UNRWA Under Political
Yasser Ali / Director General of the Palestinian Retur Foundation
Since its establishment in 1949 by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly (Resolution 302), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has been one of the most prominent international witnesses to the crime of displacing the Palestinian people from their land and to the ongoing nature of the refugee cause as the core of the conflict, not a passing humanitarian matter. For this very reason, UNRWA has never been immune to political targeting, particularly from the United States and the Zionist entity.
UNRWA’s role has not been limited to providing educational, health, and relief services to more than five million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Rather, it has represented a renewed international recognition of the refugees’ rights and the international community’s responsibility for their plight. This political and legal dimension has made the agency a direct target of attempts to weaken and dismantle it.
American pressure began to intensify during the first term of US President Donald Trump's administration, when Washington decided in 2018 to completely halt its funding to UNRWA. This move was clearly aimed at erasing the refugee cause and redefining refugees outside the framework of international law. Despite a partial resumption of support under President Joe Biden's administration, funding remained conditional and restricted, accompanied by continuous political pressure to restructure the agency and curtail its role.
In contrast, the occupying power launched a systematic campaign against UNRWA, accusing it of promoting the "right of return" and disseminating "incendiary rhetoric" in its educational curricula. This was an attempt to delegitimize the agency and tarnish its image in the eyes of donors. With each act of aggression against the Gaza Strip, this campaign escalated, particularly with the targeting of UNRWA schools and facilities by airstrikes, resulting in the deaths of dozens of its staff members. This sent a clear message that, in the eyes of the occupation, the agency is not neutral but rather part of the battle of memory and legitimacy.
This targeting reached its peak during the recent Israeli aggression against Gaza, where unsubstantiated accusations against some UNRWA staff members were used as a pretext to halt or suspend funding from several Western countries, in blatant disregard for the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe and the vital role the agency plays in preventing the complete collapse of life in the Gaza Strip.
The pressure on UNRWA cannot be separated from the broader political context aimed at liquidating the refugee cause by drying up the agency's resources and transforming it from an international witness to the crime into a powerless or ineffective institution. An attack on UNRWA is an attack on the right of return, on the Palestinian narrative, and on one of the last vestiges of international commitment to a people who have been paying the price for their Nakba for more than seven decades.
Despite all this, UNRWA continues its work, given the needs of millions of refugees and the fact that its existence is not a political favor, but a legal and moral obligation that cannot be extinguished by the passage of time. UNRWA's battle today is not merely a battle for funding, but a battle to keep the memory alive in the face of a project that seeks to erase the witness before erasing the crime.
Given this reality, the protests by Palestinian refugees in Lebanon against the current administration, represented by its German director, Dorothee Klaus, may seem surprising. However, the truth is that this director's actions align with American and Zionist desires to curtail UNRWA's operations and services in Lebanon. What are these actions?
This is what we will be addressing in the next article.