Outgoing UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini reflects on two years of atrocity, institutional assault, and the one girl he cannot forget.

Philippe Lazzarini, the outgoing Commissioner-General of UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, speaks with the measured gravity of a man who has spent his career in the world’s worst places, from Angola to Iraq, Somalia to South Sudan. What he encountered in Gaza four weeks into the war that began in October 2023 still haunts him. In a school in Rafah, a young girl stood with what he described as “empty eyes,” begging for water and bread. A place that should have been a site of joy and learning had become a site of misery and shelter. “I have been haunted by this,” he told UN News.

Nearly 400 UNRWA staff members have been killed in Gaza over the past two years, a toll without precedent in the history of the United Nations. Hundreds of the agency’s buildings have been struck. Its ability to operate has been constrained not only by Israeli military action but by a concerted campaign to delegitimise it, including allegations that staff members participated in Hamas’s attacks of October 7th, 2023. A high-level UN investigation found that of 19 staff members accused, evidence indicated potential involvement in nine cases, leading to dismissals, while nine others lacked sufficient evidence and one case lacked any supporting evidence at all.

The ceasefire that nominally holds in Gaza today is, in Lazzarini’s assessment, “in name only.” People continue to die because they do not know where the shifting boundaries of the Israeli military’s operational zone lie. People live in rubble. They wait hours for clean water. They fight disease. “We might have reversed the tide of deepening hunger in Gaza but nothing else,” he said.

The agency faces an existential financial crisis. Despite austerity measures including a 20 percent salary cut for most local staff, and despite a three-year mandate extension passed by the UN General Assembly in December 2025, UNRWA lacks the funding to match its responsibilities. Lazzarini has warned that the agency “may soon no longer be viable.” There is, he insists, no alternative: UNRWA is the only organisation with the manpower, expertise, and community trust required for public health and education services in Gaza. The Palestinian Authority is not in a position to take over.

Lazzarini also draws a direct line between the dismantling of respect for international law in Gaza and the widening of conflict into Iran and Lebanon. The demolition of UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters by Israeli bulldozers in January 2026, and the hoisting of an Israeli flag atop the UN complex, reflect a pattern of impunity that has spread. Accountability deferred, he suggests, becomes impunity exported. The cost is being paid by civilians across the region.