Political Attacks, Principled Defenses: UNRWA and Humanitarian Rhetoric in the Gaza War

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has long relied on humanitarian principles to secure operational space in the geopolitically fraught terrain of Gaza. The Gaza War exposed UNRWA to direct military, reputational, and political threats. This study asks to what extent, and for what purposes, UNRWA articulated core humanitarian principles in its public statements during the war. To contextualize UNRWA’s discourse, it compares the Agency with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch through a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 533 public statements, press releases, and reports issued between 1 January 2023 and 31 January 2025. It finds that humanity constituted a common moral vocabulary across organizational types, whereas impartiality and, especially, neutrality distinguished UNRWA’s humanitarian discourse from human rights advocacy. UNRWA narrated humanitarian shocks through the language of humanity and impartiality, while it presented threats to its legitimacy and survival by using neutrality as a marker of identity, accountability, trust, and acceptance. As Israeli efforts to ban UNRWA intensified in late 2024, the Agency’s discourse evolved: it combined principled self-defense with increasingly explicit political and rights-based rhetoric. Humanitarian principles thus provide organizations with a range of rhetorical options, which they select according to the character of threats to humanitarian space and organizational survival.