UNRWA From Its 1949 Founding to the Fight Over Aid for Palestinian Refugees

On December 8, 1949, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution with a dull number, 302, and a dull purpose. It created an agency to provide "direct relief and works programmes" for the Arabs who had fled or been driven from their homes in the war that accompanied Israel's founding. The planners imagined something short-lived. The refugees would be resettled or go home, the reasoning went, and in the meantime they needed food, tents and some kind of work, perhaps on public-works projects such as roads and terracing. The agency was given a mouthful of a name, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, and a temporary mandate that the General Assembly would have to renew. It has renewed it ever since. Notice that word, works. The agency's founders thought the answer to a refugee crisis was jobs. What it became instead tells you a great deal about why the conflict has lasted as long as it has.

In short: UNRWA began in 1950 as a stopgap for about 700,000 Palestinian refugees and grew into the main provider of schools, clinics and relief for millions of their descendants across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. In 2024 Israel accused some staff of joining the October 7 attacks, major donors paused funding and the Knesset passed laws that cut the agency off from Israeli authorities, setting off a fight over whether it should be reformed, replaced or protected.

A temporary agency for a temporary problem

In the war of 1948, roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel. Palestinians call it the Nakba, the catastrophe. The causes have been argued over by historians for decades, and the honest summary is that both flight from fighting and expulsion happened, in different places and at different times, and that Israel did not allow the great majority to return afterward.

The refugees ended up in Gaza, then under Egyptian control; in the West Bank, annexed by Jordan; in Jordan itself; in Lebanon and in Syria. They lived first in tents, then in the concrete-block camps that still exist. The UN had already passed Resolution 194 in December 1948, saying that refugees wishing to return home and live at peace with their neighbours should be allowed to do so, and that compensation should be paid to those choosing not to return. That resolution has been a cornerstone of Palestinian claims ever since, and Israel has rejected a general right of return as incompatible with its existence as a Jewish state.

UNRWA began operating on May 1, 1950. A year later, when the world wrote the 1951 Refugee Convention and set up the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Palestinians were placed outside that system: the convention excludes people already receiving protection or assistance from another UN agency. That separation is the source of many later arguments.

The works became schools

The public-works idea faded within a few years. Large resettlement schemes found few takers among refugees who wanted to go home and few governments willing to absorb them. What grew instead was everything a state normally provides.

UNRWA became a school system, eventually one of the largest in the Middle East, with hundreds of thousands of pupils at a time and a reputation, among development experts, for decent results on very little money. It ran health clinics, maternal care and vaccination programmes. It provided food and cash to the poorest, microfinance loans, camp infrastructure and social services. Almost all of its tens of thousands of staff were Palestinian refugees themselves: teachers, nurses, doctors, sanitation workers.

It also defined who counts as a Palestine refugee for its purposes: people whose normal residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and who lost both home and livelihood in the 1948 conflict, along with their descendants through the male line. Registered refugees today number in the millions, spread across its five fields of operation.

Five fields, five different lives

It is easy to talk about "the Palestinian refugees" as if they shared one situation. They do not, and the differences explain a lot.

In Jordan, most refugees from 1948 were granted Jordanian citizenship. They vote, work and own property, and many have never lived in a camp. For them UNRWA is mostly a school and a clinic system among other options.

In Lebanon, the picture is very different. Palestinians there have long been barred from many professions and from owning property, partly because Lebanon's fragile sectarian balance makes politicians unwilling to absorb a large, mostly Sunni population. Lebanon's camps are crowded and poor, and UNRWA is often the only provider of basic services.

In Syria, refugees for decades had most of the rights of citizens without citizenship itself. The civil war that began in 2011 shattered that. The Yarmouk camp in Damascus, once a bustling district, was besieged and largely destroyed, and many Palestinian refugees were displaced a second time.

In the West Bank and Gaza, refugees live under occupation or blockade, alongside non-refugee Palestinians, and in Gaza refugees make up a majority of the population. UNRWA there functions almost as a parallel public service.

The point is that whether UNRWA looks like a lifeline or a crutch depends heavily on where you stand. Where host governments have given refugees rights, dependence on the agency has shrunk. Where they have not, it has grown.

The argument about descendants

Here is the critique most often made of UNRWA, and it deserves a fair statement.

Critics, including successive Israeli governments and many American politicians, argue that by registering descendants as refugees, generation after generation, UNRWA keeps the refugee question open forever and keeps alive a demand for return that no Israeli government will accept. They argue that it gives the conflict a permanent constituency rather than helping people build new lives, and that a normal refugee system would by now have integrated most of them into the countries where they live. Some also point to UNRWA school materials that, according to critics and some independent reviews, at times contained hostile or antisemitic content, much of it drawn from host-government curricula, which UNRWA is generally required to use.

The response has several parts. First, UNHCR also recognizes the descendants of refugees in prolonged situations, such as Afghan refugees in Pakistan, as part of the same refugee population; the practice is not unique to UNRWA. Second, UNRWA does not decide the refugees' political future. That is a matter for the parties and the host states. Lebanon, for example, has for decades restricted Palestinians' access to property ownership and many professions, which keeps them dependent. Third, the agency has said it reviews teaching materials and removes content that violates UN values, while admitting the process has had failures. The descendant argument is really about the conflict, not about the agency. Abolish UNRWA tomorrow and the refugees, the camps and the claims would still be there; what would vanish are the schools and clinics.

