UNRWA

Based on Wikipedia: UNRWA

In October 2024, Israel's parliament did something unprecedented: it passed a law designating a United Nations agency as a terrorist organization. The agency in question, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, known by its acronym UNRWA (pronounced "UN-ruh"), had been operating for seventy-five years. It employs more than thirty thousand people. It runs schools, health clinics, and social services for nearly six million registered refugees.

And now Israel wanted it gone.

The story of UNRWA is, in many ways, the story of one of the world's most intractable conflicts—frozen in institutional amber, its very existence a reminder that some problems don't get solved, they just get managed. To understand why a humanitarian agency became the target of terrorism legislation, you need to go back to 1948.

The War That Created Millions

When the British withdrew from Palestine in May 1948 and Israel declared independence, the surrounding Arab states immediately invaded. The war that followed—called the War of Independence by Israelis and the Nakba (meaning "catastrophe") by Palestinians—produced one of the largest refugee crises in modern history.

Over seven hundred thousand Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. Some left voluntarily, expecting to return after an Arab victory. Others were driven out by military force. Many were caught in the chaos of war, fleeing violence without any expectation of what would come next.

The newly created United Nations faced an immediate humanitarian emergency. In November 1948, the General Assembly created a temporary body called the UN Relief for Palestine Refugees to provide emergency aid. Less than a month later, they established the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine to work toward a political settlement, including helping refugees return to their homes or resettle elsewhere.

Neither effort worked as planned.

The political settlement never came. The Conciliation Commission couldn't reconcile parties who disagreed on fundamental questions: Should refugees return to what was now Israel? Should they be resettled in neighboring Arab states? Who was responsible for their displacement in the first place?

So in December 1949, the General Assembly created UNRWA—not as a permanent solution, but as a stopgap while the adults figured things out. The resolution passed without opposition. Israel voted yes. The Arab states voted yes. Only the Soviet bloc and South Africa abstained.

That was seventy-five years ago. The stopgap is still there.

The Unique Agency

UNRWA occupies an unusual position in the architecture of international organizations. It's the only UN agency dedicated to refugees from a single conflict. Every other refugee population in the world falls under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, created in 1950. But Palestinians got their own agency, created a year earlier, with its own rules.

This distinction matters more than it might seem.

Under UNRWA's definition, a Palestine refugee is someone whose "regular place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict." Crucially, this status passes to descendants, including legally adopted children.

This is different from how other refugees are handled. Under the broader UN refugee framework, people generally stop being refugees when they become citizens of another country, or when the conditions that caused their displacement end. Palestinian refugees, by contrast, remain refugees even if they've lived their entire lives in Jordan and hold Jordanian citizenship.

The result is remarkable: a refugee population that has grown from seven hundred thousand in 1950 to nearly six million today. This isn't because of ongoing displacement (though that has occurred). It's because children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original refugees inherit the status.

Critics call this absurd—a bureaucratic fiction that perpetuates a problem rather than solving it. Supporters argue that the refugees' right to return to their ancestral homes hasn't been addressed, so their status shouldn't be revoked. Both sides have a point, which is why nothing changes.

What UNRWA Actually Does

Whatever the political controversies, UNRWA runs an enormous operation. It operates in five areas: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. In these places, it provides services that might otherwise fall to governments—except that the host governments haven't fully integrated the refugee populations, and no Palestinian state exists to take responsibility.

Education is the largest program. UNRWA runs schools serving hundreds of thousands of students, from primary grades through secondary education. The agency claims to have achieved near-universal enrollment among registered refugees in its areas of operation.

Healthcare comes next. UNRWA operates primary health centers offering outpatient care, maternal and child health services, and disease prevention programs. It doesn't run hospitals, but it refers patients to government and private facilities for specialized care.

Then there's direct relief: food assistance, cash transfers, and emergency support for the poorest refugees. Social services include programs for people with disabilities, women, and youth. Microfinance programs provide small loans to refugees starting businesses.

The agency also manages what it calls "Palestine refugee camps"—though "camps" is a somewhat misleading term. These aren't tent cities. Over seventy-five years, they've developed into dense urban neighborhoods, often indistinguishable from surrounding areas except for their legal status and the agency that provides services within them. About a third of registered refugees live in these fifty-nine recognized camps.

UNRWA doesn't actually administer the camps. It has no police powers, no governmental authority. It simply provides services—schools, clinics, relief distribution—within spaces governed by host countries.

Thirty Thousand Employees, Almost All Palestinian

Here's a fact that shapes almost every controversy about UNRWA: ninety-nine percent of its staff are locally hired Palestinians. The agency employs over thirty thousand people, making it the largest employer of Palestinians in the region. Only a small number of international staff—a few hundred—serve in leadership and specialized roles.

