The Middle East and North Africa is one of the world’s most gender unequal regions; it will take an estimated 140 years for MENA countries to establish parity between men and women. The existing gender gap has had serious ramifications for women, limiting their access to the labor market and economic empowerment. These women are not only hindered by challenging economic conditions and political instability, but also by restrictive gender norms. 

In addition to rampant gender disparities, the MENA region is also identified as a climate change hot spot; it is home to 13 of the world’s 20 most water-stressed countries. It is expected that about 90 million of the region’s inhabitants will be at risk of water stress by 2025. Additionally, the region is warming faster than the global average. Researchers predict that summer temperatures will rise by 4°C by the end of the century. The combination of heat and drought is set to accelerate desertification, which is extremely concerning for  a region whose terrain is already over 82 percent desert. Existing social problems, like gender inequality, exacerbate these growing environmental hazards. Understanding how climate change intersects with gender in the realm of agriculture, migration, and conflict is key to designing effective and lasting policies that support women’s safety and empowerment. 

Land Workers, Not Landowners 

It is estimated that of the approximately 1.3 billion people living in poverty in the region, roughly 70 percent are women. Women are also the primary users of natural resources because of the gendered productive and reproductive responsibilities which are dependent on these resources. Women in developing countries are responsible for growing vegetables, rearing livestock, food storage and transport from the villages, food processing and production, and fetching water and fuel wood for households. Yet women are always underrepresented in natural resource decision-making and are often denied land ownership. 

Agricultural production, for example, depends largely on rural women, with women representing over 50 percent of the agricultural workforce in the region; women make up 45 percent of this workforce in Egypt and over 60 percent in Jordan, Libya, and Syria. Despite the prevalence of women in agriculture, discriminatory laws and social norms impede women’s access to necessary resources, such as land, water, and credit. 

A report from the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas indicates that women own less than 5 percent of the agricultural land in the MENA region. Women’s land rights are restricted not only by a lack of implementation of existing laws but also by prevailing patriarchal gender norms that often discriminate against women, resulting in obstacles for women to acquire and retain land. Although Sharia-based inheritance laws do not prevent women from owning land in the MENA region, there are a number of factors that curtail women’s ability to exercise control over land. 

These include the complexity of land registration systems, lack of access to information and knowledge about land laws and national land policies, and customary laws that in some cases force widowed or divorced women to cede their share of family land to their brothers in exchange for economic support.

In the light of the aforementioned issues, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN indicates that out of eight world regions, the MENA region has the lowest rates of female agricultural land owners. In Jordan, for instance, women’s land rights are secured through comprehensive legal frameworks but women still own only 17 percent of land, while men own 48 percent. Similarly, while Sudan’s national land laws do not discriminate based on gender, women are still more likely to be landless. Even when women own land, male-biased inheritance practices and regressive social norms obstruct women from land management and impede their access to the necessary credit, capital, and technology. For example, male members of the household may coerce women into relinquishing their rights, ejecting them from their land in case of the death of a husband, and excluding them from decisions about the sale, lease, or management of their land.

The impacts of these legal and cultural restrictions are exacerbated by climate change, which poses a growing threat to the natural resources required for agricultural production. For instance, due to traditional gender norms, women are often employed on farms as casual workers, giving them very little social security in the event of a climate crisis. Thus, they are often the first to be laid off in times of disasters like droughts and crop failures. When these climate disasters take place, women farmers (who are often heads of households or the primary breadwinners) are likely to lose their livelihoods. 

Climate hazards can also worsen pre-existing gender divides and emphasize social vulnerabilities.  For example, it is estimated that 50  percent of Syrian refugee women working in Lebanon are employed in agriculture  because it is one of the few sectors open to refugees. Many of these women are also the heads of their households. However, many have lost their jobs in recent years due to significant crop failures (triggered by heat waves) that dried up many of Lebanon’s rivers and springs. These women, who are refugees with limited job opportunities and employed only in a casual capacity, have no way to mitigate these economic losses or obtain more stable work. In the MENA region, mobility at times of climate disasters is not gender neutral. Climate-induced women migrants are faced with multidimensional vulnerability and insecurity throughout the migration process and even after they settle in their new host communities.

Vulnerability in Migration

As the climate crisis intensifies, more people have been driven to leave their homes, displaced either within their countries or across borders. It is estimated that 223,000 internal displacements occurred as the result of severe droughts, flash floods, storms, or other climate catastrophes throughout 2021. In the face of climate shocks, men are more mobile; they are more likely to migrate to urban centers in search of alternative employment opportunities. Conversely, patriarchal structures and gendered social obligations limit the mobility of women, both inside and outside the household, particularly at times of climate shocks. A report issued by the UN Women Regional Office for Arab States shows that women in the MENA region carry the biggest share of care work, performing 4.7 times more unpaid care work than men—the highest female–to–male ratio anywhere in the world. This means that women are often left behind to handle the family care responsibilities. Furthermore, with a higher level of illiteracy among women in rural communities, they have more difficulties than men in understanding early warning messages. Women’s mobility is also restricted by the fear of sexual and gender-based violence outside the home.

For example, in Syria, the record drought from 2006 to 2010 drove dispossessed farmers—most of them men—from the country’s breadbasket to urban peripheries, leaving the women behind. This forced women to become heads of household, taking on the men’s farming work in addition to their regular (unpaid) household responsibilities. This made them susceptible to various forms of exploitation and violence.

Climate-induced migrants of all genders face complex and significant risks during the moving process. However, women migrants in particular are faced with multidimensional vulnerabilities and insecurity throughout the migration process. These vulnerabilities continue even after they settle in their new host communities. For instance, female migrants may be separated from their families and subjected to exploitation and human rights violations. These include a heightened threat of arbitrary detention, sexual exploitation, and human trafficking. Female refugees are particularly susceptible to trafficking when they are moving through unsafe migratory routes without concrete protection measures (women account for 71 percent of human trafficking victims). 

Sexual violence against women migrating via the Mediterranean routes, particularly through illegal channels, is endemic. A recent study showed that Syrian refugee women who lacked the funds to pay smugglers and border guards were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation. This has been seen in refugee camps in both the MENA region and Europe.

In addition to a greater likelihood of being subjected to human rights violations, women are 14 times more likely to die than men; this is due to the difficulties women face in accessing adequate health care, food, water, and sanitation.For example, it was found that women migrants suffer from inadequate health services due to poor health literacy (particularly across sexual and reproductive topics), challenges in navigating complex healthcare systems of the host countries, and fear of prosecution especially among undocumented migrants. 

Even after reaching their destinations, women refugees are more likely to experience intersectional forms of discrimination. This discrimination is based on a compounded set of factors, including place of origin, religion, race, and socioeconomic status. These factors can restrict women’s access to employment, housing, education, and health services and make them vulnerable to  social exclusion.

Traveling between countries is particularly difficult due to a lack of consistent legal protection for refugees across borders. The Geneva Convention, which handles international regulations, outlines protections for those who are persecuted for their political orientation, race, nationality, religion, or because they belong to a specific social group.  The Geneva Convention does not provide protection for people who are displaced because of existential climate risks. However, there are a number of other policy frameworks that address the intersection of climate-induced migration and gender, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Platform for Disaster and Displacement, Global Compact on Refugees, Kampala Convention, and Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction. 

These international instruments offer important visibility to climate refugees and to the extensive risks associated with climate change, particularly gender-based violence. However, they are not legally binding; states are not required to provide legal protection for climate-induced migrants, whether within or between borders. Furthermore, there is no regional agreement that addresses cross-border migration in the context of climate change. Instead, most countries prefer to develop individual legal frameworks that mainly address internal, rather than cross-border, displacement. Only two countries have enacted relevant policies to protect internally displaced people, Iraq in 2008 and Yemen in 2013. 

Climate change worsens the severity of conflicts particularly for women. In the MENA region,  the deteriorating securitarian conditions, coupled with the dire climate hazards, are exacerbating the challenges of water scarcity, food insecurity, and forced displacement.

A Warming and War-torn Region

Climate change, in combination with poor governance and structural inequalities, can worsen the severity of existing conflicts and increase the likelihood of future ones. In 2020, six fragile and conflict-affected countries in the MENA region were hit with severe climate hazards. Droughts, floods, and other climate disasters exacerbate the depletion of natural resources; this scarcity is often found at the center of regional conflicts.  

For example, conflicts among agro-pastoralist communities often erupt over inadequate pasture space and water points; it is estimated that the number of such conflicts is likely to increase by 54 percent with every one degree increase in temperature. This is particularly relevant in the MENA region, where agriculture, fisheries, and livestock account for about 15 percent of the total population’s livelihood; additionally, 70 percent of the region’s crops are rain fed, which is more susceptible to weather changes than other forms of irrigation. Therefore, changes in precipitation and extreme weather events present a major threat to food security and economic stability, escalating the risk of violent conflicts. 

This trend is evident in Syria where multiple studies emphasize the importance of the 2007 and 2008 multi-year drought, which caused widespread crop failure, worsening conditions for the rural population, and increased migration from drought-affected regions. The issues of water scarcity, food insecurity, and economic distress, combined with pre-existing soci-economic inequalities and political discontent, intertwined to play an important role in the eruption of Syria’s violent insurrection in spring 2011. 

Syria’s prolonged crisis has had a profound impact on its population, with 6.8 million refugees displaced internally and more than 5 million displaced to neighboring countries; roughly half of these refugees are women. These women were extremely susceptible to sexual and gender-based violence; girls were obligated to drop out of school and the majority of displaced women were (and continue to be) deprived of their most basic needs, like food and healthcare. 

Similarly, in Yemen, climate change plays an important role in the protracted armed conflict ongoing since 2015. Water scarcity has historically been a pressing issue in Yemen. In 2012, the water availability per capita was assessed to be as low as 86 cubic meters per year, one of the lowest in the region. This chronic water scarcity has had profound impacts on agriculture, as one third of the population works in small-scale subsistence farming. Agriculture yields for essential crops like wheat, maize, and vegetables have been significantly reduced; this has decreased household incomes and caused alarming food insecurity. 

Some 19 million people in Yemen are grappling with food insecurity and lack access to safe and drinkable water; nearly 60 percent of these people are women and girls. In addition, about 2.5 million children under the age of five and 1.5 million pregnant and lactating women suffered from acute malnutrition over the course of 2022. 

Through almost one decade of consistent armed conflict, water has become both a weapon and casualty of war. Due to its scarcity, water has been used as a military target;  attacks on water infrastructure and supply chains have taken a devastating toll on local communities, particularly women and girls because they are usually responsible for collecting water for their families. As water sources decrease, women have to walk longer distances, with a high likelihood that they may step on landmines or encounter gender-based violence. In addition, girls are forced to drop out of school to take care of increased household responsibilities and unpaid domestic activities. 

Additionally, about 4.5 million Yemenis have been internally displaced; roughly 70 percent are women and children. Fifty percent of them have ended up in makeshift sites that not only lack basic services but are also located within 5 kilometers of active conflict zones, disproportionately exposing them to the dangers of armed conflict.

Environmental problems are also destabilizing southern Iraq—especially Basra; in 2018, water scarcity, coupled with the government mismanagement of water quotas, instigated confrontations between southern tribes which then escalated into armed conflicts.  In 2021, an acute drought resulted in the reduction of water flows in the Tigris River by 29 percent and the Euphrates River by 73 percent. A subsequent survey examining 7 Iraqi governorates revealed that 37 percent of wheat farmers and 30 percent of barley farmers suffered crop failure, which resulted in shrinking incomes (particularly for women) and alarming food insecurity among farmers’ families. As climate change continues to exhaust resources and aggravate socio-economic and political tensions, an estimated 3,000 families—including women-headed households—have been displaced across central and southern Iraq.

Water scarcity has also been a chronic challenge for Gaza and its 2.3 million inhabitants since October 7. The World Health Organization indicates that the share of water for each individual is less than a gallon per day; 20 gallons is the minimum needed for proper hygiene. 

About 90 percent of Gaza’s water is pulled from groundwater wells, primarily the Coastal Aquifer Basin. In 2018, the World Bank reported that this coastal aquifer had come under increasing pressure from rising sea levels and infiltration of salt water. This problem is currently exacerbated by the war on Gaza; reports from UNICEF indicate that Israeli airstrikes have been targeting water infrastructure and desalination plants, cutting off access to aquifers in the Strip. This has caused Gaza’s water production capacity to drop to 5 percent of typical levels. In addition, it is reported that Israeli forces have razed 22 percent of farms and agricultural land in northern Gaza, leading to a significant decrease in local agricultural production and worsening malnutrition among the 300,000 people still living there, particularly pregnant and lactating women.

The deteriorating securitarian conditions, coupled with the dire climate conditions, are exacerbating the challenges of water scarcity, food insecurity, and forced displacement. Of all the people facing catastrophic hunger or famine worldwide, Gazans alone account for 80 percent percent; the majority of them are women and children.

Recognition of Female Farmers: Women as Landowners and Not Casual Workers

Since climate change is not a gender-neutral experience, governments in the MENA region must ensure that women are playing an active role in discussions on environmental policy and are receiving adequate support at the institutional, legal, and financial levels.

As previously explained, the agricultural sector is the largest employer of women in the MENA region. Women have developed significant knowledge and skills related to the collection and storage of water, the preservation and rationing of food, and the prediction and mitigation of natural disasters. However, women also suffer from dangerous working conditions, crop failures, unstable incomes, lack of health insurance and social protection, discriminatory laws, and regressive cultural norms that obstruct their land ownership. 

Government authorities need to advance the legal and social recognition of women’s contributions to the agriculture sector through the gathering and analysis of gender-disaggregated data on the opportunities and constraints faced by female farmers. This will help to design policy frameworks that eliminate women’s marginalization, make their voices equally represented, and protect their legal right to land titling and management. This goal is achievable: in Morocco, female farmers formed women-led cooperatives to mobilize for better wages and working conditions. These organizations pool resources and help increase their members’ access to credit and non-land assets such as livestock, equipment, and technology. Such promising initiatives need to be integrated in other countries throughout the region.

Protecting and Empowering Women Migrants: Legal Mechanisms and Economic Opportunities 

Women who are displaced by climate crises are facing a gap in protection. While the guidelines suggested by international organizations have the potential to help internally-displaced climate migrants, they remain non-binding. Thus far, these guidelines have not been effectively integrated into local legislation and where this legislation is present, it rarely addresses the issue of gender.  

