(6 Feb 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Beirut, Lebanon – 6 February 2025
1. Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA entering room for interview
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA:
“So, you know, in Gaza, we have 14,000 staff. We have a massive presence on a daily basis. We are providing 17,000 a consultation in our health centers across the Gaza Strip. And since the beginning of the ceasefire, we have also reached out to nearly 800,000 people when it comes to food distribution. Our colleagues have also rehabilitated access to clean water in a number of locations in the Gaza Strip. So, the activity within Gaza continues when it comes to the supply. There is no supply, and we don’t want as a consignee anymore in the Gaza Strip. But we are supporting and helping, in fact, any other partner of taking in Gaza supply to distribute to the people."
3. Close of Lazzarini’s hand
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA:
“You know, in the long term, the risk is the erosion of the operation space that sort of surely but slowly but surely our activities will decrease, that the operation be triangulated and that ultimately the agency is not in a position to properly deliver education services, primary health services to the population in Gaza, but also in the West Bank."
5. Lazzarini seated during interview
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA:
“Today, for example, in Gaza. There are about 600,000 girls and boys on the edge of primary or secondary school. They live in the rubble. They are deeply traumatized. And if an agency like ours cannot initiate or deliver education services in the absence of a functioning state, there is absolutely no alternative, which means the schools will be the environment of misery."
7. Photographer
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA:
“We have the choice to let the agency implode and abruptly end its activities, which would means additional suffering for one of the most destitute population in the region. Or we organize an orderly transition of having UNRWA part of the political process leading to empowered capacitated Palestinian institutions within the Palestinian state so that at the end of this process, the agency can hand over its services to an empowered Palestinian institution."
9. Close of camera screen
STORYLINE:
The head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said Thursday that an Israeli ban on his institution has not forced it to halt its services so far but that in the long run, the agency faces an “existential threat.”
“I have been very clear that despite all the obstacles and the pressure the agency is under, our objective is to stay and deliver until we are prevented to do so,” Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, also known as UNRWA, said in an interview with The Associated Press in Beirut.
Israel last week formally banned UNRWA from operating on its territory. As a result, Lazzarini said, international staff have had to leave East Jerusalem because their visas expired, but in Gaza and the West Bank there has been no immediate impact on operations.
Even in East Jerusalem, he said, healthcare and other services provided by UNRWA "are continuing, though not necessarily at the same scope it used to be.”
UNRWA is also likely to face increased pressure from the United States under the new Trump administration.
Fadi Tawil Mahamad Anouti
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