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 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.

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.

UNRWA has developed a massive infrastructure over the years. By expanding the definition of refugees under its care to automatically include the patrilineal descendants of refugees — unlike how the United Nations treats all other refugees — UNRWA has ballooned its registry to nearly 6 million, and its budget has swelled to more than $1 billion annually.

Mo Ghaoui is a naturalized US citizen and an UNRWA-recognized refugee. His citizenship would preclude him from refugee status under the 1951 Refugee Convention — but not so with UNRWA. Ghaoui entered an UNRWA office in Lebanon to pose the question: What if someone wanted to be removed from UNRWA’s list?

“Why?” the employee asked him, in Ghaoui’s account. “There’s nothing to lose. No one does it. No one. We don’t have this procedure.” The UNRWA staffer told Ghaoui that he cannot move past his victimhood identity in the agency’s books.

The enforced permanence of the Palestinian refugee issue is absurd. Thousands of Jews were displaced in the same war that led to UNRWA’s 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’s War of Independence.

Moreover, UNRWA was founded just years after the end of World War II, which saw more than 50 million people uprooted from their homes in Europe, including my grandparents. If UNRWA standards were applied universally, I would be a refugee thanks to my father’s birth in a displaced persons camp.

That would be preposterous — just like handing refugee status eternally to the descendants of those displaced in 1948.

For example, real estate developer Mohamed Anwar Hadid, whose father left Nazareth in 1948, is reported to 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.

The same applies for Zahwa Arafat, the daughter of Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian president who reportedly stole billions of dollars from his own people, allowing Zahwa to live in Paris and own prime real estate in London.

But UNRWA isn’t just a slap in the face to common sense — its support for terrorism is an obstacle to peace as well.

Of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees in Gaza, Israeli security documents revealed that 440 are active in Hamas’s military operations and 2,000 are registered Hamas operatives. At least nine UNRWA employees took part directly in the October 7 massacre, including at least one who stole the body of a dead Israeli and brought it back to Gaza as a bargaining chip.

In February 2024, Israel discovered a large Hamas data center underneath UNRWA headquarters that ran cables through the UN facility above. Hamas stored weapons in other UNRWA facilities. And a senior Hamas leader eliminated in an Israeli strike in September 2024 was the head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Lebanon.

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 praises jihadists, 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.

Moreover, several UNRWA staffers lauded the Hamas Oct. 7 atrocities on social media.

Meanwhile, UNRWA has campaigned alongside Hamas against the 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.

And as Mo Ghaoui’s 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 indulges the Palestinians’ desire to move to Israel en masse and overwhelm the only Jewish-majority country in the world.

The inflated rosters and expanding budgets have taken their toll on UNRWA. Several donor countries pulled funds over UNRWA’s collaboration with Hamas. The agency currently faces a $200 million deficit and is considering cutting services.

UNRWA’s critical services should be transferred to neutral bodies, with the ultimate goal of weaning Palestinians off UNRWA’s unrealistic and ahistorical promises.

Reform is not enough — UNRWA is an obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace and must be dismantled.

David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay.

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