Some countries in the MENA region have already made commitments through their National Action Plans to secure the human rights of women and girls, particularly in conflict settings. For example, countries such as Iraq, Tunisia, Sudan, Palestine, Yemen, and Lebanon have adopted 1325 National Action Plan that entails taking  special measures to protect women and girls from all forms of gender-based violence that is particularly widespread during times of violent conflict. However, there is still no unified and comprehensive regional framework for cross-border migration that provides adequate protection to vulnerable groups—particularly women—during the migration journeys and in the post-migration phase. 

MENA governments should aim to provide regular and safe pathways for women that have been displaced by climate disasters, informing migrants in advance about the living conditions in destination areas, such as the availability of assistance, legal protections, and work opportunities. This will enable migrants to proactively decide if, when, and where they migrate. Equally important, governments need to create comprehensive and effective mechanisms that criminalize gender-based violence against refugees, particularly at entry points and refugee camps.

Women and Peace-Making: Women are Not Mere War Victims

While addressing the immediate impacts of climate change on women is key, it is important to remember that environmental hazards are also a political problem. As explored above, the MENA region is conflict-plagued; an alarming number of people migrate as a result of a pernicious confluence of violence, deteriorating socio-economic conditions, and escalating climate hazards. These problems are worsened by a global disinterest in advancing peace in the region. 

If women are to be protected, the international community must stop these armed conflicts; if the international community wishes to stop these armed conflicts, it must challenge the global structure of militarism. In 2023, the world military expenditure reached an all-time high of $2443 billion, marking nine years of consecutive rise. The MENA region bore the biggest military burden that year; 4.2 percent of the region’s GDP was put toward military spending, double the global average. The soaring value of military expenditures—amid a global economic downturn and accelerating environmental disasters—indicate that we have built our societies to fight wars, not promote peace. 

Furthermore, we need to speak differently about women in this war-torn region. Rather than being presented as peace builders, women are often portrayed only as war victims. This is understandable, given that women are still significantly underrepresented in peace processes. In the UN, only 13 percent of negotiators, 4 percent of signatories, and 3 percent of mediators between 1992 and 2018 were women.  However, in order to change these realities, we must begin to recognize the contributions that women have made to peace, enable them to join negotiations, and support their ability to bring change. 

We need to amplify a narrative that treats climate change as an emergency which is quickly approaching its damaging tipping point sooner than expected. This sense of emergency is crucial in mobilizing collective efforts to stop the climate breakdown.  It is equally important to stress that war is not just a tremendous waste of resources that could be used to accelerate climate action, but is itself a significant reason behind the environmental harm that falls disproportionately on marginalized groups, notably women. Therefore, women and other marginalized groups need to voice their grievances, share their lived experiences, actively lead climate action, and shape the peace-making processes in their communities. Only then we can speak about achieving climate justice for all and building sustainable peace.

In March of this year, the Taliban published an audio recording of one of its leaders, Haibatullah Akhundzada, vowing to reintroduce public stoning against women charged with adultery. He claimed this decision  was the latest stage in the Taliban’s “war” against the West, which he declared would continue for decades to come.

The Taliban has violently utilized religion as a tool to systematically perpetuate the economic, legal, and physical subjugation of women. This practice engenders an oppressive social environment which leaves women without the means to escape. The international community, which rallied around the protests in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2023, has remained largely silent on the women’s security crisis raging in Afghanistan. Attempting to bring the world’s attention back to the Taliban’s war against women amid the current state of global polycrisis feels akin to screaming into the void. 

Public Stoning and Sharia Law
The use of public stoning as a legal punishment is rooted, as with all of the Taliban’s judicial and legislative frameworks, in a strict, literal interpretation of Sharia law, or Islamic law. In Islamic law, adultery is considered a hudud crime, which is a “moral crime” against Allah and constitutes the most serious level of offence under Sharia law. As a result, crimes of this degree garner more severe punishments. Punishments for adultery range from 100 lashes to death by stoning, depending mainly on the marital status of the accused.

However, despite the precedent set in the hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and Sharia law, there are also strict evidentiary requirements that must be met for these punishments to be carried out. In the case of zina (adultery), four witnesses must be able to provide consistent eyewitness accounts of intercourse that took place between the accused and the third-party. Similarly, any confession of guilt must be given voluntarily and repeated four times by the accused.

Due to the extremely high requirement of evidence for such charges, the punishments prescribed for hudud crimes are often interpreted as predominantly deterrence mechanisms and thus are rarely implemented in modern Islamic countries. Although provisions for public stoning as a capital punishment exist in the penal codes of some of these countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, these punishments are rarely carried out. Whilst there have been some notable cases in countries like Sudan, the practice remains largely confined to the cultural, community level rather than a government-mandated practice.

The Taliban implemented capital punishment in the late ‘90s during its previous stint in power, disproportionately imposing it on women. Women were often charged without trial and, where a trial did take place, the requirements outlined by the Islamic legal tradition were not upheld. Though reports have indicated a continuation of these punishments in recent years, Akhundzada’s statement is the first public declaration confirming and promoting this practice. The Taliban’s return to this form of corporal punishment is therefore neither a surprise nor a novel development; it is a repetition of history. This fact should not mitigate the ramifications of this declaration.

Dimensions of Subjugation

The reintroduction of public stoning as a punishment for adultery is just the latest development in the Taliban’s weaponization of Qur’anic doctrine against women. The Taliban continued to wage their war against women even during the country’s democratic period (2001-2021). In lieu of the all-encompassing subjugation they had exercised during their reign, they began using a predominantly ideological approach, disseminating inflammatory discourse that decried “women’s rights” as a form of Western propaganda.     

Despite their banishment from power during those years, some members of the Taliban continued to subject women to disciplinary violence within the confines of their limited operational capacity, mainly in remote and rural regions of the country. This was seen most evidently through the highly publicised stoning of a young woman in 2015. However, this era can be best understood as the ideological incubation phase of the Taliban’s long-term subjugation strategy. Despite their vast military losses, this approach worked to maintain their ideological authority and foster an anti-democratic cultural environment. 

Following their reconsolidation of power in 2021, and despite public statements declaring their intent to uphold women’s rights in the country, the Taliban has employed the legal and normative subjugation of women by incrementally degrading their right to vote, pursue education, and work freely. In the years following the fall of Kabul, the Taliban gradually introduced legislation to bar women and girls from attending schools and universities, as well as minimising their opportunities for employment. The role of women was once again constricted to the domestic sphere and the rights and opportunities that the democratic government had spent almost two decades building were destroyed, leaving in their place a downtrodden vision of the new Afghan woman.

This success of the regime in enforcing this normative suppression has paved the way for the resurgence of violent, physical suppression. Executions and floggings are commonplace in the Taliban’s Afghanistan (both during their previous reign and today), particularly for women. The recent statements concerning the use of public “death by stoning” against women as a legal punishment for adultery therefore come as no shock. 

Due to the obscured reporting environment and lack of a transparent and formalised penal code, there is little evidence to prove that this punishment has been written into law by the Taliban. However, the gradual re-introduction of violent punishments since 2022 and the group’s history of violent subjugation suggest that this practice may have continued covertly since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. In 2024, it seems this hidden practice will once again become public. 

The Taliban’s persistent removal of women’s rights has culminated in this return to the barbaric practices that were characteristic of the regime’s first stint in power. By failing to halt the ideological oppression of women, the international community has left the door open for the physical violence coming next.

No Means of Escape

An integral component of the Taliban’s war against women is fostering economic isolation, achieved by restrictive policies regarding work and education. These restrictions leave women without the financial means to sustain themselves or escape. 

In the twenty-year period under the democratic government, new economic opportunities for women resulted in the creation of over 57,000 female-owned businesses. According to a February 2021 UN Women report, the national female unemployment rate was only ten percent. Employment rates remained comparatively lower in rural areas, where weak state institutions and strong patriarchal values limited the potential for women’s economic progress. Overall, however, the female employment rate significantly increased. While barriers to gender equality still existed during this time, it was a positive period for women’s economic and political participation.

Following the Taliban’s takeover in 2021,however, new laws immediately demanded the separation of women and men in office environments and eventually required the complete removal of women from certain workspaces. By the latter half of 2022, a report by the International Labour Organisation projected the rate of female employment to have dropped by twenty-five percent. As economic freedom waned, compliance became the only social currency available to women with which they could secure their safety.

The economic situation for women under the Taliban regime is in dire straits. In 2024, Afghanistan ranked 178 out of 180 in the World Bank’s annual report on female economic participation and empowerment. In 2023, the UN Secretary-General specifically addressed the Taliban, calling on the regime to lift its restrictions on women’s work and education. Women’s economic empowerment was a priority theme in this year’s UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. In March, the UN shared its Women’s Economic Empowerment strategy, which advocated for achieving this goal by offering financing for gender equality, working to change social norms, and introducing macroeconomic policy changes. While these recommendations present clear strategies for UN member states, they all suffer the same fault; they can do virtually nothing to improve the situation for women in rogue states like Afghanistan. 

With women being outlawed from workplaces and confined to the domestic sphere, their ability to develop economic independence from their fathers or husbands has been completely removed. As a result, the Taliban has effectively shackled women in place. Whilst many have been able to flee, often supported by friends and family outside of the country, a large number remain trapped with no means of escape. 

International Implications

In an era of polycrisis, raging geopolitical tensions, and war on multiple continents, an unspoken question echoes within the silence of the international community: how does this problem affect us? The answer is two-fold.

The Taliban’s Afghanistan is an exercise in state building driven by strict religious fundamentalism, which utilizes and reproduces codified gender inequality. The success and continuation of the Taliban’s war against women is a consequence of the failure of the international community to hold the regime accountable for their persistent human rights violations. If the regime succeeds in the subjugation of women through a severe interpretation of Sharia law that brazenly rejects Western notions of human rights, it will set a dangerous precedent for other fundamentalist groups. Akhundzada’s discursive framing of the eradication of women’s rights as an operation of the group’s ongoing “war” against the West frames every new repressive policy as a failure of Western hegemony. While the United States and Western Europe may not see the ramifications of this on their own streets, extremist groups in neighbouring countries like in Pakistan will be emboldened to extend similar control mechanisms in their home countries. 

Beyond the humanitarian and political consequences of the Taliban’s war against women, countries in Western Europe will continue to bear the brunt of the mass migration of asylum seekers that continues to pour out of Afghanistan. 

The reception of Afghanistan’s migration crisis in Europe is, in some ways, a mixed bag. In terms of policy, countries have taken different approaches to the growing issue. In the United Kingdom, despite the government’s dedicated Afghan resettlement scheme, the Conservative party’s current immigration policies (such as the highly controversial Rwanda scheme) have engendered an inhospitable environment for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. In a seminal election year, the tide is unlikely to turn in favour of more lenient borders. In Europe, some governments, such as Germany, Finland, and Sweden, have recently begun granting refugee status to women and girls from Afghanistan. However, these policies, and others regarding refugees and asylum seekers, have been met with concerns regarding their impact on culture and security for these countries at the civic level. Migration continues to be a primary concern for all European countries, who are facing the consequences of years of insecurity in the Middle East in the form of a never-ending migration crisis. 

The Taliban have been left virtually unattended, allowed to operate at will despite the countless violations of human rights exercised by the regime daily. It is important to continue to raise awareness about these ongoing violations of the regime against women and girls. Ahead of the third UN meeting of Special Envoys and Special Representatives on Afghanistan (scheduled for June 30, 2024 in Doha) various human rights organisations have demanded that women’s rights be included as a primary theme of discussion and a foundational pillar in the standards and expectations set forward by the international community. As the UN continues its process of constructing a strategy for the future of Afghanistan in the global arena, women’s rights must remain a focal point and prerequisite for any international engagement with the Taliban. 

While the women’s rights crisis in Afghanistan will continue to be overlooked by the international community in favour of more immediate macro-security issues, the issue is not going to reach a favourable conclusion of its own accord. Despite promises otherwise, the Taliban has become even more brazen in their resolve to enforce a gender apartheid. The women of Afghanistan, rendered voiceless by their government, will continue to scream into the void. 

The subjugation of international law to the overruling notions of realpolitik is increasingly discussed in both legal and non-legal circles. To break down this issue’s manifestations in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, the Cairo Review’s Omar Auf spoke with Richard Falk, the former UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories from 2008 to 2014.

Currently Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Falk is the author and editor of many books on international law, justice, and the international system.

This Q&A is an abridged version of an episode of Podcast Palestine: the War on Gaza published on May 20, 2024.

Cairo Review: How do we begin to make sense of the situation on the ground in the language of international humanitarian law in terms of accountability and responsibilities?

Richard Falk: To begin with, Israel, from an international law perspective, is the occupying power of Gaza, and as such has an unconditional obligation to protect the civilian society and the population. Explicitly by the Fourth Geneva Convention governing belligerent occupation, it is obliged to make sure that the civilian population has the humanitarian assistance that is required for its physical and mental health, and that includes food and medical supplies, water, electricity, and so forth.

Israel has done two things. It has responded to the October 7 attack with an onslaught that recognizes no obligations to comply with international humanitarian law, or with the status it possesses of being the occupying power of an occupied people. In addition to that, it has been supported consistently by the liberal democracies of Europe and North America.

So, you have a situation where the law is on one side, and morality is on that same side, but the political balance has not been sufficiently strong in favor of granting the rights that the Palestinian people deserve. And so, we have this lawlessness of Israel dominating the situation.

And with the extremity of the genocide that has occurred, there has been some effort by Israel’s main supporters, including the United States, to try to suggest that Israel is obliged to allow humanitarian assistance to get to a starving and devastated Palestinian people. But Israel has, in one way, seemed to accept that pressure, but at the same time, it’s resisted and continued to do things that make it hazardous and, in some sense, impossible to provide the Palestinians who are under great stress, not only from the dangers of famine and starvation, but also disease and general living conditions—which have become non-viable.

The reality has emerged that you have a kind of half-hearted humanitarian undertaking and, at the same time, you have the Israeli military operation continuing under this false banner of the right to defend itself, which is almost totally irrelevant to the kind of motivations and seeming objectives of Israel in carrying out this response to this degree.

You’ve frequently spoken about a politics of diversion or politics of deflection exercised by Israel. Today, this politics is directed in large part at UNRWA. So what is the effect of this politics of diversion as it played out with UNRWA, both in terms of immediate disaster and lives lost, as well as the long-term political ramifications of it?

Yes, that’s a very important issue that Israel has exploited in various ways. And as you suggest, the UNRWA allegations came the day after the ICJ reached its findings in favor of the request for provisional measures that were basically accepting the allegations that South Africa was making. And what was enabled by doing that is to shift the focus from the outcome in the International Court of Justice to the impact and the rationale for this UNRWA deflection from the existential reality of the suffering of the Palestinian people and the threat to their physical and mental survival.

