If UNRWA Collapses, the ‘Palestinian Refugees’ Will be Looked After by UNHRC

UNRWA has been mired in scandal these last few years. In 2019, its Commissioner-General, Pierre Krähenbühl, resigned after becoming embroiled in a scandal involving accusations of nepotism, abuses of authority, and having an affair with an employee who did no discernible work but traveled around the world with him, an animated merkin flying first-class and staying in luxury hotels, all of it paid for by UNRWA.

Now a new scandal threatens not the employment of this or that official, but the very existence of UNRWA. For during the war in Gaza, the IDF discovered that 19 UNWA staff members had taken part in the atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, when 6,000 Hamas operatives smashed into Israel, and proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate (eyes gouged out, genitals cut off), and murder 1,200 Israelis, and to kidnap, and take back to Gaza 251 hostages. The IDF also found out, from documents it unearthed in Gaza, that at least 450 members of the UNRWA staff are members of Hamas. As one result, the United States has now ended its financial contribution to UNRWA. Israel has banned UNRWA from operating inside its territory. And the scandal of hundreds of UNRWA staff being part of a designated terrorist organization threatens to destroy the organization. The Director-General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, putting a brave face on it, has claimed that even if UNRWA collapses, the Palestinians will continue to receive special treatment unlike that given to all other groups of refugees in the world. More on his assertion, and the response to it, can be found here: “UNRWA director claims Palestinian refugee status would continue if @UNRWA ends. It is a lie.” Elder of Ziyon, February 16, 2025:

Al Jazeera interviewed UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini last week outside the Munich Security Conference, and he told a whopper of a lie:

Interviewer: Are there plans being made for a Plan B if if  UNRWA wasn’t there or is there not a plan B?

Lazzarini: Well, if UNRWA cannot operate anymore we will have to go back to the General Assembly.  Now I have also warned the member states, please do not make any mistake:  if we are unable to provide basic services to the Palestine refugees they will not lose their refugee status, and if they do not lose the refugee status, I mean, there will be more pressure on issues related to return or resettlement.

OK, let’s read the Refugee Convention, article 1D:

This Convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving  from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance.

This is the UNRWA exception to which refugees get protected by the Refugee Convention.

All other refugees are subject to the terms of the Convention on Refugees. The Convention does not apply to persons who receive protection from an agency of the UN, other than the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Only one group fits that description: the Palestinian refugees, whose assistance does not come from the UNHCR, but from UNRWA.

When such protection or assistance has ceased for any reason, without the position of such persons being definitively settled in accordance with the  relevant resolutions adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, these persons shall ipso facto be entitled to the benefits of this Convention.

This says that as long as UNRWA exists, Palestinians get protection from UNRWA, not the UNHRC like the rest of the world.

If UNRWA no longer exists or cannot provide protection for any reason, then Palestinians who are refugees would be protected by the UNHRC – and therefore have to follow the UNHRC eligibility requirements for being defined as refugees, which would exclude nearly all of the Palestinians that UNRWA considers “Palestine Refugees” today.

Palestinian refugees, as long as UNRWA exists, have been defined as including not just those who left or fled Mandatory Palestine, and then Israel, during the period from late 1947 to 1949, but also all of their descendants — children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. For the status of “Palestinian refugee” is treated as an inheritable trait. No other refugees in the world are treated in this astonishing manner. Henry Kissinger was a German Jewish refugee. His son David, born in New York City, is not. Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian refugee. His son Dmitri, born in Berlin, was not.

If UNRWA collapses, the Palestinians would then come under the protected of the UN High Commisssioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and that means they would be defined not as they are now (their status handed down to all of their descendants), but according to the UNHCR eligibility requirements, which would exclude from the definition of “Palestinian refugees” all of the descendants of the real “Palestinian refugees” — those who actually left Mandatory Palestine/Israel in the 1947-1949. Those original refugees, according to the UNHCR definition, are not counted in the millions; fewer than 25,000 of them are still alive.

When UNRWA collapses, as is now more likely than at any time in its squalid 75-year history, thanks to the entanglement of its staff with Hamas murderers, the Palestinians will come under the protection of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and will have to meet the UNHCR’s eligibility requirements. That means the status of “Palestinian refugee” will no longer be an inheritable trait. Now the Palestinians will be defined in the same way that all other refugee groups are defined: only those who left or fled a territory can be considered refugees, and not their descendants. At long last there will be no “Palestinian exception.” It will have been worth the wait.