| Affiliation: | Spokesperson and director of advocacy and strategic communications at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), a position he has held for nearly nine years, notably during the fighting in Gaza in 2014 and 2008–9. Before assuming his current position, Mr. Gunness read philosophy and theology at Oxford University, subsequently joining the BBC, where he worked for 23 years, as a producer, foreign correspondent and anchor on BBC World TV and flagship current‐affairs programs, winning awards for his journalism. He joined the UN political office in Jerusalem in 2006 and moved to UNRWA in 2007. In an exclusive interview, Sara Roy, senior research scholar and associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, talked to him about UNRWA, the largest and oldest UN humanitarian agency in the Middle East, and the increasingly complex environments in which it works: Syria, Gaza and the West Bank. |