Since October 7, alarm bells of analysts and policymakers have been sounding in terms of the possibility of drawing other parties in and regionalizing the conflict. The United States and its Arab allies have done a fair amount of work to ensure that this does not happen.

Given the importance of the Palestinian cause to the people of the region, do you think the focus on the possibility of conflict or instability spreading is justified? And if so, then between whom is this conflict going to take place?

There’s so much uncertainty at the present time. Netanyahu and his coalition government are cornered in a sense. They face failure on several grounds. They have not succeeded in destroying Hamas. They have not succeeded in getting the hostages released. And they have alienated world public opinion to a degree that they’ve become a pariah country and likely one that is the target of violence in the future, whatever happens in Gaza in the weeks to come. So you have a cornered leader that has very few options left.

The West and particularly the United States are allied with Israel partly for the civilizational and political reasons and partly an expression of the domestic politics in these countries, which exhibit very strong Zionist networks of pressure and funding that exert an influence on the political behavior of the government.

In my own country, the United States, it’s very evident that politicians have come to the conclusion that they have very little to gain by taking a balanced view on Israel-Palestine and a lot to lose because they will then become the targets of AIPAC and other strong, well-funded Zionist lobbying groups. And that is happening in an election year in the United States with the targeting of those few people in the U.S. Congress who have attempted to take a more humanitarian view or have been critical of the way in which Israel responded to October 7.

With those background realities, in addition to the uncertainty about access to the energy resources, and as you pointed out, the tension between the governments in the region and the publics, creates a great deal of uncertainty and instability, and exerts pressure on these governments, the Arab governments in the region, to be very autocratic in their methods of governing. They feel very vulnerable to a population that doesn’t share either their views on the rights of peoples, or is equitable when it comes to economic and political questions of the sort that Palestine poses.

So Palestine is, from an academic point of view, a textbook example where governments are following one line of policy that is at odds with the overwhelming majority views of their own population. And to make that work requires intimidation and, to some extent, continuous repression. So it’s a very consequential set of challenges for the peoples and the elites of the region.

You’ve expressed the view that the Nakba is and should be seen not as a single event that occurred in 1948, but as an ongoing process of displacement and dispossession that continues today. Within this framework, the violence and indeed the genocide that has taken place since October 7, does it present itself as an escalation of a continuing Israeli policy? 

In general, I would say that the Nakba process culminates in this genocidal phase, that the earlier reliance on a variety of tactics designed to complement the Nakba of 1948, including the imposition of apartheid—another very fundamental crime of an international character—that those intermediate steps didn’t satisfy the maximal Zionist agenda of extending Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank, and more recently to the Gaza Strip.

And so this pattern, which is characteristic of settler colonial projects, you find it in all the breakaway British colonies, of which the United States is the most important, but the Canada, Australia, New Zealand, they went through a phase of eliminating, or at least radically marginalizing, the indigenous native people. And that was an invariable feature of successful settler colonialism.

The tactics that are used to achieve the goals of maximal Zionism have to be more drastic. And where the native population is not marginalized successfully, as in South Africa or in Algeria, the settler project fails. Either it is completely defeated, as in Algeria, or there’s a transition to constitutional democracy, as in South Africa.

Israel has confronted this resistance with ever more drastic measures of repression and exploitation and domination, culminating in genocide.

So one has to think back before October 7 and accept the idea that was widely discussed at the time that this new coalition government headed by Netanyahu that had taken power at the beginning of 2023 was the most extreme government in the history of Israel. And what made it extreme was that it was pledged to implement more consistently and more violently the agenda of maximal Zionism and the idea of a greater Israel that absorbed the occupied territory. And indeed, that is what partly provoked a higher level of resistance on the Palestinian side.

And it was focused in most people’s minds, including my own, on the struggle over the West Bank, which was seen as the site of the settlement and also the more valuable agriculturally in terms of water resources and even security that is viewed in a larger sense. The Israeli tactics seem to be designed to have a pretext for some sort of accelerated pressure brought to bear on the Palestinians. So they would have received the message in effect of leave or die.

That’s the bottom line message of this sort of genocidal effort of marginalization and forcible evacuation. And from the very first days of the Netanyahu coalition in January of 2023, the settlers were given a green light to engage in violence on the West Bank. They burned villages and they did a number of things that looked like they were creating a situation that would make the West Bank unlivable for the great majority of Palestinians.

The settlers actually pinned this message to cars on the West Bank after their own demonstration. Just those three words, leave or die.

With regards to the United Nations, the UN’s flaws are very clear, as well as a lot of its benefits. At the end of the day, it’s an intergovernmental organization and the way it’s designed, it makes it so if any of the superpowers disagree, the subject of disagreement probably won’t take place. 

The UN probably wouldn’t have come into being if it wasn’t designed like this specifically, but at the same time, there is some leeway, some democracy in the General Assembly, in the Human Rights Council, and there’s a sort of moral authority that comes with the UN.

What are the channels that could be used to transform the UN into something more aligned with the idealism it stands for but was not entirely designed with?

I finished a book in collaboration with a former high official of the UN Secretariat, former Assistant Secretary-General Hans von Sponeck of Germany, that will be published very shortly by Stanford University Press. And the essence of the argument is that the UN to be effective needs to be reformed in certain fundamental ways, including restricting the veto and empowering the General Assembly, making it more democratic.

Of course, the basic bargain at the UN, which is sort of disguised by the preamble to the UN Charter, is that it holds accountable ordinary members but grants a privileged status to the winners of World War II, or the five countries that are made permanent members of the Security Council with an unrestricted right of veto—in effect a signal that geopolitics has primacy over respect for international law or the UN Charter.

That tension between geopolitics and law that is built into the core of this bargain. A Mexican delegate to the original UN founding meeting described it as saying: we’ve created an organization which holds the mice accountable while the tigers run free. It’s that peculiar notion of making the organization more effective in relation to the weak states that don’t need so much constraining as it is to the strong states that they make no real effort to constrain.

And that reflects in part the experience of the League of Nations that was established after World War I, which was seen as faithfully weak because it didn’t include the participation of important geopolitical actors like the United States.

This sort of Faustian bargain was affirmed by Franklin Roosevelt, among others, who felt that the cooperation that existed during World War II against fascism would be sufficient to uphold the peace after the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan, which was a very naive idea about the nature of international conflict. And so we’re stuck with this dilemma of an impotent or marginally relevant UN and a popular desire for a UN that fulfills the promise of war prevention in the preamble to the UN Charter.

There is a summit on the future of the UN scheduled for September in New York, but I’m very skeptical about whether any meaningful progress will occur.

Israel has been pursuing a war of revenge against Gaza for the October 7 cross-border attack by Hamas fighters that left 1,200 Israelis killed, and hundreds of civilians and soldiers captured or taken hostage.

But world sympathy for Israel quickly dried up as the media showed the horrific images of Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, killed by Israeli military strikes on refugee shelters and health care facilities in the days and weeks after October 7.

With the Palestinian death toll nearing 40,000, and the Israeli government shrugging off demands even from its allies to agree a ceasefire, global public opinion shifted to one in solidarity with Gaza.

An almost universal call for a ceasefire brought out hundreds of thousands of protestors in major cities across the globe. Numerous global agencies and public figures proclaimed that the carnage wrought on Gaza by the Israeli military was indeed a genocide.

As voices—including those of Western leaders—condemning Israel grew louder, Israeli officials had to do something. They wanted to score a political victory that could help remove from the international horizon a major international agency that had come to symbolize the central Palestinian cause: the right to return to their homeland.

A turning point came in late January when South African lawyers at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague prepared their case accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

But even as opening arguments and evidence of genocide were presented at the ICJ, the Israeli government and its foreign supporters were conducting a synchronized campaign to discredit and demobilize an important United Nations agency.

With no evidence but plenty of media fanfare, Israel accused twelve Palestinian employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) of having been accomplices in the October 7 Hamas cross-border attack.

Despite having no evidence to share with the global community, Israel called on its allies in the West to stop or at least suspend funding UNRWA after what it said was irrefutable proof of the employees’ involvement in October 7.

Before UNRWA could respond to Israel’s accusations, almost all major Western donors toed the line and followed Washington’s lead to suspend its funding immediately.

The fact that Israel is known to use heavy-handed detention and imprisonment practices—and according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, has used torture to extract confessions—did little to give pause to it’s Western supporters who quickly called for dismantling UNRWA for fear they would be perceived as aiding terrorism and supporting antisemitism.

UNRWA officials demanded proof, but Israel has at the time of writing failed to produce any.

The Israeli gambit against UNRWA fell into shambles.

Within weeks of Tel Aviv making public its allegations against UNRWA, some Western donors—many considered to be stalwart Israel allies like Canada and Germany—resumed their donations to the beleaguered relief agency.

Despite this, the United States and United Kingdom have not resumed funding, with the former suspending funding for the agency until at least March 2025.

It is not surprising that Israel would attempt to destroy UNRWA at a time when its brutality in Gaza was coming under public scrutiny and condemnation around the world, with even erstwhile supporters demanding it agree to a ceasefire.

Israel has for years targeted UNRWA because the central premise of the relief agency’s mandate is the return of Palestinian refugees to their ancestral homeland, a nightmare scenario for hardline officials like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

From Return to Resettlement

Seventy-five years earlier, when the state of Israel was born, Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by Israeli militias and armed groups from hundreds of villages and towns. More than 750,000 Palestinians who were living in what Israel declared to be its state on May 15, 1948, became refugees overnight. These sudden refugees who were forcibly displaced as they fled the brutality of Zionist armed attacks and massacres, flooded the nearby areas of the West Bank (which would later be annexed to Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (which was administered by Egypt). They also managed to find refuge in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and areas in the east bank of the Jordan river. Palestinians who were living in the center and southern areas of historic Palestine crowded into the seaside strip of Gaza. In time, those refugees would become the majority of its population who today are yet again forced out of their homes.

Unused land plots were given to the temporary refugees, unknown to them or local governments that this was no temporary status but would become a decades-long housing problem. Unable to return after the war as a result of the new state of Israel’s refusal to allow them back home, the refugees lived in tents and later corrugated iron-roofed shanty homes usually in an exceedingly small geographic area.

Images of Palestinian refugees in the first winter of 1948 and subsequent years would be shown around the world prompting the United Nations to move quickly to address this humanitarian crisis. The UN, which replaced the League of Nations, was intent on a new post-World War II order in which the emerging powers, led by the United States, would not tolerate such mass deportation of a civilian population—reminiscent of European ethnic cleansing. The United States, which was the first country to recognize Israel, was caught in a bind.

As the chair of the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), the United States realized that Israel would never allow the refugees back to their homes. It looked for an alternative to the right of return in the form of local integration in host countries where the Palestinians had become refugees. The scheme for this, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority, became UNRWA.

The “Works” in UNRWA’s name refers to large-scale and labor-intensive public work schemes envisaged to economically integrate the refugees in the host countries. In this sense, UNRWA was born with ‘original sin’ because it changed the direction of the pursuit of a solution to the refugee question from return, as per United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 194, to tawteen (resettlement) just 12 months later.

Created by the UNGA resolution as a temporary agency, UNRWA had no set budget from the United Nations, and its mandate, renewed regularly, set the parameters for its operations.

The Americans and their Western allies decided to fund this new agency while hoping that its mandate would be short-lived. Payment for UNRWA’s commissioner and senior managers came from the UN itself, but all other staff were paid largely from donor funding, making fundraising the priority for the agency’s top brass.

As it was expected to be a temporary organization until Israel agreed to the return of the refugees under UN Resolution 194, the agency was unable to work on a regular budget to be set beforehand.

UNRWA, which has had international (largely Western) directors-general ever since it launched operations in 1950, began the effort of organizing housing, medical support, elementary education, and vocational training for the refugees. The new agency made agreements with local authorities from Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon to fulfill its mission.

As a relief and works agency, UNRWA gave priority to Palestinian refugees themselves to work in its clinics, schools, and vocational training centers. Registered Palestinian refugees used their UNRWA registration cards at food centers and medical clinics, as well as local UNRWA schools.

The Nakba and Right of Return

The 1967 War represented another chapter in the continuing misery of Palestinian refugees, and UNRWA’s evolution in hopes of alleviating their plight.

While most of the Palestinian refugees had lost their homes and land in what is now called the 1948 Nakba (the catastrophe), a new batch of refugees was created as the Israeli military rolled into Gaza and the West Bank in the June 1967 War, called the Naksa (defeat).

While many—especially in the Jordan Valley area camps were already refugees who had been pushed out during the 1948 War to the safer east bank of the Jordan River, now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—the dramatic defeat of Arab armies ceding land to Israel created a new wave of first-time refugees.

Palestinians in the West Bank, whether refugees or not, as well as in the East Bank, were all given Jordanian citizenship as part of the annexation of the former to Jordan following the Nakba.

Israel explicitly requested UNRWA to continue its operations in Gaza and the West Bank during the 1967 War and an exchange of letters was agreed in a matter of days.

While Israel as an occupying power did not have the right to ban the UN agency from working in areas under its control, the relationship was not always pleasant; for the most part Israel tolerated its existence. In fact, in its years of direct occupation of Palestine, Israel was happy that UNRWA relieved it of the duties and costs of providing medical, educational, and other support that normally would be the responsibility of the governing occupier.

For UNRWA—like its sister agency, UNHCR—its mandate neither made distinction between first-generation refugees or their children, nor did it care if they had received citizenship in other countries or not. As long as they were refugees or descendants of refugees, they were allowed to register with the UN agency and benefit from its services.

But history shows that Israel never had any intention to allow the refugees to return. The UNCCP, which met and organized several conferences to try and resolve the issue, failed in the face of Israeli intransigence, which was often coached with unrealistic excuses. When Israel applied for membership to the UN, the international agency pushed Israel to fulfill the relevant UN resolutions and Israel promised but never fulfilled nor did it ever plan to fulfill the right of Palestinians’ right to return.

Israel was the homeland of the ‘Jewish people’ and Jews from around the world had the right to settle in Palestine and occupied territories, as per the 1950 Israeli Law of Return, Israel argued. It used that as a pretext to declare that the return of Palestinian refugees would constitute the end of the Jewish state, and therefore it was unwilling to accept their return.

In the 75 years since the refugee crisis was created, the only serious talks about resolving the Palestinian refugee problem took place under former Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. The first attempt at resolution was after the PLO and Israel exchanged letters of recognition and the Declaration of Principles was signed at the White House in 1993, while the second was during the short-lived Ehud Barak administration.

In those talks, the Israelis refused to allow wholesale the return of Palestinian refugees but were willing over a ten-year period to allow the return of 10,000 a year on the basis of family reunification only.

