICJ ruled 10-1 Wednesday that as the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is responsible for providing aid to Palestinians and allowing the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to operate in Gaza.
The ICJ has just rejected all objections and (spurious) defenses and found that the Israeli regime is in violation of international law in its obstruction of aid, its attacks on UNRWA and other agencies, its mass murder of hundreds of UN staff, its violations of the rights of aid… https://t.co/fjCziAg5Gg
— Craig Mokhiber (@CraigMokhiber) October 22, 2025
Israel has sought to ban UNRWA from Gaza since January 2024, when it alleged without evidence that a small number of staffers at the agency had participated in a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel in October 2023.
Multiple investigations found that Israel had not provided supporting evidence for the allegations, and the ICJ ruled that Tel Aviv had “not substantiated its allegations that a significant number of UNRWA employees were members of Hamas.”
With the advisory opinion, “yet another Israeli government lie — slavishly repeated by Western media — collapses.” remarked Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Y?ji Iwasawa in 2018. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
ICJ President Yuji Iwasawa said in the ruling, which is not legally binding, that Israel’s first obligation is to “ensure that the population of the occupied Palestinian territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services.”
The court also ordered Israel to “agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes on behalf of the population of the occupied Palestinian territory so long as that population is inadequately supplied, as has been the case in the Gaza Strip.”
UNRWA has said it has roughly 6,000 aid trucks that are ready to enter Gaza.
“With huge amounts of food and other lifesaving supplies on standby in Egypt and Jordan, UNRWA has the resources and expertise to immediately scale up the humanitarian response in Gaza and help alleviate the suffering of the civilian population,” said Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the agency.
Israel began blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza following the Hamas-led attack in 2023, and intensified the blockade from March to May this year after breaking a ceasefire that began in January.
More than 450 Palestinians have starved to death, and experts have warned many of the effects of starvation on those who have survived, especially children, may be irreversible. A famine was declared in August by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a U.N.-backed group.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the ICJ opinion “comes at a moment in which we are doing everything we can to boost our humanitarian aid in Gaza. So the impact of this decision is decisive in order for us to be able to do it to the level that is necessary for the tragic situation in which the people of Gaza still is.”
As it has with numerous other rulings by the ICJ, Israel immediately rejected the decision and claimed it was politically motivated. The U.S. State Department also dismissed the ruling, saying it “unfairly bashe[d] Israel” and repeated the debunked allegations of UNRWA’s “deep entanglement with and material support for Hamas terrorism.”
Al Jazeera reported that “even if Israel ignores [the advisory opinion], as it’s done time and time again, all the U.N. countries are obliged to follow up on this court’s advice.”
The ICJ is also considering a genocide case against Israel, brought by South Africa in December 2023. Nearly two years later, the world still awaits the court’s final ruling after declaring the genocide charge “plausible” in January 2024.
In September, a commission of independent experts at the U.N. said Western countries, including the U.S., must stop providing military aid to Israel as it found Tel Aviv was carrying out genocide in Gaza.
The commission cited several of the attacks that have killed more than 68,000 Palestinians since October 2023 and public statements made by Israeli officials demonstrating their intent to wipe out Gaza’s population of 2.1 million people.
Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Two million starving people, half of them children. Six thousand trucks full of food minutes — minutes — from delivering aid.
There are no words to describe the level of evil on the part of the U S and Israel.
Yes Julia, and according to UN International Law, Hamas has
obeyed the ceasefire, is trying to return Israeli bodies under
Israeli bombed buildings and is armed for protecting what
scant food and medicine Israeli troops allow into Gaza.
That from Israeli supported gangs stealing the aid and
killing those seeking it.
And according to acclaimed UN Palestine scholar Richard
Falk, Hamas has every right to resist violently Israel’s
brutal slow-motion genocide, October 2023.
It’s Israel’s US backed occupation of Palestine and
it’s genocide that’s guilty before the UN ICJ, not Hamas.
What could be more convincing of Hamas’ right of
resistance than that Saudi Arabia’s prince of reporter chopping
(Khashoggi, 2018), above all wants to disarm Hamas, not Israel?
I see that the notoriously corrupt Julia Sebutinde is one again the sole judge dissenting against this ruling.
how [close to] ideal would the world be if
leaders of all nations could bring themselves
to adhere to international law?
yet, instead, so many choose to ignore it.
they seem to have become indifferent to
the reasons that once led to its creation.
should i console myself stating that, to my knowledge,
at least, no-one has yet suggested to do away with it?
[disregarding it amounts to the same, almost, doesn’t it?]
still, i appreciate the fact that int’l courts of justice remind us
of what almost ideal international co-existence could look like.
I wonder if the International Court sees the danger of having no authority in today’s world owned by billionaires who practice no moral traits, embracing no humanist values, and no end to their greed. Essentially to be included in a one world order club who from all outward appearances and indications focuses on being number one in that club.
This is not confidence building to the entire remainder of the humans race.