Don’t Give Up on UNRWA

Last month, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said that the agency had reached a “breaking point.” After Israel accused 12 agency personnel of involvement in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, 18 states announced in January that they would suspend funding to UNRWA, including its two top donors: the United States and Germany. On Saturday, the U.S. Congress barred funding to the agency through March 2025.

Although Lazzarini has dismissed 10 of the employees (the other two are dead), and the U.N. promptly launched an investigation into the allegation, most donor states have refused to resume funding until the investigation is finished. The European Commission, Sweden, and Canada have released some of their pledged funds, but the agency continues to exist “hand-to-mouth” amid the very real risk of being forced to shut its doors.

Now that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has outlined his postwar plans for the Gaza Strip, which include closing UNRWA, the agency’s future looks even more unstable. Yet to shutter UNRWA would be a betrayal of Palestinians. The agency, which provides essential services to 5.9 million Palestinian refugees, has been a stopgap for almost 75 years as the international community has failed to find a durable solution for Palestinians.

UNRWA—which I worked for between 2019 and 2022—cannot solve the root causes of Palestinians’ dispossession, but for decades, it has managed to address the symptoms. It has also become Palestinians’ only effective representative on the international stage. In the absence of a political solution, the international community owes it to Palestinians to ensure that UNRWA remains operational amid one of the worst humanitarian crises in its history.

UNRWA originated as a makeshift solution to a thorny problem. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 displaced around 750,000 Palestinians, the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) passed two crucial resolutions. The first, Resolution 194, enshrined Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes and established the U.N. Conciliation Commission for Palestine to promote a durable solution for Palestinians. The following year, Resolution 302 set up UNRWA as a subsidiary organ of UNGA to conduct “direct relief and works programmes” that would incentivize Palestinians to settle in neighboring countries.

The fact that UNGA endorsed two such differing approaches just a year apart reflects the deadlock that diplomats faced. Months after the Conciliation Commission for Palestine was founded, it came to a dead end; the only solution acceptable to Palestinians was return—a solution that Israel would not consider. Diplomats had to come up with an alternative.

In September 1949, the U.N. sent an Economic Survey Mission to countries to which Palestinians were displaced. The mission concluded that “relief and public works” programs would “increase the practical alternatives available to refugees, and thereby encourage a more realistic view of the kind of future they want and the kind they can achieve.” The implication was clear: Palestinians should be encouraged to stay in their host countries, such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

UNRWA was thus established in 1949 with a yearlong temporary mandate to serve “persons whose normal 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.” Aid workers quickly began providing rations to 950,000 refugees, and the agency offered a modest income to the Palestinians who assisted in the delivery of relief.

Yet diplomats’ dreams of turning beneficiaries into well-integrated, self-sufficient employees soon faded. Palestinians, relegated to overcrowded camps, faced high levels of poverty, malnutrition, and disease. In any case, refugees would not give up on returning home. Nor would Arab states encourage integration within their borders. From their perspective, doing so would allow Israel to evade its responsibility to Palestinian refugees.

They also feared upsetting delicate sectarian balances. In the case of Lebanon, the 100,000 predominantly Sunni Palestinians it hosted constituted around 10 percent of the country’s population, leaving its sectarian power-sharing system based on a 1932 census dangerously out of date.

With the political avenue dead and no Palestinian state established, UNRWA soon took on a role that diplomats had not foreseen. The agency grew to become a quasi-state, delivering services that a government would normally provide. Today, UNRWA is the backbone not just of Gaza and the West Bank, but also of Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, providing education, maternal care, social work, university scholarships, camp infrastructure, and vocational training. It employs 30,000 Palestinian refugees, providing a lifeline amid economic deprivation.

Despite its outsized role, UNRWA remains strictly a relief agency, unable to fix a problem far beyond its mandate. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, an agency mandated to aid every refugee population except for Palestinians, advocates for durable solutions for refugees. It defines these as integration in the host country, resettlement in a third country, or return home. But UNRWA has no power to advocate for a durable solution for Palestine refugees.

In the words of Ardi Imseis, who worked in the UNRWA’s legal division before becoming a legal scholar, UNRWA has taken “a development approach to what is a legal issue.” It provides relief and employment to people whose dispossession and exile cannot be resolved through humanitarian assistance. UNRWA’s narrow mandate means that it can never work itself out of a job: A political solution must be found first—until then, UNRWA duct-tapes over the cracks.

Although its weak mandate simply perpetuates the status quo, the agency faces regular political attacks. Those who wish to prevent Palestinians from returning often criticize UNRWA, whose existence serves as evidence of Palestinians’ protracted exile.