Rabin was assassinated by a radical right-wing Israeli settler and Barak would later lose the elections to his militant and hardline adversary, Ariel Sharon.

But decades after the Nakba, many Palestinian refugees were no longer interested in actually returning to their homes and lands that were now Israel. Rather, they insisted on preserving their right to return—a right stemming from the illegality of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Palestinian negotiators would demand from their Israeli counterparts an admission of Israel’s moral and historical role in causing the refugee problem.

The Far-Right’s Attacks on UNRWA

UNRWA has been a manifestation of the unresolved plight of the Palestinian refugees and, as such, is a nuisance to Israel.

The Israelis argued that under international law the status and therefore the rights of refugees do not pass to their descendants. Instead, Israel wanted to dismantle UNRWA and shift the responsibility of Palestinians to UNHCR which would automatically dilute the issue of the right of return. Although Israel has often criticized UNRWA, substantive efforts to neutralize it grew in tandem with the increasing prominence and power of the Israeli far right.

A concerted media and political campaign began to defame UNRWA because it hosted Palestinian refugees who made public expressions of their rights and lived in countries that spoke about the Nakba. Israel claimed UNRWA supported terrorism and hatred of Jews in school books used by children in refugee camps. The agency responded that the school books that were taught in various countries were the official curricula of those countries. Nevertheless, UNRWA wanted to debunk these accusations and began creating a human rights curriculum to be taught at all UNRWA schools.

Khalil El Halabi, a long-time UNRWA teacher and staffer, was proud to unveil the UNRWA human rights curriculum during a 2009 visit to Gaza by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

But the accusations and campaign to discredit UNRWA continued. Meanwhile, successive UNGA meetings repeatedly renewed its mandate.

As in many cases, Israel often creates momentum by making a preposterous claim that often includes an accusation of supporting terrorism, forcing many donors to suspend their support of Palestinians. By the time the truth finally came out, the damage had already been done. In recent years this is exactly what happened when Israel accused a Palestinian from Gaza, Mohammad El Halabi, director of World Vision, of diverting 50 million dollars of humanitarian aid to Hamas even though the entire budget of the aid agency does not even come to that.

Additionally, six Palestinian Human rights organizations were accused of being terrorist fronts. No evidence was presented by Israel in this issue as well. But in both cases as in the UNRWA issue, the goal was temporarily accomplished. World Visions suspended all its humanitarian support to Gaza to this day even though their own detailed and independent investigation proved that there was no wrongdoing. In the case of the six organizations, some donors hesitated but others have continued in their support—and the same has happened to UNRWA.

Achilles Heel

The absence of a systematic and transparent multi-year budget for its operations, which have become costlier with the growth of the refugee population, has in time emerged as UNRWA’s Achilles Heel.

Arab donors continue to hesitate in supporting UNRWA funding—especially after major Israeli attacks on refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza—except in emergencies.

Gulf countries helped rebuild the Nahar al Bard camp in Lebanon, the Yarmouk Camp in Syria, Jenin camp in the West Bank, and numerous UNRWA refugee camps in Gaza, but did not increase contributions to the agency’s regular operating budget.

Under former U.S. President Donald Trump, Israel succeeded in getting Washington to defund UNRWA, though other countries, especially Scandinavian and some Arab countries, stepped up. The Biden Administration renewed funding when he became president, but is in large part responsible for UNRWA’s current funding crisis.

Today, the agency is threatened by more than just an assault on its finances; Israel has ordered UNRWA to evacuate its premises in East Jerusalem due to ‘unpaid rent’. And the Israeli parliament is considering designating the agency as a terrorist organization.

What is clear is that despite the numerous and repeated cases of fabrications, lies, and distortions by Israel, many in the West continue to believe the Israelis. And when they don’t, they fear not appearing to believe them and therefore suffering from the entitled indignation of Israel and its supporters—accused of being accomplices to terror and supporters of antisemitism.

June 11, 2024 marked the first annual International Day of Play (IDOP). While the day was established by a United Nations General Assembly resolution in March 2024, the campaign for the International Day of Play was initiated by the LEGO Group and LEGO Foundation and coordinated by a network of organizations. The Children and Young People’s Call to Action defines play as “our right to have fun and express ourselves freely through different activities and sports. Play is not just for fun; it is essential. It helps us be creative, learn new things, and make friends. Playing makes us feel good and helps us grow up healthy and happy, both in our bodies and our minds.” 

The Call to Action, drafted by The Child and Youth Advisory Board, also includes findings from online surveys and focus group discussions looking at the impact of play—and lack thereof—from over 10,000 children and young people around the world. The consequences of loss of play include negative impacts on the physical and mental health of children and young people. These consequences are more prevalent than ever, the Call to Action reports.

It has found that “27 percent of children play outside their homes today, a stark contrast to the 71 percent of our parents and grandparents”. Barriers to play are particularly high for children with disabilities, girls, children living in areas that hold play as less culturally important, and children living in areas that lack safe play spaces due to natural disaster and war, such as in the Gaza Strip.

The loss of play during warfare may seem trivial compared to the catastrophic harm inflicted by Israel on Gazan children, families, and communities. Casualties in Gaza as of June 9, 2024 include 37,084 killed, including over 15,000 children, 84,494 injured, and over 10,000 missing. Since October 7, over half of Gaza’s homes had been destroyed or damaged, as well as 88 percent of school buildings, and 267 places of worship. Hospitals, medical facilities, and medical workers across the Gaza strip have been specifically targeted, destroying the Gazan healthcare system. At least thirty children in Gaza have died as a result of malnutrition, with famine continuing to unfold across Gaza under Israel’s forced starvation policies. 

The current onslaught of violence by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza comes despite orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to take steps to limit harm to Palestinians and avoid committing genocide, as well as to immediately halt military operations in Rafah. Far from complying with the ICJ’s orders to adhere to the Genocide Convention, Israel’s military attacks and denials of humanitarian aid have only increased, leading International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan KC to seek arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in addition to seeking warrants against three Hamas leaders. 

According to Al Jazeera, casualties from October 7 to June 9 also include 1,139 people killed in Israel and some 8,730 injured, as well as 532 people killed and over 5,000 injured in the West Bank. Casualties in the occupied West Bank are expected to grow as it faces what the UN human rights chief calls “unprecedented bloodshed” associated with attacks by Israeli military and settlers against Palestinians. Israel—along with Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad—is being added to the annex of the UN’s next annual report on children in armed conflict, also known as the “blacklist” of parties that commit grave violations against children. 

The current war comes amidst the backdrop of decades of occupation, displacement, and oppression by Israel against the Palestinian people. And yet, in the face of all of this, children in Gaza have a right and a need to play.

What is the “Right to Play”?

Article 31 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) says: “States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.” Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989, the CRC is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world, and all States Parties have an obligation to uphold Article 31’s right to play. The United States is the only UN Member State that is not Party to the convention, though it is signatory and is therefore obligated to refrain from actions that would contradict the object and purpose of the treaty. As a legally binding human rights treaty, the CRC is applicable in both times of peace and war and it primarily refers to how a government must treat its citizens.

The CRC is the culmination of decades of advocacy, with international declarations on the rights of the child previously adopted by the League of Nations in 1924 and the United Nations in 1959. These two previous non-binding declarations say a child must have “the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually” and the “full opportunity for play and recreation,” respectively. In 1978, Poland proposed a legally binding Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was then developed by a working group created by the Commission on Human Rights in 1979—the Year of the Child. Ten years later, the CRC was adopted, but Article 31’s right to play received little focus, especially regarding children impacted by armed conflict.

In 1996, the landmark Graça Machel report, Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, was released, centering children as the primary victims of armed conflict. The only mention of play in the report is as a strategy to promote psychosocial well-being through re-establishing a sense of normalcy. The ten-year-review of the Machel report put greater focus on the importance of play, discussing its importance as an early childhood intervention, its connection to education, and its loss as a significant consequence of war. The review contains quotes from a child in Somalia about how their playgrounds were transformed into centers of military mobilization, as well as a girl who said of her Sri Lanka transit center, “There are no trees to play under and no playground to go to”. Increasingly, organizations focused on child welfare have recognized the importance of play in psychosocial resilience and healing, prompted by the voices of children themselves. 

In 2014, War Child Holland released a “Child Rights Situation Analysis” on Syria, which found play to be “one of the top five priorities by 50 percent of child participants”. As studies of the relationship between war and play have grown, it has become increasingly clear that play is simultaneously one of the first things lost in war and one of the most important factors for mitigating its psychosocial harms. 

Persistent threats lead to a toxic stress response, which has long term impacts on developing bodies and minds. Play offers some protection by lowering the need for stress response. Children may also augment play to reflect the violence that they see around them, a form of processing and communicating their complicated emotions and traumas. Wartime has necessitated creative ways to play, such as the underground amusement park near Damascus, which gave Syrian children a space to play away from the bombs. The park gave children a break from the constant fear of war, with one child expressing, “I’m not afraid of bombardments because my father told me that we are in the basement”.

While war presents clear obstacles to play, or at least play as it is experienced in peace time, children experiencing war-related trauma need play more than ever. Play is a protective factor to boost a child’s resilience, especially as their minds and bodies are developing. It can help to distract children, to work through their experiences, and to preserve memories of the past and hopes for the future. In Gaza, play—in addition to basic necessities, cultural heritage, and survival—is under attack by the Israeli military.

Playing in Gaza

Like in previous conflicts, children in Gaza are finding ways to play, sometimes through organizations and the leadership of community members and sometimes through their own creativity. One such organization is Hope Makers School, which seeks to provide education for children in the al-Mawasi displacement camp. Schools across Gaza have been destroyed or transformed into shelters for displaced people, leaving no functioning schools across all of Gaza and over 600,000 students without education for the past eight months. The director of Hope Makers School, Ashraf Asfour, explained that they focus on three study areas: psychological care, values and principles, and education and skills. In addition to learning Arabic and math, children are able to participate in art classes. One student says, “I also learned how to draw a fruit basket because I like fruit so much. I haven’t had any fruit for three weeks”. 

Providing students with a safe place to learn and express themselves through creativity is of the utmost importance. UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires told Al Jazeera: “We can say safely that every single child in the Gaza Strip today is traumatized… every single teacher is now indeed a social worker, a parent.” This is especially true for the over 20,000 children who have been orphaned in the war. Further attempts at continuing education for children in Gaza and providing them a safe place to play have been taken up by people like Nur Nassar on Instagram, who travels with a whiteboard and educational materials in a #School_Without_Borders. The Instagram account’s Reels show children excitedly participating in lessons, contributing to group art projects, and playing educational games. 

Play in Gaza is additionally used as a form of cultural preservation. A weekly art workshop sponsored by the UK charity Christian Aid and run by Palestinian partner the Culture and Free Thought Association allows children to draw and color their memories of bombed historical buildings such as Qasr al-Basha and Omari Mosque. Buthaina al-Fuqawi, a community mobilizer who helps run the sessions, observed of the participating children: “The first look is despair and misery. The second look is hope. The third look is love of life and childhood.” For many children, the workshops are the first time they’ve been able to use a pencil or crayon in months. The workshops serve the dual purpose of briefly distracting children from their hardships and also helping to preserve Palestinian cultural heritage, which has been severely impacted by the ongoing conflict. 

Additional efforts to preserve play and heritage have been made by the Asayel Arts and Dabke Troupe, which was established in 2011 and now gives dance classes to displaced children in Deir el-Balah. Dabke is a Palestinian dance usually accompanied by traditional wind instruments and singing in local dialects. The children interviewed by Al Jazeera say that learning the dance has helped distract them from the ongoing war, with one participant sharing: “It fills me with joy, by the way. Ever since I was younger, I would dream of knowing how to dance dabke.” Another participant reflects, “I do enjoy it, but there isn’t a greater joy than going back home”.

Children have also taken it upon themselves to create opportunities for play while they are away from home. A video shared by @middleeastmonitor and @samih.madhoun on Instagram shows a young musician, Samih Madhoun, playing the oud and singing to other children and displaced people in Gaza. Before the war, Samih had been building his name as a musician in Gaza City. As of early June, Samih’s family is facing their sixth displacement since October 2023.

Other children, like @renadfromgaza have also taken to social media to spread awareness of Gaza and the needs of their families, while also sharing their own creativity and talents. Renad, ten years old, posts videos on Instagram and TikTok of her cooking “Gazan styled” dishes from a displacement camp. Some of her dishes include “war’s lollipop,” made from melted sugar, and “war falafel,” a video that couldn’t be finished because Renad and her family received news of a “relative’s martyrdom”. Renad’s Instagram bio reads “Struggling to survive and live my childhood”.

For many children, living their childhood is no longer an option. In January, NBC News covered the story of thirteen-year-old Mohammad Al Yazji and his seven younger siblings. After their mother was killed by an Israeli strike just days into the war and their father went missing, Mohammad became the sole caretaker of the family. Every morning, he wakes up at six to get his siblings food and water. He expresses particular sadness about caring for his six-month-old sister, especially with a scarcity of baby formula and diapers caused by Israeli blocking of aid and supplies: “[My mother] knew how to silence her when she cried. I don’t know how to deal with this.” Still, Mohammad recognizes the need of his siblings for play. With the small amount of money he gets from aid groups, Mohammad buys his siblings a ball to play with “so they forget the war and do not get bored”. Still, Mohammad shares that his siblings cry whenever they hear an air strike.“There is no one to give them a feeling of safety,” he says.

While children are finding creative ways to play, distract themselves from the war, and preserve their cultural heritage, there is no replacement for feeling safe enough to experience a normal childhood. When one young girl, Lina, asks her father what they will do when they go back home, he replies, “Life will go back to how it used to be. We’ll go to the park. Play with everyone”. The video, published by The Guardian in November 2023, shows Lina and other children playing hopscotch in the sand and then playing “the shooting game” in the back of a truck, in which the “shooter” must choose another player to kill every round. Lina’s games demonstrate the use of play as distraction, as emotional processing, and as something which can only be fully realized in a safe future.

Lost Childhoods

In March 2024, Save the Children released a report entitled “Trapped and Scarred: The Compounding Mental Harm Inflicted On Palestinian Children in Gaza”. The report underscores the fact that Palestinian children currently displaced in Gaza have never lived “outside of interminable cyclical violence and a life-limiting land, air and sea blockade imposed by the Government of Israel”. While the mental health and rights of children were already undermined by the almost seventeen-year blockade on Gaza, parents and caregivers report that the current war has made the situation unimaginably dire. 