October 7 and the allegations

The agency's long-running political fight turned into an existential one in January 2024.

That month Israel told UNRWA and donors that twelve of the agency's staff had taken part in the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. UNRWA's commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, fired the staff named, and the UN launched an investigation through its Office of Internal Oversight Services. Within days, more than a dozen donor governments, including the United States, which had long been the agency's largest donor, suspended funding.

Two reviews followed. An independent review of UNRWA's neutrality, led by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna and published in April 2024, found that the agency had more developed mechanisms for ensuring neutrality than comparable UN bodies, identified real gaps and recommended improvements, and said that Israel had not yet provided supporting evidence for its broader claim that a significant number of UNRWA employees were members of terrorist groups. The internal UN investigation reported in August 2024 that nine staff members may have been involved in the attacks and that their employment would be terminated; in other cases the evidence was insufficient or did not support involvement.

The Israeli military also said it had found a Hamas tunnel and data centre running beneath UNRWA's headquarters in Gaza City. UNRWA said it had evacuated the compound in October 2023 and had not known what was underneath.

Most donors restored funding after the Colonna review. The United States did not. Congress barred US funding for UNRWA in the spending law it passed in March 2024, and the ban continued after that. American support had been cut once before, during the first Trump administration in 2018, and restored by the Biden administration in 2021, so the agency's fortunes in Washington have swung with the parties.

The Knesset's laws

In October 2024 Israel's parliament passed two laws by large majorities. One bars UNRWA from operating in Israel's sovereign territory, which in Israeli law includes annexed East Jerusalem. The other bars Israeli officials and bodies from having contact with the agency. The laws took effect at the end of January 2025.

The practical effect was larger than the text. UNRWA depends on Israeli coordination to move goods and staff into Gaza and the West Bank, and its international staff need Israeli visas. Its East Jerusalem headquarters and facilities were affected directly. The agency's international staff left, its Gaza operations continued largely through local staff under very difficult conditions, and in the West Bank its operations were squeezed alongside Israeli military operations in refugee camps in the north.

The war itself had already devastated the agency in Gaza. UNRWA schools had become crowded shelters for displaced families, and many were struck. Hundreds of UNRWA staff were killed in Gaza during the war, the largest number of UN personnel killed in any conflict in the organization's history.

In October 2025 the International Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion, requested by the General Assembly, on Israel's obligations toward the UN and humanitarian relief in the occupied Palestinian territory. The court said Israel, as an occupying power, must facilitate relief schemes provided by the UN and its agencies, including UNRWA, and found that Israel had not substantiated its claims that a significant part of UNRWA's staff were members of Hamas or other armed groups. Israel rejected the opinion. Advisory opinions are authoritative statements of law but are not binding in the way judgments between states are.

Reform, replace or protect

So what should happen to UNRWA? The options on the table are real, and so are the trade-offs.

Replace it with other UN agencies, the Palestinian Authority, host governments or private contractors. Supporters of this view say a new structure could break with the agency's history and win back donor trust. The obstacle is capacity: no other body has the schools, staff, supply chains and local knowledge, and building them during a humanitarian catastrophe is slow.

Reform it with stricter vetting, independent monitoring of staff and curricula and tighter controls on facilities. The Colonna review set out a list of such steps, and UNRWA said it would implement them.

Protect it as it is, on the view that attacks on the agency are really attacks on the refugees' status. That position risks ignoring real failures that the agency itself has acknowledged.

Here is the argument this site would make, labelled as opinion: reform and protect, together. The people who would suffer from UNRWA's collapse are children who need a classroom and a vaccination, not the politicians who argue about the agency. Strict, transparent neutrality is not a concession to Israel; it is the condition for the agency's survival and its credibility with the people it serves. And the debate over the refugee question belongs in a peace negotiation, not in a fight over whether a ten-year-old in a camp in Gaza or Jordan gets to go to school.

The founders' word

The 1949 resolution imagined that jobs and public works would end the refugee problem within a few years. That was the original design: get people working, and politics would take care of the rest. The opposite happened. Politics never took care of the rest, and so the agency kept running the schools. The lesson is not really about UNRWA at all. It is that humanitarian relief can hold people's lives together while politics fails, but it cannot replace politics, and when politicians refuse to settle a conflict for seventy-five years, the relief agency ends up blamed for the waiting room.

You can follow the reporting on refugees, aid and the agency's future on our Gaza and Palestine page and on the wider human rights and foreign aid page.

What you can do

1. Learn the agency's actual work. UNRWA publishes on its own site what it runs in each of its five fields, how many pupils it teaches and what its budget gaps are. Start there before forming a view.
2. Ask Congress about the US funding ban. The ban on American funding for UNRWA came through spending laws, so it is a decision Congress makes. Look up your members on the representatives page, which gives their phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes, and ask whether they would support restoring humanitarian funding with conditions on vetting and monitoring.
3. Check how they voted. Appropriations bills and amendments touching UN agencies appear on the Congress votes and bills page, where you can see each recorded vote.
4. Support refugees where you live. The organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause in every state, including immigrant services and legal aid groups that help refugee families resettled in the United States.
5. Separate the agency from the conflict in conversation. When someone argues that UNRWA prolongs the conflict, ask what should happen to the schools and clinics the next morning. The answer tends to clarify everyone's thinking, including your own.