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UNRWA: What It Does, Why It Matters, and Why It’s Under Attack

On any given school morning in Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, or in the Balata camp near Nablus, or in the Jabalia neighborhood of northern Gaza, children file into classrooms that exist because of a single UN agency: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, universally known as UNRWA. Those classrooms — along with hundreds of primary health clinics, food distribution points, and emergency cash assistance programs — represent the only functioning safety net for 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees across five fields of operation: Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

That safety net is now under sustained, possibly terminal, pressure. Understanding what UNRWA actually does — and who is trying to dismantle it, and why — is essential to understanding the broader Palestinian condition.

Where UNRWA Came From and What Its Mandate Covers

UNRWA was established by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) in December 1949, one year after the Nakba — the mass displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The agency began operations in May 1950. Its mandate has been renewed by the General Assembly continuously ever since, most recently through 2026. The mandate is explicitly temporary: UNRWA is meant to operate only until a durable political solution — including the resolution of the refugee question under General Assembly Resolution 194 — is achieved.

Seventy-five years later, no such solution exists. Instead, UNRWA has grown into an agency employing approximately 30,000 staff — the overwhelming majority of them Palestinian refugees themselves — and delivering services that no host government or alternative body has agreed to assume.

Those services fall into four broad categories. Education is the largest single budget line: UNRWA runs more than 700 schools across its five fields of operation, educating roughly half a million children. Health is the second pillar: some 140 primary health centers and clinic points provide basic medical care, maternal health services, and chronic disease management. Relief and social services cover food assistance and cash transfers for the most vulnerable — in Gaza before October 2023, this included regular food parcels for roughly one million people living in conditions UNCTAD has repeatedly described as de-development. Emergency response, always a part of UNRWA’s work, became its dominant mode of operation in Gaza after October 7, 2023, when the agency’s warehouses, schools-turned-shelters, and convoys became the primary — often only — channel for humanitarian goods reaching a besieged population.

The Geography of Dependency: 5.9 Million People, Five Fields

The scale of UNRWA’s reach maps directly onto the scale of Palestinian displacement. In Jordan, more than 2.3 million registered refugees live, the majority holding Jordanian citizenship but retaining refugee status; UNRWA runs 173 schools there and serves a population whose legal protections remain tied to the agency’s continued recognition of their status. In Lebanon, where Palestinian refugees are constitutionally barred from dozens of professions and cannot own property, UNRWA’s schools and clinics are not a supplement to the state — they are the state, for a population of around 489,000 registered refugees living largely in camps like Shatila, Burj el-Barajneh, and Ain al-Hilweh. In Syria, before the civil war UNRWA served approximately 560,000 registered refugees; the war decimated that population and destroyed multiple UNRWA installations, yet the agency has continued to operate.

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, UNRWA serves nearly 900,000 registered refugees in 19 camps. Its clinics provide care that the Palestinian Authority’s overstretched system cannot fully cover, and its schools educate generations of children in camps like Jenin, Dheisheh, and Aida. In Gaza — before the current war already the most densely populated territory on earth — UNRWA was the backbone of public services for a population where roughly 80 percent are refugees. As of late 2023 and through 2024, UNRWA reported that more than 150 of its staff had been killed in Gaza, and numerous UNRWA facilities had been struck, in what the agency’s Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini called an assault on the agency itself.

The 2018 Defunding: A Precedent That Emboldened Opponents

UNRWA’s funding has always been precarious. Unlike UNHCR, which serves all other refugee populations globally, UNRWA receives no assessed contributions from the UN budget — it depends entirely on voluntary donations from member states. The United States was historically the single largest donor, contributing roughly $350 million annually.

In August 2018, the Trump administration cut all U.S. funding to UNRWA, withholding approximately $300 million. The stated rationale shifted over time — from concerns about the agency’s financial model to, ultimately, ideological objections to UNRWA’s definition of refugee status, which includes descendants of the original 1948 displaced persons. Critics of the cut, including UNRWA itself, Human Rights Watch, and UNRWA’s then-Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl, argued that defunding the agency would not resolve the refugee question but would instead destabilize Jordan and Lebanon and deepen suffering in Gaza. The Biden administration restored U.S. funding in April 2021.

The 2018 episode demonstrated something important: that UNRWA could be weaponized as a pressure point against Palestinian political claims, and that donor states could be moved to suspend funding through political campaigns rather than documented evidence of institutional failure.

The 2024 Campaign: Israel’s Push to Ban UNRWA

In January 2024, Israel alleged that a number of UNRWA employees — it initially cited a figure of twelve — had participated in or had foreknowledge of the October 7 Hamas attacks. UNRWA immediately placed the named individuals on administrative leave and launched an independent review. Multiple major donors, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and others, suspended funding within days of the Israeli allegations, before any independent findings had been released.

The independent review, led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna and published in April 2024, found no evidence that UNRWA as an institution had violated neutrality, while recommending improvements to the agency’s oversight mechanisms. Several donors subsequently restored funding. But Israel went further: in October 2024, the Israeli Knesset passed two laws — one banning UNRWA from operating on Israeli territory, including in relation to crossing points into Gaza, and one prohibiting Israeli authorities from coordinating with the agency. UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the legislation, if implemented, would make it “nearly impossible” to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. The UN General Assembly, the ICJ, and numerous human rights organizations condemned the measures.

What Collapse Would Mean

UNRWA is not a perfect institution. It has documented administrative problems, and no institution of its size and operating environment is without failures. But the question of UNRWA’s imperfections is categorically different from the question of what replaces it if it ceases to function.

The honest answer, at present, is: nothing. No host government has agreed to absorb its functions. No alternative UN mechanism exists. The World Food Programme, WHO, and UNICEF have all stated they cannot substitute for UNRWA’s integrated service delivery model. For the children in Shatila, for the patients in the Jabalia clinic, for the families receiving food parcels in Khan Younis, the collapse of UNRWA would not be an abstraction. It would mean no school, no doctor, no food. Refugee scholar Leila Hilal and legal scholar Noura Erakat have both written that attacks on UNRWA are, at their core, attacks on the legal and material recognition of Palestinian refugee status — an attempt to dissolve a claim, not just an agency.

The UN General Assembly created UNRWA because it recognized an obligation. That obligation has not expired. The refugees are still there.

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