Children are experiencing a “destruction of the fundamental tenets of childhood… no escape from the reality of war, no stable routine, no opportunity to learn or play—and for many, no family”. It is routines, playing, learning, and family that are usually protective factors against long-term and severe mental health impacts of trauma, leaving many children in Gaza defenseless. One mother of four told Save the Children: “I wouldn’t even say that their mental health has deteriorated—it’s been obliterated. Complete psychological destruction.” Similarly, spokesperson for UNICEF James Elder told Al Jazeera, “children are in uncharted territory, psychologically… I see children in those tents…who have had amputations, who need to be in hospital both for their physical wounds, but also psychologically”. As more hospitals across Gaza are bombed, shut down, and denied basic supplies by Israeli attacks and Israel’s closure of all crossings out of Gaza, this type of medical assistance becomes impossible.

Though some children and communities have found or made opportunities for play and fun, the definition of a fully realized right to play by the Child and Youth Advisory Board in their Call to Action includes a kind of play that “helps us grow up healthy and happy, both in our bodies and our minds”. In Gaza, children should be playing and enjoying their childhoods, but the actions of the Israeli government and military make that impossible. 

Instead, children are decapitated and burned while playing at a park like Ahmed Al-Najjar; they are left alone in a car surrounded by corpses as paramedics fight to get to them like Hind Rajab; and they are denied medical treatment and starve to death like Fayez Ataya and Abdulqader Al-Serhi. There is currently no way to “grow up healthy and happy” in Gaza, as UNICEF reports that every single child in Gaza has been exposed to traumatic experiences that will have life-long impacts. All the barriers to play discussed in the IDOP Call to Action are heightened in Gaza: disability rates have skyrocketed during the war as over 3,000 children have become amputees, young girls face increased risk of gender-based violence, the importance of play is secondary to physical integrity, and there are no safe places for play anywhere in Gaza.

As one nine-year-old child in Rafah, Adil, told Children in Conflict, “I used to laugh a lot… We as children, are living a life that isn’t good… It’s dark”.

Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has been playing a critical, humanitarian role in the bombed and besieged Strip. Israel’s antagonistic attitude toward UNRWA and the agency’s vulnerable funding structure have culminated in Israel’s January accusations, void of evidence, that a small number of UNRWA’s staff were involved in October 7. Taken at face value, key donors, such as the United States, suspended funding of the agency’s lifesaving activities.

Based in Washington, the UNRWA USA National Committee is a nonprofit organization working to raise funds for and awareness of UNRWA. Since October 7, and especially since the suspension of funding—which will not be reversed by the United States until March 2025 at the earliest—UNRWA USA’s work has become all the more important, if extremely pressured and profoundly painful.

To understand how UNRWA USA operates in this context, what has changed in recent times, and why the organization does what it does, the Cairo Review’s Omar Auf invited the UNRWA USA management team to a Q&A. These questions were answered by Executive Director Mara Kronenfeld, Director of Communications Laila Mokhiber, Director of Philanthropy Hani Almadhoun, and Director of Strategic Programs Jason Terry.

Cairo Review: What do your day to day operations look like amid the urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza? In what ways are you able to support UNRWA during this extremely difficult time? 

UNRWA USA: In response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, UNRWA USA National Committee (UNRWA USA) is deeply involved in supporting UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Our day-to-day operations concentrate on fortifying the frontline efforts of our UN counterparts. While UNRWA navigates an ever-fluctuating state of chaos in Gaza, we at UNRWA USA play a crucial role from the United States, actively mobilizing grassroots fundraising and advocacy to enable and sustain their continued efforts.

Since October 2023, our nonprofit organization has mobilized well over 100,000 grassroots supporters, along with dozens of foundations and community organizations, to provide more than $40 million in relief support for Gaza. These funds have been critical in providing essential food and non-food items for tens of thousands of people. Additionally, we have also included over $2.5 million in funds to maintain the operations of UNRWA’s mental health teams. More than 300 UNRWA counselors are moving among the displaced, providing essential psycho-social support to over 400,000 children and their caregivers.

At the same time, we are leveraging the momentum we have seen in support of Gaza to expand our funding efforts for UNRWA’s other field sites: the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Those projects include case management and emergency funding for individuals displaced by Israeli military operations, as well as essential cash assistance for Palestine refugees living in extreme poverty outside the occupied Palestinian territory.

How has the social and political environment you’re operating in changed since October 7? Has there been increased expressions of antagonism or solidarity, and how has this reflected in terms of financial support? 

The political environment UNRWA USA has been operating has gotten much worse October 7th, UNRWA USA is currently facing:

1. A baseless lawsuit which incredibly accuses UNRWA USA of aiding and abetting terrorism because of its support for UNRWA. This lawsuit targeting UNRWA USA is part of a broad attack on humanitarian aid for Palestinians as famine spreads in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile thousands other NGOs working in conflict zones like UNRWA USA or engaged in work that may be susceptible to politicization are also facing:

2. H.R. 6408, a bill recently passed in the House that would suspend the tax-exempt status of any US nonprofit deemed to be supporting terrorism, something that is already provided in US law (in the tax code). The bill’s stated aim – to prevent support for terrorism by NPOs – is laudable. However, a close reading demonstrates that this legislation would create an administrative tool easily wielded and weaponized against charities whose work a given administration does not support politically.

When the Biden Administration pulled funding from UNRWA after—evidently baseless—Israeli accusations of UNRWA’s involvement in the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, UNRWA USA also temporarily paused disbursement of funds to UNRWA as a precautionary measure. In April, you resumed funding, citing other countries’ resumption as well as UN reports. 

What was the effect of the U.S. withdrawal on your fundraising efforts both before and after you resumed disbursement to UNRWA? 

Grassroots support for UNRWA has grown immensely in the wake of the siege of Gaza post October 7, 2023. UNRWA USA’s annual revenue, the vast majority of which is supported by individual U.S. based donors, grew substantially in 2023: it went from an average of $6.2m between 2019 and 2022 to a total of $32.4 m in 2023.

Some of those who work for UNRWA USA are Palestinians who have family in Gaza, such as Director of Philanthropy Hani Almadhoun. His parents remain in the north and his brother runs a soup kitchen, feeding the hungry. On May 8, he wrote that “On a professional level, I have chosen to bury my emotions somewhere deep and put them behind walls. I do this to be able to function, to be their voice, and to share our truth.”

Do you feel that the deeply personal and oftentimes painful nature of the work that the Palestinians within UNRWA USA carry out strengthens your mandate or drives your outreach in some way, especially during this ongoing genocide in Gaza? 

The deeply personal and often painful nature of the work, especially for those of us Palestinians on the UNRWA USA team with family in Gaza, undoubtedly strengthens our mandate and drives our outreach efforts in significant ways.

Each one of our team members could not do this work if we did not believe that we needed to step up and help rally people around this cause to get them to act. People genuinely want to help, and it is our role to guide them on how they can contribute effectively. Our fundraising team operates like traffic control; donors see us, and we see them, and mutual trust is essential to deliver for refugees in Gaza.

Setting boundaries during these times is challenging, as crises do not adhere to a weekday schedule. Bad and horrible things happen not just on work days but also on weekends. We feel the need to stay on top of the news and determine the ways UNRWA is responding, so we can prepare the UNRWA USA community to support. Such work can be taxing to one’s well-being, but if UNRWA was not there, not much would get done to support refugees in need in Gaza. We have the honor and the challenge of supporting the largest humanitarian actor inside Gaza. They need resources, but they also need help in awareness building, responding to rumors, and combating misinformation in the United States.

Our connection to our families and communities gives us a profound sense of responsibility and urgency in our work. It fuels our commitment to advocate for those who are suffering and ensures that their stories and needs are brought to the forefront. During this ongoing crisis in Gaza, our personal experiences allow us to convey the realities on the ground with authenticity and empathy, which resonates deeply with our supporters and partners.

While navigating the emotional toll can be challenging, it also serves as a powerful motivator. By channeling our pain into our professional efforts, we can provide a more compelling and genuine voice for those who are enduring unimaginable hardships. This personal connection reinforces our dedication to our mission and helps build stronger, more empathetic relationships with our audience.

“This piece of writing might be the only thing that tells the world I was once here. That I existed.” This was how Amjad Shabat, an UNRWA USA freelance content producer based in Gaza, opened her article published in November on your website. What impact do the stories you share from Palestinians, like Amjad, have on your overall operations? 

At UNRWA USA, our goal is straightforward: to ensure Palestine refugees have the UNRWA support they need for as long as they need it. Aid saves lives, and our advocacy work ensures UNRWA remains their lifeline. The real stories from Palestine refugees and from our donors and advocates, are our most potent tools. Without these authentic narratives, others will tell these stories, and the truth can be easily distorted.

During this year’s Nakba commemoration week, we launched an advocacy storytelling campaign accompanied by a call for personal stories. The narratives from our supporters and those who benefited from UNRWA, now residing in the United States, are an integral part of the collective history, legacy, and future of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. We want to understand what brought people to our nonprofit organization and why they choose to support the rights, dignity, and well-being of Palestine refugees through UNRWA USA.

Centering Palestine refugee voices and incorporating these firsthand accounts into our communications strategy is a major part of our nonprofit’s mission. By sharing these powerful stories, we ensure that refugee voices are heard and their experiences acknowledged.These stories not only amplify the voices of those directly affected but also reinforce the credibility and urgency of our work. They connect those on the ground in Gaza—a place most outsiders will never visit due to the blockade, borders and ongoing violence—with everyday Americans who come across our communications. This connection allows us to build stronger, more empathetic relationships with our American audiences, ultimately driving more effective advocacy and fundraising efforts.

Amjad Shabat, a female writer from Gaza, worked with us as a freelance content producer for more than six months in Gaza before she was evacuated with her family to Egypt. When the crisis erupted in October, our operations faced significant disruptions. Amjad could no longer travel freely or safely around Gaza to gather stories, as hundreds of thousands were displaced and Gaza faced devastating conditions. She herself was displaced and lost her dream home, as she recounts in her story on our Voices of UNRWA blog and UNRWA USA Instagram page. Unable to access the UNRWA sites and refugee camps she once visited for interviews, she chose to share her own personal story. Lacking access to her computer or UNRWA UAS email account, she sent her story through WhatsApp and several voice notes.

Amjad’s poignant words remind our audience of the individual lives behind the staggering statistics, making the crisis in Gaza more tangible. These stories also help counteract misinformation and bring a nuanced understanding of the situation on the ground.

Our other freelance content producer on the ground for most of 2023 was photographer Motaz Azaiza, who is now globally celebrated and known as a key chronicler of the crisis in Gaza. After October, he had to shift from his usual UNRWA USA photo and video assignments, which provided visuals for Amjad’s written interviews, to being out in the streets and documenting the violence and casualties all around them. He did this for about 108 days until he was eventually evacuated as well.

We are currently in the midst of an advocacy storytelling campaign to collect as many stories as possible to continue documenting the Nakba and preserving personal accounts that ensure the truth about the plight of Palestine refugees is told. On June 20, 2024, we will hold a virtual event called “The Children of UNRWA,” featuring a panel of the UNRWA USA Refugee Advisory Council members who will share their personal testimonies from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

UNRWA, the UN Agency, is busy implementing its humanitarian programs on the ground and facing extremely tough challenges to keep going. Since we’re not always in the field except for our yearly visits, they can’t always provide us with stories when we need them for our advocacy work and to help people understand the situation better. So, we often rely on personal stories from our colleagues, like Hani and Nahed from the fundraising team, and what they hear from their families in Gaza.

UNRWA USA is committed to “showing Palestine refugees that Americans care”. Why is it important that Americans care about Palestine refugees and the Palestinian cause more broadly? And who are the Americans that you are speaking to or targeting? 

Our commitment to “showing Palestine refugees that Americans care” extends to our grassroots supporters and elected officials whom we seek to influence through our advocacy efforts. Through these efforts, we strive to convey to Americans that supporting UNRWA through their tax dollars aligns with core American principles of humanitarianism and compassion. Despite instances where political decisions have led to the politicization of humanitarian assistance, such as the defunding by the Trump administration starting in 2018 and the statutory pause under the Biden administration earlier this year, advocating for UNRWA funding remains crucial. It’s about upholding our American values and fulfilling our responsibility to support vulnerable populations in need, as tired as that term is. By restoring and maintaining funding to UNRWA, Americans can contribute to a more just and equitable world, consistent with our nation’s principles of fairness and decency.

We believe Americans must better understand and empathize with the seven-decade-long plight of Palestinian refugees and the broader Palestinian cause because it fundamentally speaks to issues of human rights, humanity, and the dignity of all people.

Currently, UNRWA USA is primarily focused on engaging three key audiences: Gen Z, progressives, and philanthropic Americans.

For Gen Z, which is often leading the charge in advocating for social justice and equality, supporting Palestine refugees aligns perfectly with their values. By championing the rights of Palestine refugees, they contribute to a world that prioritizes justice and fairness for all.

Progressives, including those who may still be uncertain about their stance on the issue of Palestine, are another critical audience. Through education and awareness-building efforts, we aim to provide progressives with the information and perspectives necessary to form informed opinions and take action in support of Palestine refugees.

Finally, philanthropic Americans play a crucial role in providing financial support and resources to alleviate the suffering of Palestine refugees. Their contributions enable us to deliver essential aid and services to refugees in need.

As an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to helping Palestinian refugees by fundraising for UNRWA, how do you navigate the complex landscape surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that exists in U.S. political circles? 

We focus on the people we help and tell their stories, trying not to allow emotions and politics to get in the way of our messaging. Additionally, we call on all parties to respect our mission and that of UNRWA’s and not impede our work of theirs. UNRWA maintains a neutral stance, standing equidistant from all actors involved. Instead of assigning blame or getting drawn into debates . While others may label UNRWA as X or Z, we remain focused on the facts, reporting on the situation as it impacts our humanitarian work.

This can be challenging because we are all human, with consciences, values, and families we love. But we always ask ourselves, why should a starving child in Gaza suffer? Our aim is to ease the pain and fulfill our mandate for Palestinian refugees and other internally displaced Palestinians. UNRWA is a lifeline, and nothing should detract from that promise.

What is your outlook for the short-term and long-term in terms of your fundraising efforts and your partnership with UNRWA? 

For now, we focus on providing as much as we can as fast as we can to help facilitate UNRWA’s absolutely vital relief work. In the short term, people need shelter, food, water, and sanitation, and in the long term they would still need all those things but also schools and jobs.

