{"id":122773,"date":"2025-07-25T17:00:52","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T15:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=122773"},"modified":"2025-07-24T14:40:54","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T12:40:54","slug":"25-00-103","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=122773","title":{"rendered":"UNRWA Forces Refugee Status on Palestinians in Perpetuity \u2014 Even Against Their Wishes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>UNRWA Forces Refugee Status on Palestinians in Perpetuity \u2014 Even Against Their Wishes<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

David May<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Security personnel work at the UNRWA headquarters, in Jerusalem, May 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS\/Ammar Awad<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A Palestinian walks into a UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) office and asks to be removed from its refugee registry. UNRWA says no.<\/span><\/p>\n

It sounds like the start of a bad joke. But the joke has been going on for nearly a century, and it has been at the expense of Palestinians, Israelis, and international donors.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Israel declared independence in 1948, neighboring Arab countries failed to smother the nascent Jewish state in the cradle. A refugee crisis emerged, with around 750,000 Arabs fleeing their homes in Mandatory Palestine. The United Nations created UNRWA to address the refugee issue. But instead of resolving the problem, UNRWA has prolonged it.<\/span><\/p>\n

UNRWA has developed a massive infrastructure over the years. By\u00a0expanding<\/a>\u00a0the definition of refugees under its care to automatically include the patrilineal descendants of refugees \u2014 unlike how the United Nations treats all other refugees \u2014 UNRWA has ballooned its registry to\u00a0nearly 6 million<\/a>, and its\u00a0budget<\/a>\u00a0has swelled to more than $1 billion annually.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mo Ghaoui is a\u00a0naturalized<\/a>\u00a0US citizen and an UNRWA-recognized refugee. His citizenship would\u00a0preclude<\/a>\u00a0him from refugee status under the 1951 Refugee Convention \u2014 but not so with UNRWA. Ghaoui\u00a0entered<\/a>\u00a0an UNRWA office in Lebanon to pose the question: What if someone wanted to be removed from UNRWA\u2019s list?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d the employee asked him, in Ghaoui\u2019s account. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing to lose. No one does it. No one. We don\u2019t have this procedure.\u201d The UNRWA staffer told Ghaoui that he cannot move past his victimhood identity in the agency\u2019s books.<\/span><\/p>\n

The enforced permanence of the Palestinian refugee issue is absurd. Thousands of Jews were displaced in the same war that led to UNRWA\u2019s creation, but they neither received their own UN agency nor are they still counted as refugees. The same goes for the 850,000 Jews who were forced from Arab lands in the decades following Israel\u2019s War of Independence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, UNRWA was founded just years after the end of World War II, which saw more than 50 million people\u00a0uprooted<\/a>\u00a0from their homes in Europe, including my grandparents. If UNRWA standards were applied universally, I would be a refugee thanks to my father\u2019s birth in a displaced persons camp.<\/span><\/p>\n

That would be preposterous \u2014 just like handing refugee status eternally to the descendants of those displaced in 1948.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, real estate developer Mohamed Anwar Hadid, whose father left Nazareth in 1948, is\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0to be an UNRWA-recognized refugee even though he now lives in California. This would make his American-born, millionaire model daughters, Bella and Gigi, refugees as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

The same applies for\u00a0Zahwa Arafat<\/a>, the daughter of Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian president who reportedly\u00a0stole<\/a>\u00a0billions of dollars from his own people, allowing Zahwa to\u00a0live<\/a>\u00a0in Paris and own prime real estate in London.<\/span><\/p>\n

But UNRWA isn\u2019t just a slap in the face to common sense \u2014 its support for terrorism is an obstacle to peace as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of UNRWA\u2019s 13,000 employees in Gaza, Israeli security documents\u00a0revealed<\/a>\u00a0that 440 are active in Hamas\u2019s military operations and 2,000 are registered Hamas operatives. At least nine UNRWA employees\u00a0took part<\/a>\u00a0directly in the October 7 massacre, including at least one who\u00a0stole<\/a>\u00a0the body of a dead Israeli and brought it back to Gaza as a bargaining chip.<\/span><\/p>\n

In February 2024, Israel\u00a0discovered<\/a>\u00a0a large Hamas data center underneath UNRWA headquarters that ran cables through the UN facility above. Hamas\u00a0stored weapons<\/a>\u00a0in other UNRWA facilities. And a senior Hamas leader\u00a0eliminated<\/a>\u00a0in an Israeli strike in September 2024 was the head of the UNRWA teachers\u2019 union in Lebanon.<\/span><\/p>\n

IMPACT-se, an international research organization that monitors and analyzes education around the world, has catalogued many cases of UNRWA radicalizing future generations of Palestinians. For example, a textbook used in UNRWA schools\u00a0praises<\/a>\u00a0jihadists, including the perpetrators of October 7, instructing students to count using martyrs as a unit of measurement and teaching pupils the physics behind attacking Israeli soldiers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, several UNRWA staffers\u00a0lauded<\/a>\u00a0the Hamas Oct. 7 atrocities on social media.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, UNRWA has\u00a0campaigned<\/a>\u00a0alongside Hamas\u00a0against<\/em>\u00a0the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-funded initiative to provide aid directly to Palestinians, which prevents Hamas from siphoning the supplies. Rather than engage with GHF, UNRWA has campaigned to shutter this threat to Hamas.<\/span><\/p>\n

And as Mo Ghaoui\u2019s story demonstrated, UNRWA is in the business of protracting the refugee crisis, not solving it. While the UN Refugee Agency, which oversees all non-Palestinian refugees, offers a variety of solutions to help refugees improve their lives, including resettlement in a third country, UNRWA\u00a0indulges<\/a>\u00a0the Palestinians\u2019 desire to move to Israel en masse and overwhelm the only Jewish-majority country in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

The inflated rosters and expanding budgets have taken their toll on UNRWA. Several donor countries\u00a0pulled funds<\/a>\u00a0over UNRWA\u2019s collaboration with Hamas. The agency currently faces a\u00a0$200 million deficit<\/a>\u00a0and is considering cutting services.<\/span><\/p>\n

UNRWA\u2019s critical services should be\u00a0transferred<\/a>\u00a0to neutral bodies, with the ultimate goal of weaning Palestinians off UNRWA\u2019s unrealistic and ahistorical promises.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reform is not enough \u2014 UNRWA is an obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace and must be dismantled.<\/span><\/p>\n

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David May<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u202f<\/em>is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow David on X<\/em>\u202f<\/em>@DavidSamuelMay<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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UNRWA Forces Refugee Status on Palestinians in Perpetuity \u2014 Even Against Their Wishes David May Security personnel work at the UNRWA headquarters, in Jerusalem, May 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS\/Ammar Awad A Palestinian walks into a UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) office and asks to be removed from its refugee registry. UNRWA says no. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122773"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=122773"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122863,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122773\/revisions\/122863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=122773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=122773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=122773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}