Israeli officials have not spelt out how they will enforce the legislation passed last year by Israel’s parliament, which accused Unrwa of being complicit with Hamas – an allegation the agency denied.

“It will be a catastrophe if this ban takes place,” says Juliette Touma, communications director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa).

“It will deepen and further the suffering of the Palestinian people who rely on the agency for their survival, for their education and healthcare.”

Even before 15 months of brutal war left the vast majority of the two million people in Gaza displaced and homeless, most were registered refugees.

Unrwa camps were first set up in Gaza to house Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their land in fighting before and after the state of Israel was created in 1948.

For seven decades, those original refugees and their descendants – as well as a new wave of refugees created by the 1967 Middle East War – have been cared for by Unrwa.

Across the Middle East – in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon as well as the occupied Palestinian territories – there are some six million Palestinian refugees.

They include the Naseer family, currently huddled in a tent in the courtyard of an Unrwa school-turned-shelter in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. They are from Beit Hanoun in the north but have decided to delay returning to the rubble of their home, even as a fragile ceasefire has taken hold.

“I have a disability, and I have a big family,” says Ahmed Naseer, a father of nine who says he struggles to access food aid. “Right now, we get hot meals twice a week from Unrwa and people are still starving. What would it be like if it stops for good?”

Ahmed says his children – all formerly Unrwa students – have forgotten basics like their times tables, as their schools have been closed for so long. Now they worry their lessons will never resume.

“We just want to go back to school to make up the days we’ve lost,” says 16-year-old Malak. “Every child in Gaza has a dream of what they want to do when they grow up – to be a doctor or engineer. If education is stopped, there will be no future for us.”

The full implications of legislation passed by the Israeli parliament are not yet clear. In October, it voted overwhelmingly to ban Unrwa activity on Israeli soil and forbid contact between Israeli officials and Unrwa employees. The laws come into effect on 30 January.

However, the legal wording does not directly address the agency’s operations in Gaza, or the occupied West Bank. UN workers say it will ultimately be impossible to function in either location without co-ordinating with Israel’s military authorities.

Talking to the BBC, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel suggests that only Palestinian officials should deal with Unrwa in the West Bank.

She accuses the agency of being infiltrated by Hamas in Gaza and becoming a security threat.

“Israel actually gave more than a year to the international community to clean out this organisation, but it didn’t. It tried to sweep it under the rug and turn a blind eye to breaching the law of neutrality,” Haskell says. “This was the only logical step.”

“We are pausing the delivery of aid through Kerem Shalom, the main crossing point for humanitarian aid into Gaza. The road out of this crossing has not been safe for months. On 16 November, a large convoy of aid trucks was stolen by armed gangs,” UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini said in a post on X.

“Yesterday, we tried to bring in a few food trucks on the same route. They were all taken,” he added, warning hunger was “rapidly deepening” in Gaza.

Lazzarini listed how the humanitarian operation had become “unnecessarily impossible” due to “the ongoing siege, hurdles from Israeli authorities, political decisions to restrict the amounts of aid, lack of safety on aid routes and targeting of local police”.

He called on Israel to ensure aid flowed to Gaza and said the country “must refrain from attacks on humanitarian workers”.

On Thursday, the UN agency said “out of the 91 attempts the agency has made to deliver aid to besieged north Gaza between October 6 and November 25, 82 have been denied and 9 impeded.”

Israel has been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war as it has restricted supplies of food, medicine and other essential items into Gaza since launching the war last October. More than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in nonstop Israeli bombardment since then.

Louise Wateridge, the UNRWA emergency officer said that the targeting of aid convoys has been happening since May.

“That has led to desperation of people, who don’t have what they need and it has led and forced criminal activities,” she stressed.

The pause in the delivery of aid also follows an Israeli attack on Saturday that killed three contractors of the US charity World Central Kitchen (WCK). The Israeli military claimed one of the contractors was involved in Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.

However, the WCK said it had “no knowledge that any individual in the vehicle had alleged ties” to the Hamas attack.

The UN said last month that 333 aid workers had been killed since the start of the war in October of last year, 243 of them employees of UNRWA.

Israel, which imposed a total siege on Gaza in the early stages of the war last year, blames the inability of relief organisations to handle and distribute large quantities of aid.

Hamas’s Interior Ministry in Gaza have responded to the looting, saying more than 20 of the gang members suspected of carrying out the robbery had been killed by its security forces acting in coordination with tribal committees.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza have expressed their confusion over how, in one of the most heavily surveilled territories on the planet, the presence of so many armed men could have gone undetected by Israeli forces.

The Washington Post had previously reported that an internal UN memo from October said the gangs in Gaza “may be benefitting from a passive if not active benevolence” or “protection” from the Israeli army.

One gang leader, the memo said, had established a “military-like compound” in an area “restricted, controlled and patrolled by the IDF (Israeli army)”.

As this developed, Gaza’s civil defence agency reported that nearly 100 people were killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza in the last 24 hours.

The casualties include those killed in an Israeli strike on a home belonging to the al-Araj family in the Tal az-Zaatar neighbourhood, which housed more than 40 people.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed at least 44,382 Palestinians and wounded 105,142 since October 7, 2023. At least 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks that day, and more than 200 were taken captive.