UNRWA is unique because, sadly, the organization has been around for 76 years, and it is geared from cloud computing to ground support. While this is certainly an unprecedented situation on every level, UNRWA can accomplish big things for the communities it serves if the funding lines up it has

Longer-term, though, the devastation in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, is going to take over a decade to address. In the West Bank, expanded military operations and settler violence, along with heightened work and travel restrictions, have put tens of thousands in need of shelter and income. In Gaza, where almost the entire 2.2 million person population has been displaced, vast quantities of trash and rubble will need to be disposed of to enable a reconstruction effort that has already been estimated at a minimum of $50 billion. That includes nearly every school, every hospital, every university, and all manner of public works infrastructure, along with at least 80% of housing stocks. To rebuild, we will likely need to see a massive wealth transfer not seen globally since the Marshall Plan after World War II. So, we’re preparing our donors and funders to make long-term commitments to the lives and livelihoods of Palestine refugees.

Between May and June 2024, Spain, Ireland, Norway, and Slovenia announced that they would officially recognize the state of Palestine.  Predictably, this received dramatic condemnation from Israel. Just as predictably, the United States—which has consistently opposed statehood for Palestinians through both its veto power in the United Nations Security Council and implicit and explicit support for Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)—expressed disapproval of this move by its European allies. 

Lost in the Western media’s maelstrom about these developments was the important fact that, by May 2024, a majority of the world’s countries, more than 140, had already recognized Palestinian statehood—and had done so for years. In particular, Global South countries in Asia and Africa have long seen the Palestinian quest for self-determination as an extension of their own anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. An examination of this history of solidarity can help us understand the ways in which anti-colonial and post-colonial politics have shaped global understandings of the Israel-Palestine conflict, beyond the narrow vision of many Western countries. In turn, this will provide us with much-needed context to the current situation. 

At the time of Israel’s establishment as a state in 1948, much of Africa and Asia was still under the yoke of European colonial rule. One exception to this was India, which gained independence from British rule in August 1947. In June 1947,  Jawaharlal Nehru, who went on to become independent India’s first Prime Minister, explained his country’s nuanced position on the question of Israel and Palestine in a letter to Albert Einstein, who had written to him to seek support for Israel’s creation:

“You know that in India there has been the deepest sympathy for the great sufferings of the Jewish people. We have rejected completely the racial doctrine which the Nazis and the fascists proclaimed. Unfortunately, however, that doctrine is still believed in and acted upon by other people. You are no doubt aware of the treatment accorded by the Union of South Africa to Indians there on racial grounds….In raising this question [of South Africa] before the United Nations, we did not emphasise the limited aspect of it, but stood on the broader plane of human rights for all in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations…. With all our sympathy for the Jews we must and do feel that the rights and future of the Arabs are involved in this question…Why do they [Jews] want to compel the Arabs to submit against their will to certain demands? The way of approach has been one which does not lead to a settlement, but rather to the continuation of the conflict.”  

In November 1947, India was one of only thirteen countries that opposed UN Resolution 1981, which paved the way for Israel to be established the following year. India went on to recognize Israel in 1950 (although full diplomatic relations were not established till 1992); but for many years remained actively supportive of Palestinian rights. 

Nehru’s early concerns—regarding the parallels between Israel and South Africa, the marginalization of Palestinian rights, and tying the Palestine question to the broader UN commitment to supporting equal rights for all persons—continued to resonate over the ensuing decades. As countries across Asia and Africa gained independence from colonial rule, they extended vocal support to Palestine on the international stage. They did so through resolutions passed by the  United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and statements from the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Organization for African Unity (OAU). NAM was particularly outspoken on this issue, having created a Ministerial Committee on Palestine at its 1983 meeting in New Delhi, India. Ignored by the West, Palestinians viewed this step as an important  indication of global support. NAM and OAU (which converted to the African Union (AU) in 2002) would make repeated statements to the UNGA about the need to center Palestinian rights to bring a just and durable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Many of these statements would draw comparisons between the oppressive policies of the South African and Israeli regimes. 

An Independent State

In November 1988, Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), declared Palestine as an independent state. Between 1988 and 1989, a number of countries from Asia and Africa recognized Palestine. Among those were India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Zambia, The Gambia, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Vietnam, Cape Verde, Niger, Tanzania, Ghana, Togo, Zimbabwe, Chad, Uganda, Angola, Mozambique, Gabon, Botswana, and Kenya. Two central American countries, Cuba and Nicaragua, also joined this first wave. A 1989 OAU submission to the UN, authored by Kenya, was one of many which asked for Palestine to be recognized as a state, drew links between Israel’s oppressive practices and that of apartheid-era South Africa, and called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the OPT.

The end of the Cold War and the emergence of the U.S.-led world order weakened NAM and OAU, both of which had received support from the Soviet Union. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Palestinian cause appeared to recede from the public eye in many postcolonial countries. Regular submissions to the UN on this issue assumed a depressing form of repetition, devoid of actual impact. Israel, for its part, was able to establish closer diplomatic, economic, and military ties with a number of post-colonial countries, including India.   

The 1990s, however, also saw the growing prominence of another important voice of solidarity. As the anti-apartheid movement of South Africa gained steam, Nelson Mandela and others involved in the effort to change the country’s racist regime spoke firmly and unequivocally about their affinity with Palestinians. One of the first acts of the post-apartheid South Africa government was the recognition of Palestine in 1995. While South Africa continued to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, support to Palestine was a sharp reversal of the apartheid-era government’s close relations with Israel. South Africa would go on to become one of the most outspoken advocates for Palestinian rights in international forums, most recently filing a case in December 2023 against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for acts of genocide in Gaza. Since its creation in 2002, the AU, of which South Africa is a prominent member, has consistently raised the issue of Palestine as a central point of contention in its demands for reform of the global institutional regime that has long been dominated by the West.

In the 21st century, many countries in Central and South America extended recognition to Palestine, despite pressure from the United States to refrain. This was facilitated by the emergence of left-leaning governments in the region, which tended to see structural global inequality as being reflected in the Palestinian cause. Countries from the region that have recognized Palestine in the last few decades include Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico. 

It is in this broader context of growing global solidarity that Sweden’s recognition of Palestine in 2014—the first Western European country to do so—should be seen. It is notable that more than 125 countries—a majority in UNGA—opposed the United States’s 2017 decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Most countries have continued to criticize Israel’s actions in the OPT, including the expansion of settlements, an issue on which Western countries have tended to remain relatively silent. 

Since October 2023, we have seen an unprecedented wave of public support for Palestinians across the Western world, most notably in the United States. Many protestors, including students and Black activists, draw explicit links between racist and colonial oppression and Israel’s actions. It is important in this context to remember that post-colonial countries have played a historical, pivotal role in supporting the decades-long effort by Palestinians to be heard in the UN and other international forums. 

Most countries in Asia and Africa do not have the history of anti-Jewish hate and discrimination that have for centuries marked Europe and the United States. Nor are these countries—geographically removed from the Middle East—affected by the territorial disputes, displaced populations, and proximate anxieties that affect the region. Why then, have they chosen to so consistently focus on expressing solidarity with Palestine, even while being ignored or chastised by powerful countries like the United States? And what might be the motivations for these countries to continue to speak at international forums, which have been dominated by powerful countries and remained ineffective on the Palestine issue?

Anti-Colonialism: Beyond Geopolitics

One answer to these questions is, of course, geopolitics. Some countries might have felt that it was in their national interest to ally themselves, on this issue, with countries in the Middle East. Geopolitics cannot, however, provide an explanation for the consistency and steadfastness of this support, nor the language of global rights in which it has been framed. In much of the Global South,  support for the Palestinian cause has long been seen as a critical element of a shared, anti-colonial endeavor. It is this idea, one of solidarity between colonized and subjugated peoples, that was articulated by Nehru in his communique to Einstein in 1947. This same idea has been echoed by others, including Mandela, who have seen in the Palestinian struggle a continuation of their own efforts to create more equity in the world. It explains, as well, why such countries have turned to international organizations, as have the Palestinians themselves, over a decades-long effort to have their rights recognized in meaningful ways. And, today, these same ideas—of speaking up for those affected by colonial and racist policies and of driving change in the power structures of the world—are propelling current waves of popular solidarity with Palestine.  

It is impossible to know if the current moment will pave the way for a sovereign Palestinian state that can provide a safe and secure life for its citizens, and ensure the same for its neighbors. It is also not clear that post-colonial countries, many of which have significant governance and foreign policy challenges of their own, can provide substantive models in this regard. Yet, amid the tumult of the changing world order, and the tragedies unfolding in the Middle East, a recognition of post-colonial solidarity toward Palestine reminds us of the centrality of the original, still unfulfilled promise of the United Nations—that it is a body committed to reaffirming “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small”  and to establishing “conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained”.

The roots of Sudan’s current conflict can be traced to 2019, when a popular revolution removed the previous president (who had ruled for nearly three decades) and replaced him with a civilian government. Two armed groups, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), collaborated to help bring down the president, but later pushed out the civilian government and instituted military rule. The two militias turned against each other in the years following, eventually leading to violent conflict erupting in Sudan’s capital Khartoum in April 2023. The violence has spread throughout the country, particularly in the western region Darfur due to RSF presence in the area. The fighting has taken place in densely populated civilian areas, resulting in mass killings, destruction of homes, and catastrophic levels of displacement. 

Millions of internally displaced persons (IDPs), mostly women, children, and the elderly, are being hosted by extended families or living in temporary shelters. Some have managed to go beyond the country’s borders, crossing into Chad, Central Africa Republic, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Egypt. Often, however, people who have no other options remain displaced within the conflict zones. So little is acknowledged about the plight of those displaced, their day to day struggles remain invisible to global audiences. Sadly, the information that does reach international arenas is severely distorted by orientalist media reporting. 

The reporting of the current conflict in Sudan should not be seen as an opportunity to reproduce essentialist, racialized, and gendered representations of people’s lives in a way that validates apathy toward their suffering. There is a fear among human rights activists, however, that this is exactly what is happening in this case. The lack of a coordinated international response to the plight of Sudan’s most vulnerable groups indicates that those with the power to leverage an end to the conflict have not been pushed to moral panic. 

As two authors positioned across the Global South/North divide, who have for many years championed the rights of women globally and worked together in Sudan on programs focused on ending forms of violence such as female genital mutilation (FGM), we bring shared and critical perspectives to the issue of gendered inequality. In this review piece we argue that, at times of crisis, it is critical that the humanitarian and international media lens gender conflict in order to bring visibility to those most impacted. 

That said, certain contextual realities have to be acknowledged. The narratives that this gender lens extracts must be sensitive and nuanced, balancing the harsh realities of these women’s lives—life in Sudan is hard for women even outside of conflict—with their endless capacity for resilience. 

Social Upheaval

In Sudan, cultural, religious, and gendered values restrict the mobility of women and limit their social interactions. Girls are not allowed to travel or walk long distances for school or go alone to fetch firewood or water. Even in urban areas, girls are seldom allowed to go to school or university alone, limiting their access to education; when they are allowed, they are dependent on having male guardians escort them for safety. When it comes to decision making, domains of responsibility are still strictly and conservatively delineated. Women are responsible for domestic issues and men, who can interact freely in public, take the lead on all matters outside of the home. Mothers are accountable for the conduct of girls and primarily responsible for their upbringing while income and social networking (largely with other men) is a male preserve. 

After the conflict erupted last year, traditional norms were suddenly shaken as men were drawn into the conflict or left their families in search of work when income generation dried up at home. The cost of this gendered segregation in daily life is now being experienced disproportionately by women and girls. Women, who must now hold their families together, may not feel sufficiently experienced to make the life-or-death decisions now expected of them. Few women have skills in income generation outside of the home but now find themselves in a position of having to feed their entire family. These are the stories that are not being shared. 

Furthermore, one of the most disastrous consequences of the fighting has been that state institutions, infrastructure, and services have been wiped out, particularly in sectors relating to health and education. Prior to the outbreak of fighting in April 2023, most families were living in poverty and 70% of health facilities in Sudan lacked essential life saving drugs, particularly in suburban and rural areas. The majority of these are now sites where IDPs are being hosted, straining under the meager resources and significant shortage of health personnel. 

Most of the reproductive health needs of women and adolescent girls are not met. The few initiatives by the UN and international and national organizations continue to be hindered by the ongoing conflict. There is a widespread lack of safety and security at health facilities which puts health care providers, clients, and community volunteers at risk. The systematic attacks on and looting of health facilities, assets, and equipment has caused deep suffering and led to many deaths among those living with chronic illnesses. Maternal mortality rates have also increased dramatically as women have no health support and nowhere to go to give birth safely. 

Further worsening the catastrophe which has befallen Sudan’s most vulnerable is that after the majority of the banks closed, looting began and most formal public and private services were disrupted. This resulted in mass redundancies in employment and left some families mostly dependent on funds transferred from relatives outside Sudan. Not all families have such a network, however, and most are dependent on small-scale services that humanitarian agencies now provide in IDP shelters or host neighborhoods. In short, many families have shifted from a secure existence to extreme poverty in what must feel like a mere heartbeat.

Those who have remained in states where active conflict is ongoing live in desperate circumstances, facing huge shortages of food and water. Health services are not accessible in most areas and neighborhoods are not safe for anyone to move around, let alone women and girls who face the danger of abduction, harassment, and sexual violence.

This dire situation is exacerbated by the destruction of markets and industries, which has led to resource shortages, increased food prices, and dramatic upticks in rent. Meeting even basic needs is out of reach for many families who now have no choice but to live on the street or in public places like schools. Others have taken even more desperate measures to reduce the cost of living, giving or selling young daughters in marriage (a theme we pick up later). Meanwhile, concerns for the safety of loved ones creates deep, ongoing psychological distress for many. This is compounded by the fact that people no longer have the luxury to spend time deliberating where to live, or even to have options in the first place. 

So much of this suffering is invisible from outside of the country; the daily struggle for basic survival and the risks women and girls must take to conduct previously simple tasks, like collecting water, continue to be met with silence from international bystanders. 

As it stands, more than 4 million women and girls are at risk of gender-based violence (GBV) in Sudan. Protective spaces no longer exist; the closure of schools and poor access to health facilities means there is nowhere for girls and women to seek safe harbor. It is well documented that early marriage is often utilized, not just to reduce the food burden on families, but as a means of achieving some degree of security for young girls during conflict. Cases of child marriage have reportedly been on the rise in Sudan since the beginning of the war.

This situation has exacerbated the deeply rooted gender inequalities already described. These inequalities are perpetuated by religious, cultural, and social structures which were consolidated and legitimized through the policies of the ex-regime. The precedent of using sexual violence and exploitation against girls and women during conflict has long been thoroughly documented during the previous war in Darfur. It has become abundantly clear that the current conflict is no different; reports of both parties weaponizing sexual violence have been produced, but they are met by a muted international response. 

