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Recently several Western countries announced that they had suspended funding to UNRWA, the United Nations agency responsible for providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees, pending the results of an investigation into the alleged role of some of its employees in the terrorist attacks. Hamas on October 7 against Israeli civilians. The accusations had been raised in recent days by some Israeli officials. UNRWA is an organization with a long and complicated history, and this is not the first time its funding has been suspended.
Its full name is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, but it is also known in Italy by its English acronym UNRWA. It is separate from UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, which deals with all other refugees in the rest of the world. Since 1949, it has provided humanitarian assistance to Palestinians who have left their homes or are living in refugee camps in Israel, the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and neighboring countries (mainly Syria, Jordan and Lebanon).
After the first war between Israel and several Arab countries in 1948, around 700 thousand Palestinians had to leave their homes, occupied by Israel. These people and their descendants in many cases still live in refugee camps, which have partly consolidated over time: contrary to the common imagination of “refugee camps”, the Palestinian ones also have tens of thousands of inhabitants and brick buildings, but there are no however, many essential services are available, and living conditions are extremely precarious. UNRWA defines them «hyper-congested masses of multi-storey buildings with narrow alleys, among the most densely populated urban environments in the world». Some refugee camps were created after the Six-Day War in 1967.
Today there are approximately 5.9 million Palestinians registered as refugees with UNRWA. The agency’s initial mandate was to provide job-finding assistance (as the name implies) and direct support to refugees, but over time its operations have greatly expanded. Today the agency is responsible for providing food, water, education, healthcare and other social services, and also partly takes care of the infrastructure of refugee camps.
– Read also: What are Palestinian refugee camps
It currently employs around 30 thousand employees: almost all of them are Palestinian refugees themselves, while a small part comes from other countries. The accusations of participation in the October 7 attacks concern 12 employees. At the moment it is not clear what they did to be “involved” in the attacks, nor what role they had in the agency, which however announced that it had opened an internal investigation.
In the Gaza Strip there are 1.7 million Palestinians registered as refugees, out of a population of approximately 2 million. UNRWA employs approximately 13,000 people in the Strip, making it one of the main employers in the area. In the refugee camps, unemployment – which is also high in the rest of the territory – reaches 46 percent and UNRWA estimates that over 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and depends on aid from the agency to survive and access basic services. The situation only worsened with the beginning of the conflict between Hamas and Israel, which since 7 October has constantly bombed and partly militarily occupied the territory of the Strip.
After October 7, UNRWA set up makeshift shelters in clinics, schools and other buildings it owned to provide refuge to the population of Gaza. 90 percent of people in the Strip had to leave their homes, and more than 25,000 people were killed, according to data from the Gaza health ministry. Among these there were also around 150 UNRWA employees.
I financing from foreign countries they are UNRWA’s main source of financial support: their donations in 2022 made up 99.4 percent of its annual budget. In the same year the agency had collected around one billion euros: almost half of these, 470 million, came from the governments of the member countries of the European Union and from the European Commission. Also in 2022, the single country that donated the most money was the United States, with the equivalent of 316 million euros, followed by Germany with 185 million euros. Both in recent days they have announced that they have suspended financing. Other important financiers include Japan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
This is not the first time that criticism of UNRWA has led to its funding being stopped. The United States had done so in 2018: at the time Donald Trump’s administration had defined UNRWA as “an irremediably flawed operation”. In 2019 Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands had done the same because an internal investigation to the agency he had highlighted cases of mismanagement, abuse of authority at high levels, nepotism and discrimination carried out “for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent and to otherwise achieve one’s individual objectives”. All these countries then decided to restore funding.
Over the years, the very definition of “Palestinian refugees” has been the subject of political discussions and disputes, because “refugees” continue to be defined as people who were born and live in settlements that are in fact permanent. This status it is recognized to “all persons whose habitual residence was in Palestine between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948”, as well as to their children, grandchildren and descendants through the paternal line. UNRWA has therefore cared for various generations of Palestinian refugees, who today were largely born in refugee camps.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly called on the United Nations to abolish UNRWA, which he says fuels refugee precariousness rather than alleviating it, and to stop considering people born outside Israel as refugees. UNRWA has also been accused by Israel of collaborating with Hamas: having to operate in the Gaza Strip, governed by the radical group since 2007, in many cases the agency is forced to work closely with Hamas, considered by Israel to be a terrorist. Nonetheless, the extent of their collaboration is much discussed: UNRWA, however, has repeatedly distanced itself from Hamas’ methods and condemned the violence against Israelis.
– Read also: The countries that have suspended funding to the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees