Founded 75 years ago to provide temporary aid to Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East) today mainly provides services and funding. The Palestinians are the only ones whose support is not managed within the broader mandate of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), the agency responsible for helping all other refugees around the world.
The head of UNRWA's legal office, Hector Sharp, summed up the agency's importance and function a few weeks ago: "Essentially, for the past few decades, we have been running a parallel government in Gaza," he said after the Hamas massacre on October 7 and the war that followed. "We had an education department, a health care department. We were building more schools, clinics. We had plans to build roads and playgrounds."
With a budget of more than $1 billion a year, UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary donations from UN member states, with the US and the European Union providing most of the grants. It operates in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip providing health care, food, jobs, emergency loans, housing assistance and education. Essentially, the agency has become a major employer in a region where nearly half of adults are unemployed.
Most of UNRWA's staff on the ground are Palestinian. At the beginning of 2022, there were 5.9 million Palestinian refugees registered by the UN body (2.4 million in Jordan, 1.6 million in Gaza, 901,000 in the West Bank, 580,000 in Syria and 487,000 in Lebanon). Israel has long accused UNRWA of perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem rather than solving it. What? Extending refugee status to millions of descendants of Palestinians who fled their homes in 1948 instead of limiting it to original refugees, as is the rule for refugees around the world. Not only that, Israel and other humanitarian organizations claim that UNRWA's school supplies glorify terrorism and hatred against Jews. Since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, nearly 630,000 people have found refuge in 150 buildings run by the organization, and thousands are being cared for in its clinics.
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