GBV, child abuse, and forced military recruitment are just some of the daily vulnerabilities many IDPs face. Schools have been shut down to be used as shelters for IDPs, resulting in many children roaming unsafe and potentially violent streets. The absence of social protections normally provided by familiar communities complicates the situation. A lack of privacy makes it hard for families to protect one another, an issue made more challenging by persistent overcrowding. In short, these conditions have heightened daily insecurity and triggered a massive spike in instances of violence against women and children. The UN Human Rights Commission recently published a report expressing grave concern about human trafficking in Sudan, particular with regard to children who have been kidnapped and forced into combat training by militia groups. Women and girls are also being increasingly sold into sex trafficking rings as a way to raise funds for these groups. 

Women Building Peace

After the conflict erupted in Khartoum State in April 2023, women-led organizations spearheaded the response to the war. Around 49 women-led peace initiatives, humanitarian groups, and civil society organizations came together and—supported by the UN Women’s Sudan office—formed “The Peace for Sudan Platform”. The platform is a network that includes representatives from different regions of the country and facilitates coordination, communication, and collaboration between members. Other Sudanese youth and women’s organizations operating in host states, in addition to those who had been working in those states even before the conflict started, are making great efforts in providing shelter, food, water, healthcare, and psychological and social support.

These civil society actors also monitor human rights violations and raise awareness in an attempt to lobby more international support to stop the war. Members are working hard to create inclusion and social harmony through dialogue among IDPs who have been forced to come together from different parts of Sudan. Youth participation in sports, drama, singing, and art have become critical activities offering safe spaces and respite from the ongoing traumas of war and poverty.  Some organizations provide psychosocial support for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. These groups work with women to enhance their psychological resilience so they can continue to keep their children alive and safe. With the difficulty in organizing face-to-face meetings, many organizations have created WhatsApp groups, despite weak mobile communication networks. These groups have become vital in keeping support operations going and in pooling evidence of the horrific gendered impact of the war. Most of these groups are also supported technically and financially by Sudanese expatriates.

The description above paints a picture of many local organizations working to provide essential services, but most lack financial support and depend on volunteers. Additionally, most organizations have no formal safety or financial structures. This weak civil society infrastructure cannot meet the extensive needs of the displaced population. Meanwhile, the instability created by conflict means that international staff are frequently evacuated with little notice. Many Sudanese aid workers are forced daily to flee to safer parts of the country or across borders, resulting in what little provisions were available suddenly disappearing for those who remain. 

These realities require deep reflection by a range of stakeholders and global bodies. The situation in Sudan must be examined as one part of a much bigger political-economy analysis that recognises the ways in which the experiences and vulnerabilities of women and girls are rendered invisible during conflict.

Western Bias and Inaction

To date, these stories have emerged only in sporadic news items. The invisibility of women and girls in global media is inexcusable given the extent to which, as described above, such conflicts are highly gendered. The systematic targeting of women from marginalized groups is reflective of a global misogyny that fails time and time again to prioritize the needs of women and girls and enact protective measures. The World Bank’s statistics show that 30% of all women worldwide have experienced some form of sexual violence during their lifetime. 

“The data are clear: gender-based violence is a pandemic. Thirty years since the landmark UN CEDAW commitment to end all forms of violence against women and girls, the problem remains immense. Understanding the prevalence of sexual violence and associated risk factors, however, is only the first step in developing essential prevention and support services for survivors.”

Despite this evidence, political stakeholders and media consumers alike continue to be surprised when images emerge of the gendered impact of war. Yet the global data, such as a recent UN report on sexual violence published in 2023, makes the normative realities of violence in the lives of women and girls across the globe very clear. The critical issue is how to embed a gender-transformative approach into sustainable programs of preventative and responsive action. How can the local response on the ground, outlined above, be better supported for the long-term? How can we ensure that when conflict hits, local civil society is immediately resourced and bolstered?

Those of us who have researched and worked in the field of women’s rights for decades know that the patriarchal structures described above embed violence in the daily lives of women and girls. We also know that these inequalities and associated violence only intensify when communities and families come under stress. We have already shared, in the context of the Sudan crisis, that the rate of child marriage and FGM has increased—and commonly does during famine, drought, and conflict. The bodies of women and girls become highly commodified during periods of food insecurity and deep poverty. When families run out of ways to generate an income and resources run dry, they turn to the last remaining object to trade: unmarried daughters. Daughters in such extreme situations are given in marriage to alleviate food insecurity, fetching a bride-price either monetarily or materially through livestock, animal feed, or land. Growing research has generated strong evidence to highlight the cruel links between gender, sexual violence, and child marriage.

In Sudan, midwives have been at the forefront of national public health campaigns to convince families to end FGM. Many state-employed midwives were traditional cutters who made money from performing FGM on young girls. They also gained status from their position as circumcisers with families honoring them for years after. As the global drive to end FGM grew from the early 2000s, fueled by Western donors, training and awareness programs were introduced to encourage a change in mindset. 

As a result, many traditional midwives/cutters began to work in public health and received this new training which seemed to work in transforming their attitudes toward FGM. State training and employment meant these workers were able to derive an income from the health department rather than from families wishing to observe FGM. Now that most of the health infrastructure in Sudan has been destroyed—bar the most basic provisions—it is highly likely that FGM will resurge. Midwives who are no longer able to receive a salary working in the public health sector will likely return to their old income habits. Furthermore, laws finally ratified across the country’s federal system designed to criminalise FGM barely had any time to be implemented before the country collapsed into chaos.  While the legislation may endure, it is now unenforceable, making it easy for families with weak conviction to revert to the practice. Again, the fragility of the foundation on which much needed gendered transformation was built has been exposed. 

Yet, despite this robust data, humanitarian responses rarely include measures to mitigate or stop child marriage. Trauma relief programs are sometimes offered but more systematic preventative actions are often absent. Humanitarian stakeholders have developed a number of immediate interventions, including GBV prevention officers and case workers who are deployed as soon as crises hit. However, as already discussed, foreign humanitarian workers often flee when insecurity becomes too great, leaving facilities suddenly shut. This reality brings us back to the question: why is more support not given to grassroot civil society organizations run by local people who are much less likely to flee?

The extent of sexual violence and the shame it brings on individual women and their families means that many instances go unreported. The kind of responses humanitarian agencies deploy, while welcome, do not go far enough in tackling the root causes behind the increase in multiple forms of gendered violence. Civil society actors are much more likely to understand the localized complexities of these root causes and provide nuanced responses that, if resourced, can be sustained despite conflict or other crises. 

The reality of the conflict in Sudan is that decades of progress toward ending violence against women and children, such as FGM and child marriage, are likely to be wiped out as a result of the latest conflict. These rapid regressions reveal how fragile any shift toward gender equality actually is. The harsh realities outlined above reflect the failure of the international community to provide a strong and unified political response to the conflict in Sudan. Western media’s sporadic reporting on the gendered cost of the violence in Sudan is indicative of how the war may be perceived in households across the Global North: onlookers are momentarily horrified, but quickly forget the continuing carnage. Critical decolonial thinking is needed on why this seems to be the common response. 

It may be that the violence in Sudan is normalized by conscious or unconscious perceptions of the country which have long been shaped by colonial narratives that assert a western cultural superiority over such brutality. This brutality, however, is considered by many scholars as the direct result of the country’s colonial history. For those of us positioned in the Global North, who call ourselves feminist research-activists, further challenges arise.

Empowering Women’s Voices

How do we make visible the extreme global misogyny playing out in yet another country in a way that gives dignity and respect to those caught in the current gendered horrors? How, in our drive to speak about the lives of women and girls in Sudan, do we avoid reproducing voyeuristic and essentialist depictions of African women as voiceless victims? Maintaining the distinction between “giving a voice to” rather than “speaking for” these women continues to haunt those of us who work to end all forms of abuse against women and girls, including forms often mislabeled as “cultural” rather than simply as violence.  

The arguments of many early postcolonial scholars (one, two, three) still ring alarmingly true. Those that wrote about how the suffering of black women often creates (intentionally or otherwise) a binary between “modernized Western women” and “backward yet-to-be-liberated African women”, sit uncomfortably amidst the periodic silence with which the reporting on Sudan is met.

Critical analysis of the coverage of the conflict in Sudan is urgently needed and must take a frank look at the extent to which an orientalist gaze is still used by the media in its reporting on the sexual violence and unfolding genocide. Exploration is needed into the extent to which this gaze then feeds into a complacent reaction that allows those who should be acting to feel excused from doing so. To be clear, it is not the documenting of the violence that is the issue, nor is it a problem that empowered survivors are occasionally being given the space to speak. Instead, the problem is that Western viewers may perceive the stories of survivors merely as evidence that Sudan is destined to be in conflict and thus, it is a problem for the Sudanese people alone to handle. The extremities of violence in Sudan seem to be associated, in Western minds, not with a complex history involving imperialist struggles for power and empire, but instead an oversimplified national narrative focused on conveying how the country’s political actors alone are responsible for the current conflict. This interpretation makes the present horrors easy to shrug off as not the responsibility of anyone from the outside. 

Two years ago, an Israeli soldier fired at a woman wearing a bullet-proof vest clearly bearing the word “Press”. His shot struck the woman in the neck, penetrating between her vest and helmet. One of the Arab region’s most recognized and admired reporters, Shireen Abu Akleh, died shortly after. 

 A dual American-Palestinian citizen, Abu Akleh had been a familiar face to TV viewers as a correspondent for the Al-Jazeera network. For 25 years, she reported on the lives of Palestinians in particular. On May 11, 2022, Abu Akleh and her crew were covering the aftermath of an Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp after a string of deadly attacks by Palestinians in Israel–a familiar pattern of violence in the area. Abu Akleh was not near any fighting; the area was quiet, save for the sound of distant gunfire, when she was killed. 

Israel initially denied involvement, although it later admitted responsibility—and last year apologized—for the attack. Numerous independent investigations concluded that given where on the body Abu Akleh was shot, her clearly visible “Press” vest, and the fact that there was no active fighting in the area, the killing was most likely a deliberate attack. Her death, while mourned around the world, was not unprecedented. 

Killing Journalists is a Long-Standing Pattern

The killing of Abu Akleh was not an isolated incident. A report published by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in May 2023 found that Israeli forces had killed 20 journalists over the preceding 22 years. Eighteen of them were Palestinians. No one has ever been held accountable for any of those deaths and only a handful of cases have received anything but a cursory investigation.

The killing of journalists appears to be part of a broader pattern in which Israel deliberately attempts to silence the media—despite Israel’s repeated insistence that it is the sole democracy upholding press freedoms in the region. Over the past several decades, Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked buildings housing media organizations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory— in violation of international humanitarian law, which prohibits deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure. 

While the Israeli military refuses to disclose their rules of engagement, specifically regarding the protection of journalists, this pattern of killings points to a model in which media personnel are deliberately targeted for their work, a violation of international law. 

Attacks on Journalists Since October 7

This pattern has played out again in the current war on Gaza. CPJ has documented the killings of 107 journalists since October 7. Two were Israeli journalists killed by Hamas. The other 105 were killed by the Israeli military; 102 of them were Palestinians and three were Lebanese. In addition, many media offices have been destroyed, including a building housing the offices of Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Al Jazeera.

Israel has repeatedly denied that it is deliberately targeting journalists or media infrastructure during the current war, but the details of these attacks tell a different story. CPJ has documented at least three targeted killings so far: The first was Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah, a Lebanese national killed on the Israeli border during an attack that also injured a number of colleagues from other news organizations. The strike that killed him hit an Al Jazeera car and blew Abdallah through a wall. According to AFP reporter Dylan Collins, who was injured in the attack, Abdallah’s body “was charred almost beyond recognition”. Several investigations have concluded that the group of journalists was deliberately targeted. As with Abu Akleh and her crew, Abdallah and his colleagues were clearly visible as journalists working in an area known to be a site for filming. 

In January, journalists Hamza Al Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya were killed in a targeted strike on their car in Khan Younis. Israeli officials gave several different explanations for why the car was attacked but finally alleged that “both the deceased were members of Gaza-based terrorist organizations actively involved in attacks against [Israeli military] forces”—a claim that families and colleagues of the dead men vigorously denied. Evidence presented by the Israeli military has been widely discredited.

CPJ believes that the details of at least 10 other cases since October 7 indicate a deliberate targeting of journalists by the Israeli military. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the Israeli Military General Advocate, acknowledged there had been cases of “unacceptable conduct” by the military and that some of these cases were now under investigation. An analysis of the suspected targeted killings revealed two issues that CPJ believes required immediate investigation, policy changes, and training of military personnel consistent with international law. These issues include the use of precision drones to target journalists and the failure to respect press insignia.

 For example, in December 2023, Al-Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa was struck by a drone and left to bleed to death after Israeli authorities blocked efforts to evacuate him. This drone attack also injured Al Jazeera journalist Wael Al Dahdouh. Al Dahdouh and Abu Daqqa were both wearing “Press” vests. 

A month later, Israel launched two drone attacks at journalists filming a destroyed house in Khan Younis. The first drone strike injured two of the journalists, Amer Abu Amr and Ahmed al-Bursh. The second strike killed the other two journalists, Hamza Al Dahdouh (Wael’s son) and Mustafa Thuraya. 

On February 13, 2024, Al Jazeera reporter Ismail Abu Omar and freelance camera operator and photojournalist Ahmed Matar were seriously injured while traveling by motorcycle for a reporting assignment north of Rafah. They were hit by an Israeli drone strike. Both journalists were wearing “Press” vests and carrying their equipment.

 The number of potential targeted attacks since October 7 may be an underestimate. The intensity of the war, rapid rate of journalist deaths, and the fact that independent investigation is currently not possible inside the country (since journalists and investigators are barred from entering Gaza) makes it extremely difficult to ascertain the true number of attacks or obtain the level of detail needed to bring cases to international bodies like the International Criminal Court.

Failures to Investigate and False Justifications

Israel’s practice of targeting journalists began well before the current war. CPJ’s Deadly Pattern report shows that the Israeli military was responsible for 80% of journalist and media worker killings in the Palestinian territories between 2001 and May 2023. Internal reviews from the Israeli army are unlikely to bring justice because very few deaths are ever seriously investigated. When investigations do take place, they take months or even years to complete and lack transparency. So far, no one has ever been held accountable for these killings. 

The CPJ report indicates that Israel’s method of avoiding accountability is not a new development. The pattern is consistent. First, Israeli forces target and kill a journalist. Next, they immediately deny any involvement. Eventually, they admit responsibility but claim the killed journalists were engaged in terrorism. This practice has been a long-standing framework for Israeli engagement. 