This isn't accidental. From the beginning, UNRWA was designed to provide employment as well as services. Hiring refugees to serve refugees made practical sense. It built local capacity. It injected money into refugee communities. And it gave the agency staff who spoke the language, understood the culture, and had intimate knowledge of the populations they served.

But it also created a structural challenge. If you hire thirty thousand people from a population living under military occupation, in refugee camps, in the middle of one of the world's most bitter conflicts, some of them will have political views and affiliations that their employers might not want to be associated with.

This is the crack through which all the controversies flow.

The Textbook Wars

For years, critics have accused UNRWA schools of using textbooks that promote antisemitism, glorify violence, and deny Israel's right to exist. The agency has commissioned multiple reviews and made changes to educational materials, but the accusations keep coming.

The debate is complicated by the fact that UNRWA generally uses host-country curricula. In the West Bank and Gaza, that means textbooks produced by the Palestinian Authority. So when critics find objectionable content in UNRWA schools, they're often finding content from PA textbooks—raising the question of whether UNRWA should refuse to use host-government materials or try to supplement them.

Independent monitors have found problems with some materials while concluding that UNRWA has made genuine efforts to address concerns. Critics argue the agency hasn't gone far enough. The agency argues it can't completely override host-country educational standards. The argument continues.

Hamas in the Schools?

More serious than textbook content are allegations about personnel. Critics, particularly the Israeli government, have long claimed that UNRWA employs members of Hamas—the organization that governs Gaza, is designated as a terrorist group by the United States and European Union, and has been at war with Israel since 2007.

These allegations became impossible to ignore after October 7, 2023.

On that day, Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Israel in the country's history, killing approximately twelve hundred people and taking over two hundred hostages. In the aftermath, the Israeli government alleged that twelve UNRWA employees had participated in the attacks.

The accusation hit like a bomb. Here was not just an abstract concern about employee sympathies, but a specific claim that humanitarian workers had participated in terrorism.

UNRWA immediately terminated the employees in question. It launched an investigation. And then something else happened: donors started suspending funding. The United States, which had been UNRWA's largest historical donor before stopping contributions in 2018 and resuming them under the Biden administration, suspended funding again. So did Germany, the UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, and others.

For an agency already operating on a shoestring budget in the middle of a catastrophic war in Gaza, the timing was devastating.

The Investigation and Its Aftermath

UNRWA commissioned an independent review, led by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna. Her team examined the agency's policies, procedures, and responses to the allegations.

The review found that UNRWA had stronger neutrality mechanisms than most UN agencies—a somewhat backhanded compliment, since it implied the mechanisms still weren't adequate. It recommended improvements to vetting procedures, oversight, and investigation capabilities.

Meanwhile, the specific allegations about the twelve employees remain murky. Israel provided intelligence to donors but hasn't made its evidence public or subject to independent verification. As of October 2025, the International Court of Justice weighed in, finding that "Israel has not substantiated its allegations that a significant part of UNRWA's employees are members of Hamas or other terrorist factions."

Note the careful wording. The court didn't say no UNRWA employees were Hamas members. It said Israel hadn't proven that "a significant part" were. In an agency of thirty thousand, even twelve members would be less than one-twentieth of one percent—not "significant" in statistical terms, though horrific if those twelve participated in mass murder.

By May 2024, several major donors had resumed funding, though not the United States. The investigation continues. The accusations continue. The agency continues to operate in Gaza, where two million people face what the UN has described as a humanitarian catastrophe.

Israel's Campaign Against UNRWA

Israeli opposition to UNRWA long predates October 7. For decades, Israeli officials have argued that the agency perpetuates the conflict rather than helping resolve it.

The argument goes like this: By maintaining a separate category of "Palestine refugees" that grows with each generation, UNRWA keeps alive the dream of return—the idea that millions of descendants of 1948 refugees will someday go back to homes that no longer exist, in communities now populated by Israelis. As long as that dream persists, the argument goes, Palestinians will never accept a peace deal that doesn't include it. And since Israel will never accept millions of Palestinians moving into its borders (which would end its Jewish majority), the conflict can never be resolved.

From this perspective, UNRWA isn't neutral. Its very existence is a political statement, an institutional commitment to a particular vision of the conflict's resolution.

UNRWA and its supporters respond that the agency doesn't create the refugee problem—it responds to it. The refugees exist. Their claims exist. Whether or not they're registered with UNRWA, they and their descendants will continue to exist. The agency provides education and healthcare and keeps people alive; it doesn't determine final political settlements.

