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What are we to make of UNRWA, the UN “relief agency” for the so-called Palestinian “refugees”?
Aid organizations for refugees are meant to improve the situation of refugees, not worsen it. They are meant to ease international tensions, not exacerbate them.
A comparison between UNRWA and UNKRA illustrates how these two approaches differ. Both organizations were established around the same time.
UNKRA vs. UNRWA
UNKRA was the UN relief agency for refugees from the Korean War. Although it was responsible for three times as many refugees as UNRWA, a smaller budget was sufficient to resettle all refugees—about two million—within just five years. Once its work was done, the organization disbanded in 1958.
In 1949, UNRWA was responsible for approximately 700,000 Palestinian refugees. Its budget was significantly higher than that of UNKRA. Nevertheless, UNRWA has not reduced the number of refugees to this day; on the contrary, it has multiplied it: Nearly six million people are currently listed as refugees by UNRWA.
Why is it that only UNRWA has failed to fulfill its mission, but has instead made the problem worse and worse over time?
Because it never wanted to solve the problem.
A Murderous Mission
UNRWA is an almost exclusively Palestinian institution that, under the guise of the UN, pursues a murderous mission: to destroy the State of Israel through the so-called “right of return for refugees.”
All Palestinian “refugees,” according to this demand, should be granted Israeli citizenship. The more “refugees” there are, the more certain it would be that Israel could be destroyed as a Jewish state through this means. That is why UNRWA is doing everything in its power to drive the number of so-called “refugees” to ever-new, absurd heights.
“Right of return for refugees”? Everything that could possibly be wrong about this term is wrong:
- It is not a return, because these people have never lived in Israel.
- It is not a right, because as a sovereign state, Israel has the right to decide for itself whom it grants citizenship to and whom it does not.
- These are not refugees, but their descendants, now in the fifth generation.
Sometimes not even the first generation were “refugees” from “Palestine.” For even Lebanese seasonal workers who had only worked temporarily in Galilee were summarily declared Palestinian refugees by UNRWA—and with them, all their descendants.
How many refugees would there be worldwide today if all the refugees of the 20th century—numbering several tens of millions—had been able to pass on their refugee status? What claims would they be making today, and what wars would they be instigating?
In fact, refugee status is hereditary only among the Palestinians. All other refugees in the world were told: “Yes, your fate is harsh. Yes, it is tragic. Now come to terms with it and build a new life for yourselves in your new homeland.”
And that is what they did. Only for the Palestinians was a mechanism created through UNRWA that keeps them perpetually looking backward, mourning a past that never existed, and forever burdening them with the conflicts of their great-great-great-great…-grandparents.
Refugees? What refugees?
In 2023, nearly six million people were registered as “refugees” with UNRWA. Most of them are not refugees as defined by the internationally binding Geneva Convention on Refugees:
- 2.2 million live in the West Bank and Gaza. They have, therefore, long been living in the territory they claim as “Palestine.” How can they be refugees under those circumstances?
- Another 2.2 million hold citizenship in other countries in the region, such as Jordan. How can a Jordanian citizen, born in Jordan, who has never lived anywhere else, be a “refugee” from Israel?
- Added to this are millions of citizens of other countries worldwide. By what right are they still referred to as “refugees”?
- 250,000 Palestinians live in Syria and Lebanon without having obtained citizenship there. They are stateless, but that does not make them refugees.
Only about 30,000 of the Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon are “refugees” under international law: those who have not lived in Syria and Lebanon since birth, but who once crossed the border as war refugees.
30,000: That is less than one percent of the nearly 6 million Palestinians whom UNRWA lists as refugees.
And what does UNRWA teach the so-called “refugees” in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan?
Learning Objective No. 1 in UNRWA Schools: Hatred of Jews
UNRWA students are indoctrinated from an early age with the Palestinian national ethos of revenge and return: The Jews—as stated in UNRWA textbooks—have no right to their own state, nowhere in the area “between the river and the sea.” The Palestinians, the children are taught, will destroy Israel, whether through the “right of return” or through terrorism.
Since the 1950s, UNRWA textbooks have portrayed the “return” to “Palestine” as a bloody triumph over the Jews. Playing a key role in future massacres: that is the ideal toward which the children are indoctrinated.
And the seeds are taking root. It is no coincidence that violence is particularly high where UNRWA is most influential: in Gaza and Lebanon. For at UNRWA, terror against Jews is not an accident. It is intentional.
It’s that easy to deceive the West
Outwardly, UNRWA presents itself as a humanitarian organization. The letters “UN” in its name are meant to suggest that it is a UN organization. In reality, however, UNRWA does not receive a single cent from the UN but is funded exclusively through donations. To generate these donations, the organization employs about a hundred international staff members. Germans, Swiss, and Italians are put forward as UNRWA spokespeople so that international donors can delude themselves into thinking they are dealing with an innocent aid organization.
But behind the scenes, the approximately 30,000 exclusively Palestinian staff members determine the direction the organization takes. And for decades, that direction has led, time and time again, to outright terror.
For that is UNRWA’s true purpose: to ensure that the Jewish state never experiences a single day of peace until it is wiped out.
The Result: Terror, Terror, Terror
From the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics to the horrors of October 7, 2023, nearly all of the terrorists were former UNRWA students. The fact that UNRWA employees were also involved in the crimes of October 7 only proves once again the organization’s close ties to Hamas.
In addition to instilling hatred, terrorist strategists in Gaza view UNRWA’s primary mission as relieving Hamas of responsibility for the well-being of the civilian population: UNRWA is supposed to cover Hamas’s back so that it can focus entirely on slaughtering Jews.
Terrorist Indoctrination, Courtesy of Germany
There is a simple reason why Israel has ended its cooperation with UNRWA: The Israelis do not want to support the enemy that is forcing their sons and daughters into a never-ending war.
Germany, on the other hand—the legal successor to the Nazi state—continues to support this deadly anti-Semitic organization without batting an eye.
Source: Einat Wilf (2026), Wartime Writings