UNRWA Workers Begin Civil Disobedience Against Layoffs and Service Cuts
UNRWA employees in the Gaza Strip began workplace civil disobedience on Monday after workers rallied in Khan Younis against dismissals and what their union describes as violations of employment rights. Footage and a contemporaneous caption from APA Images place the protest on November 9 and record union leaders announcing the start of the action. Workers also warned that staffing and relief cuts would deepen already severe conditions for Palestinian refugees.
The action is an escalation, not a sudden eruption. At demonstrations a week earlier, the Arab Staff Union promised further measures. Union leaders told Mondoweiss that ten days of administrative disobedience were planned and could be extended depending on management’s response, while services would continue. Monday’s protest shows that warning has moved from announcement to action.
The dispute joins two inseparable questions: whether locally recruited workers will keep their jobs and pay, and whether refugees will retain access to schools, clinics, relief distribution and social support. The union says dismissals and unfilled vacancies are reducing the capacity of an agency whose workforce in Gaza is itself part of the refugee community.
A labor fight inside a humanitarian emergency
UNRWA employs about 10,500 people in Gaza, according to AFP reporting. Agency spokesperson Jonathan Fowler told AFP that UNRWA faces “unprecedented financial and operational difficulties” and that difficult decisions may be necessary, while saying the staffing question remained under review. That response acknowledges the crisis but does not answer the union’s demand that workers and refugee services not be made to absorb it.
The agency’s own financial briefing shows how far austerity has already gone. UNRWA reported in May that most locally recruited area staff in beneficiary-facing roles had their working hours and salaries reduced by 20 percent early in 2026. The agency expected that measure to save $65 million, yet still projected a $100 million cash-flow deficit for its 2026 program budget if pledged contributions arrived in full and on time.
The immediate cash gap is smaller than that annual projection but no less urgent. On October 25, the PLO Executive Committee said roughly $70 million was needed to cover November and December salaries and called on donors to provide sustainable funding. It also urged UNRWA management to suspend layoff plans and engage with staff unions on alternatives. The two figures describe different time horizons, not competing accounts.
The cost of austerity
UNRWA’s mandate is public, but its financing remains dangerously dependent on voluntary contributions and political decisions by donor states. That contradiction turns a failure of international funding into lost wages, reduced staffing and thinner services on the ground. In Gaza, where humanitarian systems have been pushed beyond normal limits, treating frontline labor as disposable overhead is especially destructive.
Teachers, health workers, drivers, engineers, administrators and relief staff are the infrastructure through which the mandate becomes real. Cutting them does not preserve the institution in a leaner form; it weakens the institution’s ability to function. The union’s decision to keep services running during the initial administrative action underscores that its fight is not against refugees but against making refugees and workers pay for donor abandonment.
The same financial pressure is already reaching other UNRWA facilities. Pamphlets reported on the PLO’s demand to keep Qalqilya Hospital open and protect its workers, another case in which payroll decisions and service continuity cannot be separated. Gaza’s civil disobedience now brings that conflict into sharper view: the defense of labor rights is also a defense of the public capacity refugees rely on.
Management must disclose the scale and criteria of any proposed dismissals, negotiate with the elected staff union and protect accrued rights. Donor governments, meanwhile, cannot demand uninterrupted humanitarian work while withholding the predictable funding needed to sustain it. The November 9 action is a warning that the agency’s locally recruited workforce will not quietly carry an international funding crisis on its back.
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