This disagreement has no resolution because it's not really about facts. It's about whose narrative matters.

The Ban

In October 2024, Israel's parliament, the Knesset, passed legislation that went further than any previous action against the agency. The law designated UNRWA as a terrorist organization and prohibited it from operating within Israeli-controlled territory.

The practical implications were severe. UNRWA provides services not just in Gaza and the West Bank, but in East Jerusalem—territory Israel has annexed and considers part of its capital, but which most of the world regards as occupied. The agency's headquarters were divided between Gaza and Amman, Jordan. Its schools and clinics served populations on both sides of the Green Line.

The law took effect in January 2025. Its implementation remains contentious, tangled in court challenges and diplomatic protests.

The United Nations and most of the international community condemned the move. They pointed out that UNRWA has legal status as a UN body, that its mandate comes from the General Assembly, and that a member state doesn't have the authority to unilaterally declare a UN agency a terrorist organization.

Israel responded that it does have authority over what operates within its territory, and that UNRWA had forfeited any claim to neutrality.

Following the Money

Understanding UNRWA requires understanding its funding, which is precarious by design. Unlike some UN agencies that have assessed contributions from member states, UNRWA relies almost entirely on voluntary donations. This means it's perpetually fundraising, perpetually vulnerable to political shifts in donor countries.

For most of its history, the United States was the largest single donor, providing hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The European Union and its member states collectively provided even more. Germany, the UK, Sweden, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar—the donor list reads like a map of countries with stakes in Middle East stability.

In August 2018, the Trump administration cut off all U.S. funding, arguing that UNRWA's mandate should shrink to cover only the original refugees still alive—by then a few tens of thousands of elderly people rather than millions of descendants. The cut removed three hundred million dollars from a roughly 1.2 billion dollar budget.

The agency survived by finding other donors. Gulf states increased contributions. European countries stepped in. The funding never fully recovered, but UNRWA continued to operate.

Then came October 7, and the renewed suspension of funding by multiple donors simultaneously. In the middle of a war that turned Gaza into what some have called the world's largest open-air prison—now actively under bombardment—the agency providing education, healthcare, and food assistance found its budget collapsing.

Some donors have since resumed funding. Others haven't. The financial situation remains fragile, dependent on political winds that shift with each news cycle.

The Camps That Aren't Camps

If you visit a Palestinian refugee camp today, you won't see tents. You'll see concrete apartment buildings, crowded streets, shops, schools, mosques. Jabalia in Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth. Shatila in Lebanon became internationally known after a 1982 massacre. Balata in the West Bank has been the site of numerous military operations.

These places have existed for seventy-five years. Multiple generations have been born, lived, and died there. They have their own social structures, their own internal politics, their own identities. And yet they're still called "camps," still administered under special rules, their residents still classified as refugees even if they've never been anywhere else.

This temporal distortion—the way a temporary emergency measure from 1949 calcified into permanent infrastructure—reflects the broader political deadlock. No one expected the camps to last this long. No one planned for them to become what they became. They just... persisted, because the alternatives (return, resettlement, absorption into host countries) remained unresolved.

Lebanon's Particular Tragedy

The situation of Palestinian refugees varies dramatically by host country. Jordan granted most of them citizenship, allowing substantial integration. Syria, before its civil war, allowed Palestinians to work and access services while not offering citizenship. But Lebanon took a different path.

Lebanon, with its delicate sectarian balance between Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shia Muslims, feared that absorbing several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees—mostly Sunni—would tip the political scales. The country enacted laws preventing Palestinians from owning property, excluded them from dozens of professions, and kept them confined largely to the camps.

The result is several generations of stateless people living in poverty, unable to work legally in most fields, dependent on UNRWA services, with no path to integration. If you want to understand why Palestinian refugees haven't simply "moved on" after seventy-five years, Lebanon is a useful case study. They haven't moved on because they literally cannot.

Syria's Collapse

Before 2011, Syria hosted over half a million registered Palestinian refugees, concentrated particularly in neighborhoods around Damascus. When the Syrian civil war erupted, they were caught in the crossfire—quite literally, in places like Yarmouk camp, which was besieged, bombed, and fought over by multiple factions.

UNRWA's Syria operations faced impossible choices: How do you maintain services when your facilities are on front lines? How do you evacuate staff and beneficiaries when movement means potentially being killed? How do you respond to a humanitarian catastrophe inside a humanitarian catastrophe?

Many Palestinian refugees from Syria fled to Lebanon, Jordan, or beyond, becoming double refugees—displaced once in 1948, again in 2011. The Syria crisis strained UNRWA's budget and capacity while demonstrating both the agency's resilience and its limitations.

