UNRWA

UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, is a UN body created in 1949 as a temporary relief agency for people displaced by the 1948 war, and still operating 76 years later as the sole provider of education, health care and food aid to roughly 5.9 million registered “Palestine refugees,” a population that has grown almost entirely through a hereditary refugee-status rule found nowhere else in international refugee law. It employs about 30,000 staff, nearly all of them Palestinians themselves, running schools and clinics that are genuinely relied upon across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. It is also an agency whose Gaza City headquarters sat over a Hamas tunnel, whose schools have repeatedly stored militant rockets, in one case handed by UNRWA directly back to Gaza’s Hamas authorities rather than to Israel or a neutral party, and nine of whose staff the UN’s own internal investigators concluded may have taken part in the October 7 attacks.

Who created it and how it is built

UNRWA was established by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) on 8 December 1949 and began operations on 1 May 1950, a year after the Nakba displaced roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the war that followed Israel’s founding. It was meant to be a stopgap: the General Assembly renews its mandate every few years rather than granting it permanently, a formality repeated so many times it has become routine. Unlike the UN’s global refugee agency, UNHCR, which serves every other refugee population on earth, UNRWA serves one population and answers to its own separate bureaucracy, headquartered in Amman with field offices in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Its budget runs over $1.6 billion a year between core operations and emergency appeals, historically financed mainly by the United States and the European Union, with Germany, Sweden and the UK among the largest state donors; the United States alone contributed several hundred million dollars annually before the Trump administration cut funding in 2018, funding that was later restored and then suspended again after 2024.

What it does that is real

An honest account does not reduce UNRWA to scandal. It runs roughly 700 schools educating more than 500,000 children, operates health clinics that are often the only medical access in Gaza’s refugee camps, and distributes food aid that has been a lifeline during the Gaza war. Its staff, overwhelmingly local Palestinians rather than international bureaucrats, absorbed real casualties during the war: UNRWA reported hundreds of its employees killed in Gaza between October 2023 and the war’s later phases, a toll that reflects the agency’s genuine and dangerous presence on the ground, whatever else is also true of it.

The refugee definition it invented

UNRWA’s defining and most contested feature is whom it counts. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention that governs UNHCR’s mandate everywhere else in the world, refugee status ends when the underlying conflict ends, a country is formed, or a person resettles and gains new citizenship, the Article 1C “cessation clauses.” UNRWA applies no such limit. It defines a Palestine refugee as anyone whose normal residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and who lost home and livelihood in the 1948 war, and then extends that status to the descendants of the original refugees indefinitely, including great-grandchildren born as citizens of other countries. That rule is why a population of roughly 700,000 in 1949 is registered at 5.9 million today, most of whom never set foot in the territory they are counted as refugees from, and why hundreds of thousands still live in UNRWA-run refugee camps generations after the war that displaced their great-grandparents. Palestinian factions and host governments have consistently opposed resettling registered refugees, treating the permanent count as leverage for the right of return claimed against Israel; UNRWA’s structure gives that political position an institutional home no other refugee population in the world has.

Hamas inside the agency, dated

UNRWA’s neutrality problem is not a single incident. During the 2014 Gaza war, UNRWA itself discovered militant rockets stored inside its schools on at least three separate occasions, and in one case handed a recovered cache back to Gaza’s Hamas authorities rather than to Israel or a neutral party. In 2017 the agency found a tunnel running beneath two of its Gaza schools. During the war that followed October 7, Israeli forces reported and photographed a tunnel shaft beneath UNRWA’s own Gaza City headquarters, wired into Hamas’s broader tunnel network. In January 2024, Israel presented allied governments a dossier alleging that twelve UNRWA employees took part directly in the October 7 massacre; UNRWA fired the named staff, and the United States, Germany, the UK, Italy, Japan, Canada, Australia and other major donors immediately suspended funding pending investigation. The UN’s own Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) completed its inquiry that August, examining nineteen staff in total: it found insufficient evidence against nine and cleared one, but concluded that evidence indicated the remaining nine “may have been involved” in the attacks, and UNRWA terminated all nine, on top of ten others UNRWA had already dismissed in January. OIOS also noted it could not independently authenticate Israel’s underlying intelligence because Israel kept the source material in its own custody, a limitation an honest reader should weigh alongside the finding.

The findings, the ban, and why it persists

A separate, broader review commissioned by the UN Secretary-General and led by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna reported in April 2024 that UNRWA has more developed neutrality mechanisms than comparable UN bodies, while identifying serious, unresolved problems: Israel had not, at that point, supplied the evidence to substantiate its wider claim that a significant share of the agency’s roughly 13,000 Gaza staff belong to terrorist organizations, even as the review acknowledged specific breaches had occurred. Israel did not wait for further review. On 28 October 2024 the Knesset passed two laws, 92 to 10 and 87 to 9, barring UNRWA from operating on Israeli sovereign territory and prohibiting Israeli officials from any contact with the agency, effectively voiding the 1967 Comay-Michelmore Agreement that had governed UNRWA’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza; the laws took effect roughly ninety days later, in early 2025. UNRWA’s defenders, including much of the humanitarian sector, argue no alternative delivery network exists at its scale, and that is true. It is also true that the agency’s scale, its hereditary refugee rolls, and its record of militant infiltration are the same institution, not two separate ones, and any honest reckoning has to hold both facts at once rather than choosing the convenient half.