But the narrative is that they don't want to help refugees.
UNRWA operates separately from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which was also established in 1949.
The commercial with Ukrainians is for UNHCR.
While UNHCR provides temporary protection and assistance to refugees, it does not have a mandate over Palestinian refugees within the UNRWA fields of operations.
In 1965, UNRWA changed the eligibility requirements to be a Palestinian refugee to include third-generation descendants, and in 1982, it extended it again, to include all descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, regardless of whether they had been granted citizenship elsewhere.
Unlike UNRWA, UNHCR has a specific mandate to assist refugees in
eliminating their refugee status by local integration in the current country, resettlement in a third country or repatriation when possible.
So basically, UNRWA with a staff of about 30,000 or so is just for Palestinians in certain places, where as UNHCR with a staff of about 12,000 is for the rest of all global refugees, including Palestinians
outside of the regions exclusively under UNRWA mandate.
UNRWA operates in five areas:
Jordan,
Lebanon,
Syria, the
Gaza Strip and the
West Bank, including
East Jerusalem. aid for Palestinian refugees outside these five areas is provided by the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). UNRWA is the only UN agency dedicated to helping refugees from a specific region or conflict in perpetuity. The UNRWA definition of "refugee" is meant solely to determine eligibility for UNRWA assistance.However, some argue it serves to perpetuate the conflict.
In recent decades, UNRWA has been involved in controversial incidents connected to its role in the Gaza Strip, relationship with
Hamas, textbook content, and potentially the
2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel also.
The High Commission UNHCR is mandated to help refugees get on with their lives as quickly as possible and works to settle them rapidly, most frequently in countries other than those they fled. UNRWA policy, however, states that the Palestinian Arabs who fled from Israel in the course of the 1948 war, plus
all of their descendants, are to be considered refugees until a just and durable solution can be found by political actors. UNRWA was specifically designed
not to prescribe how the outcome of an agreement would take shape.
That’s where this controversy lays. It’s the old “Poison Gum-ball Machine” senario. What %’age of the gumballs have to be poison in a gum-ball machine before you stop plugging your nickels into it?
en.wikipedia.org