The Question No One Wants to Answer

Here's the uncomfortable question at the heart of every UNRWA debate: What is the alternative?

Critics who want to defund or abolish the agency rarely articulate what would happen to the nearly six million people it serves. Would the UN High Commissioner for Refugees take over? That agency has neither the budget nor the infrastructure to absorb such a massive caseload. Would host governments provide services? Lebanon won't even let refugees work legally. Would a future Palestinian state assume responsibility? There is no Palestinian state, and the territory where one might exist is currently under Israeli military occupation or—in Gaza—devastated by war.

UNRWA's defenders argue that the agency exists because no one else is willing to do its job. Get rid of it, and you don't solve the refugee problem—you just leave millions of people without schools, clinics, or food assistance.

UNRWA's critics argue that the agency has become part of the problem, that its perpetuation of refugee status across generations ensures the conflict never ends. But when pressed on what comes next, the answers tend to trail off.

Perhaps that's because there are no good answers. The refugee problem is intractable because the underlying conflict is intractable. UNRWA is a symptom, not a cause. It's a seventy-five-year band-aid applied to a wound that no one can agree how to close.

The View from Gaza

As of late 2024, Gaza was in ruins. Israeli military operations following October 7 had killed tens of thousands of people and displaced most of the strip's two million residents. UNRWA facilities—schools, warehouses, shelters—were among the destroyed or damaged buildings. UNRWA staff were among the dead.

In this context, debates about the agency's neutrality and the political implications of its mandate feel almost absurd. There are hungry people. There are sick people. There are children who need education, if any schools are left standing. Whatever one thinks about UNRWA's history or policies, in that moment it was one of the few organizations trying to provide humanitarian aid under wartime conditions.

And yet the October 2024 ban, the funding suspensions, the allegations about October 7—all of it continued while bombs fell. The political conflict over the organization providing aid persisted alongside the humanitarian catastrophe the aid was supposed to address.

What Comes Next

UNRWA's mandate is currently extended through June 2026. The General Assembly has renewed it routinely every three years since 1949. There's no reason to think this pattern will change—the international consensus supporting the agency, while fraying, hasn't collapsed.

But the Israeli ban introduces a new variable. If Israel prevents UNRWA from operating in territory it controls—including East Jerusalem and, arguably, Gaza—the agency's ability to serve its largest population concentrations becomes compromised. Whether Israel's position is legally tenable, whether international pressure will force modification, whether some new arrangement emerges—all of this remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the refugees wait. They attend UNRWA schools if the schools are still standing. They visit UNRWA clinics if the clinics have supplies. They collect UNRWA rations if rations are available. Their grandparents' status—displaced person, refugee, exile—has been inherited like a strange patrimony, passed down through generations who have never seen the villages their families left in 1948.

The villages mostly don't exist anymore. Israeli towns and cities stand where they once were. The fig trees and olive groves the old people remembered have been replaced by highways and apartment blocks. Return, in any literal sense, is impossible.

But the status persists. The agency persists. The conflict persists. Seventy-five years of temporary measures stretch toward a hundred.

A Note on Numbers

Statistics about Palestinians and UNRWA are contested. The agency's count of 5.9 million registered refugees is based on its own registration criteria, which critics argue are inflated by including descendants in perpetuity and not removing people who have died, emigrated, or acquired citizenship elsewhere. Lower estimates exist, though they're often politically motivated in the opposite direction.

What's not disputed is that we're talking about millions of people—some living in camps, some integrated into host societies, some scattered across the globe—all carrying a legal status tied to events that happened before most of them were born.

Whether you think UNRWA should continue, be reformed, or be abolished probably depends on what you think should happen to those people. And that question, in turn, depends on how you understand the history that displaced them—a history that remains as contested as everything else in this conflict.

The Uncomfortable Truth

After seventy-five years, here's what we know: The refugee problem created by the 1948 war was never solved. The political settlement that UNRWA was supposed to bridge never materialized. The temporary agency became permanent. The temporary camps became permanent. The temporary status became hereditary.

Maybe this is a failure of international diplomacy. Maybe it's inevitable given the depth of the conflict. Maybe it's both. What it definitely is, is a humanitarian reality that won't disappear because it's politically inconvenient.

UNRWA exists because five or six million people need services and no one else will provide them. It continues to exist, despite all controversies, because the alternative—millions of people with nothing—is unacceptable to enough of the international community to keep the funding flowing, however precariously.

It's not a solution. It never was. It's a holding pattern, a way of managing a problem that can't be solved, a seventy-five-year-old temporary measure that has outlasted the people who created it and will probably outlast everyone reading about it today.

That's not satisfying. But then, nothing about this conflict is.