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UNRWA Forces Refugee Status on Palestinians in Perpetuity — Even Against Their Wishes
Security personnel work at the UNRWA headquarters, in Jerusalem, May 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
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.
The post UNRWA Forces Refugee Status on Palestinians in Perpetuity — Even Against Their Wishes first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Rubio Heads to Israel Amid Tensions Among US Middle East Allies
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to members of the media, before departing for Israel at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, US, September 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard/Pool
US President Donald Trump’s top diplomat, Marco Rubio headed to Israel on Saturday, amid tensions with fellow US allies in the Middle East over Israel’s strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar and expansion of settlements in the West Bank.
Speaking to reporters before departure, Rubio reiterated that the US and President Donald Trump were not happy about the strikes.
Rubio said the US relationship with Israel would not be affected, but that he would discuss with the Israelis how the strike would affect Trump’s desire to secure the return of all the hostages held by Hamas, get rid of the terrorists and end the Gaza war.
“What’s happened, has happened,” he said. “We’re gonna meet with them. We’re gonna talk about what the future holds,” he said.
“There are still 48 hostages that deserve to be released immediately, all at once. And there is still the hard work ahead once this ends, of rebuilding Gaza in a way that provides people the quality of life that they all want.”
Rubio said it had yet to be determined who would do that, who would pay for it and who would be in charge of the process.
After Israel, Rubio is due to join Trump’s planned visit to Britain next week.
Hamas still holds 48 hostages, and Qatar has been one of the mediators, along with the US, trying to secure a ceasefire deal that would include the captives’ release.
On Tuesday, Israel attempted to kill the political leaders of Hamas with an airstrike on Doha. US officials described it as a unilateral escalation that did not serve American or Israeli interests.
The strike on the territory of a close US ally sparked broad condemnation from other Arab states and derailed ceasefire and hostage talks brokered by Qatar.
On Friday, Rubio met with Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani at the White House, underscoring competing interests in the region that Rubio will seek to balance on his trip. Later that day, US President Donald Trump held dinner with the prime minister in New York.
Rubio’s trip comes ahead of high-level meetings at the United Nations in New York later this month. Countries including France and Britain are expected to recognize Palestinian statehood, a move opposed by Israel.
Washington says such recognition would bolster Hamas and Rubio has suggested the move could spur the annexation of the West Bank sought by hardline members of the Israeli government.
ON Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed an agreement to push ahead with a settlement expansion plan that would cut across West Bank land that the Palestinians seek for a state. Last week, the United Arab Emirates warned that this would cross a red line and undermine the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords that normalized UAE-Israel relations in 2020.
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Netanyahu Posts Message Appearing to Confirm Hamas Leaders Survived Doha Strike
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a Plenum session of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, in Jerusalem, June 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – In a statement posted to social media on Saturday evening, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the Qatar-based leadership of Hamas, reiterating that the jihadist group had to regard for the lives of Gazans and represented an obstacle to ending the war and releasing the Israelis it held hostage.
The wording of Netanyahu’s message appeared to confirm that the strike targeting the Hamas leaders in Doha was not crowned with success.
“The Hamas terrorists chiefs living in Qatar don’t care about the people in Gaza,” wrote Netanyahu. “They blocked all ceasefire attempts in order to endlessly drag out the war.” He added that “Getting rid of them would rid the main obstacle to releasing all our hostages and ending the war.”
Israel is yet to officially comment on the result of the strike, which has incurred widespread international criticism.
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Trump Hosts Qatari Prime Minister After Israeli Attack in Doha
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani attends an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, following an Israeli attack on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, at UN headquarters in New York City, US, Sept. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
US President Donald Trump held dinner with the Qatari prime minister in New York on Friday, days after US ally Israel attacked Hamas leaders in Doha.
Israel attempted to kill the political leaders of Hamas with an attack in Qatar on Tuesday, a strike that risked derailing US-backed efforts to broker a truce in Gaza and end the nearly two-year-old conflict. The attack was widely condemned in the Middle East and beyond as an act that could escalate tensions in a region already on edge.
Trump expressed annoyance about the strike in a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sought to assure the Qataris that such attacks would not happen again.
Trump and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani were joined by a top Trump adviser, US special envoy Steve Witkoff.
“Great dinner with POTUS. Just ended,” Qatar’s deputy chief of mission, Hamah Al-Muftah, said on X.
The White House confirmed the dinner had taken place but offered no details.
The session followed an hour-long meeting that al-Thani had at the White House on Friday with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
A source briefed on the meeting said they discussed Qatar’s future as a mediator in the region and defense cooperation in the wake of the Israeli strikes against Hamas in Doha.
Trump said he was unhappy with Israel’s strike, which he described as a unilateral action that did not advance US or Israeli interests.
Washington counts Qatar as a strong Gulf ally. Qatar has been a main mediator in long-running negotiations for a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza, for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza and for a post-conflict plan for the territory.
Al-Thani blamed Israel on Tuesday for trying to sabotage chances for peace but said Qatar would not be deterred from its role as mediator.