GENEVA: The UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees wants an investigation into the killing of nearly 400 of its staff in Gaza, its outgoing chief said on Tuesday.
Criticising an “extraordinary level of impunity” on his last day on the job as UNRWA’s Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini said Israel appeared to have “a licence to kill” in the besieged Palestinian territory.
“I believe that we need to have a ... high-level panel of experts to look into the killing of our staff,” Philippe Lazzarini told reporters in Geneva.
The 62-year-old Swiss national condemned the fact that “more than 390” of the agency’s staff had been killed since the start of the Gaza war.
In blatant violation of ceasefire, Israel kills five more Palestinians
“Many others have sustained life-changing injuries or have been arbitrarily detained and tortured,” he said, adding that the killing of other UN staff needed to be investigated too.
Lazzarini said he had raised the issue of an investigation with the office of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and with UN member states.
He lamented that Israel’s conduct of the war gave the impression that “all possible red lines have been crossed, and there have never ever been any consequences, whether diplomatic, political, economic, legal, nothing”.
Licence to kill
Killings of UNRWA staff and other aid workers, health workers and journalists were routinely justified with the victims “labelled as being Hamas”, he pointed out.
And he warned that that sense of impunity was now “spreading”, with people killed in Israel’s attacks on Lebanon now “labelled as being Hezbollah”.
Referring to the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran, Lazzarini said that the world’s abject failure to respond set the stage for a war outside the bounds of international law that is now spreading across and beyond the Middle East.
Israel has barred UNRWA from operating on its soil, claiming the agency is providing cover for Hamas fighters, and claiming that some of the agency’s employees took part in the Gaza war.
A series of UN-linked internal and external investigations found some “neutrality-related issues” at UNRWA, but stressed Israel had not provided conclusive evidence for its headline allegation.
Israeli authorities earlier this year also began demolishing UNRWA’s headquarters in east Jerusalem, in a move Lazzarini called “extraordinarily outrageous”.
Israel’s attacks on the agency, coupled with swingeing funding cuts, have left UNRWA facing “collapse”, warned Lazzarini.
Israel kills five Palestinians in Gaza
Blatantly violating the so-called ceasefire brokered by US in Gaza, Israel continued its killing spree in the enclave on Tuesday, leaving five Palestinians dead in two separate attacks.
Palestinians medics said an Israeli airstrike in Jabalia killed at least three Palestinians earlier in the day, while another airstrike killed two Palestinians in Khan Younis, in the south.
The Gaza health ministry said Israeli attacks have killed at least 700 people since the October ceasefire brokered by US.
Published in Dawn, April 1st, 2026
