Israel’s offensive on Gaza and the Palestinian people has been carried out alongside an “extraordinary assault” on those defending “human rights, international law and the victims of the barbaric” conflict, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said, Al Jazeera reports.

In an opinion piece published by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Lazzarini said that in the current environment, aid workers with decades of experience working with war-affected people “are suddenly labelled as terrorists or terrorist sympathisers”.

Critics of Israel are being intimidated and harassed, while Israel’s Foreign Ministry pays to splash “inflammatory” propaganda on billboards in the US and Europe, and takes out Google ads to spread disinformation online, Lazzarini said.

“These are well funded efforts to distract from the brutality of an unlawful occupation and the international crimes being committed with total impunity under our watch,” the head of the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees said.

“We still have a window of opportunity to avert a cataclysmic future where firepower and propaganda construct the global order, determining where and when human rights and the rule of law apply, if at all,” he said.