[Photo credit Middle East Monitor, Mahmoud Zaki Salem Issa – Anadolu Agency]Following an intense smear campaign against UNRWA, the major provider of humanitarian services in Gaza, the Israeli Knesset proceeded to designate the organisation a terrorist entity last week. A few days later, the Israeli Land Authority declared that the land on which the UNRWA headquarters in Jerusalem is located had been confiscated. 

In this timely new article, PhD candidate Caroline Lund and Assistant Professor Brendan Ciarán Browne examine the tactics used by the Israeli government to delegitimise those involved in providing humanitarian and lifesaving support for the Palestinian population. They conclude that, while efforts to control and ultimately eliminate the native population are a given consequence of the violent underpinnings of settler colonialism, efforts to control the (dis)engagement of organisations that aid the Palestinian population through the construction and dissemination of narratives that depict them as being “terroristic” or having “terrorist” connections, are a sophisticated additional layer of the logic of elimination and erasure. 

Read the article here.