On February 5, the Spanish government announced $3.8 million in additional emergency funding to UNRWA, the United Nations’ main humanitarian agency in Gaza. The cash is meant to help ensure the agency can continue supplying essential humanitarian aid to Palestinians over the short term, faced with its main donors’ decision to slash funding. Spain’s move is a largely symbolic increase, relative to the agency’s overall $1.17 billion budget. Yet with a string of countries including the United States, Germany, and Britain suspending funding to the UN mission, Spain was one of few European states that openly rejected the move.

As Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares noted, Israeli allegations that UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7 attacks only related to approximately “ten out of its nearly 30,000 workers.” Social affairs minister Pablo Bustinduy, from the left-wing Sumar platform, went further, calling out the suspension of UNRWA funds by other Western countries as “an unjustifiable operation of collective punishment toward the Palestinian people.”

This was yet another example of how the government led by the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and Sumar has consistently positioned itself as something of an outlier, staking out the most pro-Palestinian positions with the European Union. Before Christmas, when Spain held the rotating EU presidency, center-left prime minister Pedro Sánchez called out Israel’s “indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilizations, including thousands of children” and demanded an “immediate” and “lasting” cease-fire — at a moment when other European leaders were simply offering their unreserved support to Benjamín Netanyahu’s government. Ministers from left-wing coalition Sumar have probably gone further than officials anywhere else in the West by characterizing Israel’s campaign as a case of “genocide against the Palestinian people.”