Israel’s assault on Gaza, with backing from the United States, has created one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. Now Israel is violating a hard-won ceasefire deal by refusing to admit all aid into Gaza.

The Israeli government also passed legislation recently to outlaw UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. This is an outrageous violation of international law that will only lead to more suffering.

UNRWA was established by the United Nations in 1949 to alleviate the “the conditions of starvation and distress” of more than 750,000 Palestine refugees forcibly displaced by the establishment of Israel in 1948. It was intended to be temporary, pending “a just and durable solution to their plight.”

But in the stubborn absence of a political solution, UNRWA has continued to help Palestinian refugees over the last 75 years. Today, Israel’s ban on UNRWA threatens to cripple the humanitarian response in Gaza. It will deprive millions of Palestine refugees of essential food assistance, along with education and health care.

In Gaza, Israel’s deliberate weaponization of starvation has left 345,000 people facing catastrophic food insecurity. Over 90 percent of children aged 6-23 months, along with pregnant and breastfeeding women, are facing “severe food poverty.” Innocent people, including children, continue to die from hunger and malnutrition by being denied the most basic assistance: food.

I’m the executive director of the UNRWA USA National Committee — and a proud Jewish American.

My grandfather escaped Nazi Germany while his sister and her family were murdered for being Jewish. My family knows firsthand what it’s like when the suffering and deaths of some innocents are mourned and not others — and how that’s contributed to a world in which innocents can be killed en masse and we are silenced into not objecting.

Indeed, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, and many genocide scholars, even some inside Israel itself, have called Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide. We see the attacks on UNRWA — including the killing of 275 UNRWA staff members during this war — as part of that assault.

Rarely do governments baselessly attack and smear humanitarian workers with decades of service, as this Israeli government has. But these abuses, along with other propaganda efforts intended to intimidate and harass critics into silence, are well funded efforts to distract us from the brutality of the crimes being committed in Gaza, with total impunity, under our watch.

Unfortunately, the U.S. has supported these actions — by first pausing and ultimately ending all funding to UNRWA under the Trump administration.

But this cruelty doesn’t speak for the American people. Ordinary Americans have courageously stepped up to support suffering innocent people, donating over $56 million in life-saving critical humanitarian aid to Gaza through UNRWA USA while our own government has sadly stepped down from its humanitarian duty.

My Jewish faith demands that I play my part in repairing the world. To defend the hate and killing that I see everyday is actually the most antisemitic and immoral position I could hold. I hope one day UNRWA can be dissolved because peace makes their work no longer necessary — but not because an extremist government unlawfully tries to shut it down.

This is why I ask all compassionate Americans to join UNRWA USA in standing against Israel’s outrageous and unjust ban. Let’s raise our voices in declaring “hands off UNRWA” and demand an immediate resumption of aid to protect the precious lives of children and their families in Gaza.

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Mara Kronenfeld is Executive Director of the UNRWA USA National Committee (online at unrwausa.org), a separate but affiliated nonprofit to UNRWA that mobilizes U.S. support for the agency’s mission. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.