MOST of the Western world and further afield is reeling under the shock of Israel’s move where the legislature has approved two bills effectively banning activities of the United Nations Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating in the West Bank and outlawing any contact UNRWA can have with state agencies in Israel. The bills become effective law in 90 days, meaning at the start of the New Year and chances of the move being reserved are by and large negligible. Taking stock of this situation is problematic.

As wisdom demands, when fate strikes the only reasonable or helpful way isn’t to lament the past but to integrate the new datum in designing the future, and nowhere is that task   more complicated than in the Middle East at the moment. There are spheres of that matter which are out of reach, for instance the sort of thinking or philosophies that the various parties espouse. But it is vital to keep these profound schisms in view to make possible designs practicable, as otherwise unmet UN resolutions are passed or blocked with a veto.

Much of the world doesn’t appear to understand that the bottom line to the raging war is that Israel has to ensure that what happened on October 7 is not repeated, meanwhile as those who perpetrated that act have never said they would not do it again. In that case, in the absence of actual surrender and unconditional release of the hostages nothing seems to be working. And with the United States entering an electoral week up to November 4, and a new government come into office early January, things change fast on the ground.

While not much of this has been stated as yet, it seems that UN work in the Middle East will now have to come under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). That means providing aid to the zone in like manner as it is direly needed in the Sudan, Ethiopia, DRC and elsewhere, not a special United Nations agency catering for the entire population for 70 years as it awaits its ‘right of return’ to Israeli villages. UNHCR helps people to settle where they are, running from a battle zone, while UNRWA was pegged to restoring the pre-1967 or even pre-1948 realities there, a dream.

Some international radio and television channels are making plenty of hay on the argument that Israel has not provided proof of systematic engagement of the UN agency in organising October 7 massacres. While they may have a point, the difficulty about the UN agency is that it made settling down impossible even with total Israel withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, pulling out farmers, etc. When the UN agency caters for much of the Gaza population’s needs, it frees its leaders to work exclusively to plan wars with Israel. The result is massive suffering that is shaming the world community as to how to end it.