“Israel would like there to be an existential threat to UNRWA because they mistakenly think if you get rid of UNRWA then you suddenly get rid of the [nearly 6 million] refugees and their right to return,” former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness recently told Reuters. In December 2022, when UNGA renewed UNRWA’s mandate until June 2026, 157 member states voted in favor; Israel objected; the United States, Canada, and eight other countries abstained.

UNRWA’s detractors have only ramped up the pressure in recent years. Pro-Israel pressure groups such as IMPACT-se and U.N. Watch (which has no affiliation to the U.N.) frequently release so-called research reports that resort to tactics such as filming students outside of UNRWA schools and using the children’s statements about their villages of origin in historical Palestine as evidence of alleged propaganda in the agency’s educational system. Monitoring the Facebook pages of UNRWA employees—many of whom work sporadically on day-laborer contracts and live in active conflict zones such as Gaza or Syria—also provides ample fodder for detractors.

Palestinians have also demanded more of UNRWA—namely, to push for the right to return. Yet they have no way of influencing the agency’s priorities, and in any case, UNRWA is unable to meet these demands. Because it is not a state, it cannot advocate for a political solution for Palestinians on the international stage or collect taxes and fund their strategic priorities. Its temporary relief and works mandate can only be altered by UNGA. That Palestinians haven’t lost all faith in UNRWA shows how poor their political prospects are.

UNRWA’s response to the pressures it faces on both sides is to reaffirm its neutrality. It is the only U.N. agency that has a “neutrality team,” which monitors staff conduct, vets all personnel and beneficiaries, inspects the use of its buildings, and seeks to ensure that the curricula taught in UNRWA schools cannot be perceived as biased.

My experience at UNRWA was that in practice, resources focused on neutrality can verge on the absurd given the agency’s dire financial straits. When I worked on neutrality, I was frequently challenged by my Palestinian colleagues about the millions of dollars spent on related processes—for example, quarterly inspections of schools and health clinics for graffiti that could betray any preference for a party to the conflict—while services for refugees were cut. (I reached out to UNRWA for comment but received no response.)

After a pressure group accused UNRWA of promoting jihadism in its schools, I was tasked with scanning thousands of lesson plans for words with the Arabic root j-h-d. I produced reams of talking points to explain to donors the distinction between the word mujtahid (“hard-working”) and jihad (“struggle,” but often taken to mean “holy war”). As I worked on these sorts of projects, often late into the night, it often occurred to me that the money and time poured into neutrality would better be spent on rations in Gaza and Syria.

The agency-wide obsession with neutrality is, however, understandable: Every accusation of bias can harm UNRWA’s ability to provide basic services. UNRWA frequently faces suspensions of funding after poorly evidenced attacks on the agency, followed by periods of costly reform. After then-U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew funding from the agency in 2018, citing the need for reform, it was plunged into financial crisis and experienced months in which it failed to pay staff salaries.

Palestinians thus live in constant fear of budget cuts to discretionary, voluntary assistance from donors. Indeed, UNRWA has been mired in financial crisis since its inception: Its first report to UNGA in 1952 concluded that “[r]elief cannot be indefinitely provided. This is an inescapable and significant fact, for the time is rapidly approaching when voluntary contributions for the provision of relief for the Palestine refugees will no longer be forthcoming.”

The news of UNRWA employees’ potential involvement in the Oct. 7 attacks is extremely serious. Yet given the severity of destruction in Gaza, donors’ hasty decision to suspend funds cannot be divorced from the broader politicization of UNRWA.

The irony of this is that UNRWA’s woes are of the international community’s own making. In the absence of any conciliation process—nothing has filled the gap of the ill-fated U.N. Conciliation Commission for Palestine since the 1950s—UNRWA has proven an easy target for critics from all parties to the conflict.

However, without a peace process, there is also no exit strategy from UNRWA. The international community has promoted the agency as the service provider of all relief and employer of thousands of Palestinian refugees. No humanitarian actor can fill the gap; UNRWA provides logistics, storage, and transport to other nongovernmental organizations and U.N. agencies. Moreover, if UNRWA were to close, its 30,000 personnel and their family members would soon be added to the list of aid agencies’ beneficiaries.

After refusing for decades to take Palestinian statehood seriously—15 of the states to withdraw funding have not recognized the state of Palestine—the decision now to cut UNRWA’s funding is an illogical stance as good as a death sentence. It is the international community’s duty to follow through with its humanitarian assistance until a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is achieved.