OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)
Caught between deep internal austerity measures and mounting political and field-level pressures, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is facing one of the most serious challenges in its history. The agency has become the target of an escalating campaign that many see as part of a broader effort to undermine the future of the Palestinian refugee question and the right of return.
Over recent months, UNRWA’s administration has implemented a harsh package of austerity measures that have struck at the heart of the agency’s operations. These measures include a 20 percent reduction in the salaries of locally recruited staff, the freezing of long-overdue promotions, the cancellation of currency-adjustment allowances, and the termination of hundreds of employees through layoffs and contract non-renewals.
The cuts have also affected staff members who were forcibly displaced during the war on Gaza or who continue to work under increasingly difficult conditions in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.
At the same time, the salaries and benefits of senior international officials within the agency’s upper management have remained untouched, raising serious questions about how the financial crisis is being managed and who is being asked to bear its burden.
These measures are unfolding alongside a broader process aimed at redefining UNRWA’s role. Critics argue that the agency is being gradually transformed from a relief institution with a political and legal mandate tied to the Palestinian refugee issue into a narrowly service-oriented body operating under donor-imposed conditions. Within this framework, the concept of “administrative neutrality” is increasingly being used in ways that affect employees directly, restricting their ability to object to or protest austerity policies.
Targeting the refugee camp
Parallel to these developments, Palestinian refugee camps themselves have come under intensified attack as symbolic and political reservoirs of the refugee cause.
In recent months, refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarem, Nur Shams, and Balata have witnessed unprecedented destruction of civilian infrastructure. In Gaza, UNRWA facilities, including schools, health centers, and shelters have also been targeted, as part of what many Palestinians view as an effort to render refugee camps unlivable and push residents toward yet another cycle of displacement.
These developments coincide with broader political efforts directed against UNRWA. At various stages, proposals have emerged seeking to restrict the agency’s operations or undermine its legal status and funding structure, threatening its ability to continue serving nearly six million registered Palestinian refugees across its five fields of operation.
A strategic campaign
Ali Huwaidi, Director General of the 302 Association for the Defense of Palestinian Refugee Rights, argues that what is unfolding is not merely a financial crisis or a set of administrative cutbacks.
“This is a systematic strategic project led by Israel and the United States,” Huwaidi told the PIC correspondent, “aimed at liquidating the Palestinian refugee issue by targeting UNRWA, which remains the last international witness to that cause.”
According to Huwaidi, the strategy relies on financially suffocating the agency and tarnishing its reputation before the international community under the pretext of funding shortages. He argues that the necessary resources do, in fact, exist within UN member states, but decisions to release or withhold funding are ultimately driven by political calculations.
He further contends that the long-term objective is to detach the refugee question from the international legal framework governing it particularly the UN resolutions affirming the right of return and compensation. Those rights, he stresses, remain inalienable and do not expire with time, regardless of whether UNRWA continues to exist.
Huwaidi notes that the very resolution that established UNRWA explicitly safeguarded refugee rights. Yet, he says, that framework is being gradually weakened through efforts to diminish the agency’s role and strip it of its political and symbolic significance.
Regarding funding, he points out that Arab and Islamic support for UNRWA has consistently fallen short of expectations. Such support, he argues, should have constituted a stable and predictable share of the agency’s budget. Instead, reliance on voluntary contributions has left UNRWA vulnerable to recurring financial crises.
He concludes that unless meaningful financial and political commitments are made, the agency’s ability to fulfill its mandate will continue to deteriorate at a time when efforts to politically and legally reshape the Palestinian refugee file are accelerating.
Targeting the idea itself
In Gaza, Israeli bombardment and destruction of UNRWA facilities have resulted in the deaths of dozens of agency employees and injuries to hundreds more, an unprecedented toll in the history of the United Nations.
For writer Mohammed Al-Madhoun, the objective extends far beyond the destruction of buildings.
“What is being targeted is not merely physical infrastructure,” he argues, “but an institution that continues to remind the world that there is a people who have not returned to their homeland, and that the refugee question remains unresolved.”
Alongside military attacks came what he describes as a political offensive: relentless incitement campaigns, systematic accusations, growing financial pressure, and sustained attempts to dry up the agency’s funding sources. As a result, UNRWA has been forced into a daily struggle for survival.
In this view, the crisis can no longer be understood as a simple budget deficit. Rather, it has evolved into a comprehensive project aimed at dismantling the UN mandate upon which the agency was founded and redefining its role in ways that strip it of its political, legal, and rights-based dimensions.
Al-Madhoun argues that the campaign against UNRWA is, at its core, not an attack on a humanitarian institution but an attack on the very idea that Palestinian refugees possess rights, that a standing UN resolution continues to affirm those rights, and that Palestinian collective memory remains alive.
This, he says, explains the repeated attempts to replace UNRWA with alternative bodies, transfer its services to other institutions, or reduce the entire refugee question to a humanitarian issue severed from its national, historical, and political roots.