Examples include that of Yaser Murtaja, a photographer killed by Israel in 2018. Israeli officials repeatedly alleged he was a member of Hamas, but it was later revealed that he had been vetted and approved by the U.S. government to receive a grant to support his production company earlier that month. No credible evidence that Murtaja was a terrorist has ever been produced.

Similarly, the Israeli military alleged Hussam Salama and Mahmoud al-Kumi, camera operators for Al-Aqsa TV, were “Hamas operatives” after they were killed by an Israeli missile in 2012. A Human Rights Watch investigation found no proof that the two were militants. When CPJ asked for evidence to justify the attack, a spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. responded (two months later) with a letter accusing Al-Aqsa TV of “glorifying death and advocating violence and murder”. The letter did not specify why this accusation would negate the journalists’ right to civilian protections.

In 2021, Israel bombed a building in Gaza that contained the offices of several media organizations, including AP and Al Jazeera. In November of last year, an Israeli missile hit a building in Gaza that housed AFP. Israel initially denied responsibility but later admitted it carried out a strike “nearby” to the agency’s bureau without having “in any way” targeted it. AFP was the only one of the world’s three major international news agencies operating a live video stream of the war at the time. Shortly after the attack, the camera on the bureau’s balcony stopped working.

Disturbingly, there also appears to be a pattern in which the homes—and therefore families—of journalists are targeted. In 2021, an Israeli airstrike killed Voice of Al-Aqsa reporter Yousef Abu Hussein in his home. In October 2023, Wael Al Dahdouh’s wife, son, daughter, and grandson were killed in an Israeli airstrike. A month later, Israel struck the home of news photographer Yasser Qudih. The strike occurred days after an Israeli media advocacy group questioned Qudih’s coverage of October 7, an unfounded and widely debunked report that prompted death threats against him on social media. Qudih survived but eight of his family members died. To date, the Israeli military has not provided credible evidence of a military basis for these actions.

When CPJ asked the Israeli military for the results of its probes into the deaths of Abu Hussein and Yaser Murtaja—which occurred within weeks of each other—it received identically worded answers that the journalists were “allegedly present at the scene of violent riots” and “no suspicion was found which would justify the opening of a criminal investigation”. CPJ asked for full probes into their deaths and those of the other journalists killed between 2001 and May 2022, but the Israeli military did not provide them, nor did it answer CPJ’s question about why the army keeps these probes confidential. 

Censorship Through Detention

In addition to utilizing targeted killings and then obstructing proper investigations, Israel has also worked to silence reporters through detention. This practice violates Articles 76 and 78 of the Geneva Conventions. These articles only permit detention for imperative security threats and require that the detainee be held within the occupied territories, not transported elsewhere. These requirements are not upheld for Palestinian detainees and the UN called on Israel to end these administrative detentions in 2020. 

CPJ has documented the arrest of at least 25 journalists by Israel since the start of the war. In March, CPJ filed an urgent submission to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention regarding three Palestinian journalists being held under administrative detention. 

While most of the arrests have occurred in the West Bank, there have also been cases in Gaza. Diaa Al-Kahlout, the veteran bureau chief for Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, was detained during a mass arrest in Beit Lahya in December 2023, along with members of his family. Al-Kahlout says that he was subjected to interrogation and physical and psychological mistreatment over his 33 days in Israeli custody. International humanitarian law prohibits humiliating, inhumane, or degrading treatment of prisoners.

 These attacks on journalists and media infrastructure are compounded by growing legal restrictions that risk curtailing free and independent reporting in Israel. In April 2024, the Knesset passed a law that gives the government the power to temporarily ban the broadcasting of international news outlets in Israel if they are deemed threatening to national security. Soon after, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet shut down Qatar-based newsgroup Al Jazeera. The International Federation of Journalists called on Israel “to stop using ‘national security’ as an excuse to censor critical media” and stated, “The actions of the Israeli government are unfitting of a democracy.”

Journalism and International Law

For states to be fully compliant with their international human rights obligations, especially Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they need to protect and support a free and independent media. While international human rights law allows the proscribing of journalist activity, this is only permissible under limited conditions. However, Israel’s targeted attacks and arbitrary arrests restrict journalist activities in a manner that goes well beyond these conditions.

The patterns of targeted killing identified both in this and previous wars are enough to warrant transparent and independent investigations. In February, five special rapporteurs from the UN Human Rights Council expressed alarm at reports of attacks on media personnel who were clearly identified through clothing and vehicles marked as “Press”. The rapporteurs stated that these attacks may indicate a “deliberate strategy” to silence reporting.

The rapporteurs stressed the right to information as a “survival right” during times of conflict and said journalists play an “indispensable role” as vital sources of information, defenders of human rights, and witnesses to atrocities. They also emphasized that targeted attacks and killings of journalists constitute a war crime and called upon the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate this pattern. 

The press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders has filed two war crimes complaints with the ICC, which confirmed in January that possible offenses against Palestinian journalists would be included as part of its ongoing investigation. “Journalists are protected by international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute and must not, under any circumstances, be targeted in the exercise of their important mission,” the ICC prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

In January, the ICJ issued a ruling in which it instructed Israel to “take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence” related to the allegations of genocide. To satisfy this order, Israel would need to ensure that journalists can freely and safely report in Gaza. Reporting by journalists has historically been admitted as evidence into hearings by numerous international tribunals on genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Taken together, the killings of media personnel, combined with the blocking of international journalists from Gaza, may be considered as a violation of this order.

Journalists in the Days After

Journalists cannot end a war. But the photographs they take and the testimonies they record can help provide the international community with the information it needs to hold parties accountable—even if that accountability comes long after the fighting ends. For instance, a photograph by Ron Haviv of Serbian soldiers kicking the bodies of two Muslims whom they had assassinated was used as evidence in war crimes tribunals a decade after the atrocities were committed. His photos from that day are still being used by the families of murdered women trying to achieve justice 20 years later.

In the meantime, it is incumbent on the international community to ensure Israel upholds its international human rights obligations, which include the right to information. Thus far, states like the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany—all vocal advocates for press freedom—have taken no significant action to hold Israel accountable for the high journalist death toll, arbitrary arrests, and other forms of censorship. At most, they have called for transparent investigations, even though it is clear Israel is unwilling to undertake said investigations, as the Deadly Pattern report attests. 

ICC and ICJ submissions are important, but any process under the ICC will take years to deliver results and ICJ rulings have so far been ignored by Israel. Targeted sanctions, such as those introduced against West Bank settlers and which have been mooted against units of the Israeli military, could be applied to those involved in human rights violations against journalists and media organizations. However, these types of sanctions have only ever been used in a limited manner and with  limited effect.

Increased media access to Gaza could also, in the short term, help to provide much-needed support to journalists inside Gaza—as well as those in the West Bank and Israel—who are working to provide a clear picture of the war and its impacts. Our ability to understand the conflict depends on having a full range of media personnel who are able to report without fear or favor. Every day that goes by in which journalists are killed with impunity, arrested arbitrarily, and prevented from reporting safely is a day in which further atrocities can be committed under the veil of darkness.

Since its establishment in 1949, the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) has undertaken an indispensable role in providing humanitarian relief, work programs, and essential services to the estimated 750,000 Palestinian refugees displaced as the result of the first Arab-Israeli War. Today, UNRWA continues to serve as a critical lifeline for the survival and well-being of roughly 6 million Palestinian refugees dispersed between the Palestinian territories—the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem—and the sprawling refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. 

Throughout its 75 years, UNRWA has become inextricably intertwined with the history, symbolism, and politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For most of the world, UNRWA constitutes an essential element of the international framework with respect to the Palestinian question, and especially the issue of Palestinian refugees, pending a final settlement of the conflict. This is reflected in the consistent support for UNRWA from key states—namely, the United States as the largest contributor, Germany and other EU countries, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye —who have provided the bulk of the agency’s funding.

For Israel, UNRWA has long been a target of often vehement criticism related to its operational inefficiencies, lack of transparency, and as an enabler of Palestinian extremism through its educational programs that allegedly condone violence and rejectionism against Israel. More importantly, for critics of UNRWA, the agency has stood as a pillar upholding the right of return for Palestinian refugees, a reality reflected in the linkage between UNRWA’s founding document, UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 302 (1949), and UNGA Resolution 194 adopted in 1948 which stipulates that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date…” 

To Israel and its supporters, the Palestinian “right of return” is an existential threat that, if realized, will undermine its existence as a Jewish state. The fact that UNRWA continues to sustain this right by enabling the transfer of refugee status to the descendants of the original Palestinians refugees of 1948 is a root cause behind much of the antagonism toward the agency and explains why Israel and its allies have repeatedly called for its replacement and its functions to be transferred to other UN agencies. 

Despite these criticisms, successive Israeli governments had largely acquiesced to UNRWA’s continued functioning, acknowledging its critical role in supporting Palestinian refugees in the Occupied Territories, thereby relieving Israel itself of these burdens and responsibilities under international law.

However, with the advent of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, this relatively tolerant attitude drastically changed. The dissolution of UNRWA became part of a broader radical vision for Israel and the Palestinian territories, involving annexation of the West Bank, precipitating the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, and instituting a legal and institutional basis for Jewish right-wing supremacy in Israel itself. 

For the right-wing parties in the Israeli governing coalition, the war on Gaza provided an opportune moment to bring about the fulfilment of this vision. Abolishing UNRWA became an explicit Israeli war objective. The Agency now faces its most existential crisis to date on multiple levels: mobilizing to confront the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza resulting from the war; having its facilities and personnel being the target of Israel’s war machine on the ground in Gaza; and confronting a full-fledged diplomatic and political onslaught by Israel and its supporters accusing it of complicity in the October 7th attack by Hamas. The latter, for which Israel has not yet provided proof, prompted several major donor countries to suspend their contributions to the Agency. The Israeli government, meanwhile, introduced a bill in the Knesset to designate UNRWA a terrorist organization. 

To explore the many ramifications of the complex crises UNRWA faces, this issue brings together a number of essays that shed light on its legal, operational, financial, and institutional aspects. We are especially grateful to UNRWA Deputy Commissioner-General for Operational Support Antonia de Meo for writing the foreword to this special issue, highlighting the urgency of the crisis and underscoring the importance of the Agency’s role as a “Lifeline of Hope”. 

Lex Takkenberg, senior advisor with the Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), explains how the campaign against UNRWA should be seen in the context of a broader assault on the global refugee regime and the general international humanitarian system as it evolved after WWII. Even though UNRWA’s statute states that the cessation of its ability to assist and protect Palestinian refugees triggers the responsibility of the global refugee regime to extend protections to them, to date no such efforts have been undertaken. 

Anne Irfan, a leading expert on Palestinian refugee rights and colonial displacement, looks at the politics of aid as it relates to UNRWA. While aid is posited as a politically neutral form of support, it is hardly free from political dynamics and machinations. For UNRWA in particular, especially with respect to its critical role in Gaza, such machinations can have fatal consequences for Palestinian refugees rendered highly vulnerable due to the impact of the war.

In the same vein, Palestinian researcher and policy analyst Shatha Abdulsamad argues that the decision of several donor countries, especially the United States, to suspend aid to UNRWA was done on highly dubious allegations of involvement of Agency employees in the October 7 attack. Instead of pushing for accountability, U.S. officials are time and again affirming their unconditional support for Israel at the expense of Palestinian lives. She adds that the broader international efforts at humanitarian assistance for Gaza have been similarly politicized. The international “humanitarian” response, including aid airdrops and efforts to set up a maritime corridor to Gaza, obscure the political underpinnings of the unfolding crisis instead of lifting the blockade on the Strip and ending military occupation, thus reflecting the juxtaposition of politics and humanitarian aid.  

Maysa Ayoub, the associate director of the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo, sheds light on UNRWA’s Egypt office, whose role is mostly diplomatic and does not provide direct support to Palestinians residing in Egypt. However, the suspension of funding has negatively impacted the ability of the UNRWA office in Egypt to facilitate the mobilization of funds from its other offices to the international and local organizations in Egypt who can directly provide aid to Palestinians. Without sustainable funding through an organized mechanism of aid delivery, Palestinians in Egypt will continue to suffer in the absence of UNHCR’s and UNRWA’s operational activities.

The implications of the current crises facing UNRWA will reverberate far beyond the humanitarian situation related to the ongoing war. They will have dire consequences on the stability of vulnerable Palestinian refugee populations far beyond the territory of Gaza, undermine the basis for a just settlement to the Palestinian refugee question, and further erode the prospect for a negotiated solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This is the precise intent behind Israel’s diplomatic, military, and financial assault against the Agency. This is the grim reality that is aptly captured by the title of our special issue “Destroying Hope”, which also features essays on Israel’s attacks on journalism, the right to play for Gaza’s children, the gendered conflict in Sudan, the plight of women in Afghanistan, and others.

Cairo Review Co-Managing Editors,

Karim Haggag

Firas Al-Atraqchi

Palestinians are the only group of refugees excluded from the mandate of the main United Nations refugee agency as a result of the existence of two specialized bodies: one dedicated to the provision of services, and the other to find a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. But what happens to Palestinians in locations where both agencies do not operate?

The Statute of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was adopted by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on December 14, 1950. The office was tasked with the mandate to help displaced populations after World War II. In 1951, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was adopted. Article 35 of the convention requires the signatory states to cooperate with UNHCR, and gives the latter the responsibility to oversee the implementation of the convention.

The 1951 convention and its 1967 protocol represent the main legal instruments governing refugees around the world today, and form the basis of the UNHCR’s work. While its mandate was originally renewed every few years, in 2003 the UNGA made it permanent “until the refugee problem is solved”. It entails providing international protection and humanitarian assistance as well as working with the host governments to ensure the inclusion of refugees in national systems.

The only group that is excluded from UNHCR’s mandate is Palestinian refugees. The first paragraph of Article 1D of the Refugee Convention states:

“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.”

At the time of drafting of the convention, two UN agencies were concerned with Palestinian refugees: the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP). The former is tasked with the provision of aid and assistance to displaced Palestinians and the latter was created to find a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and ensure the protection of Palestinians refugees. Assigning two UN agencies to a specific refugee group is explained by the UN’s involvement in Palestine since 1945 and its partial responsibility for the expulsion of Palestinians as a result of the conflict following the Partition plan of UNGA Resolution 181(II).  Palestinians were therefore automatically excluded from the Refugee Convention based on the provisions of Article 1D.

The UNCCP was mandated to facilitate an agreement between the Arab countries and Israel for the delineation of borders and the future of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip that were under Arab control between 1948 and 1967. The UNGA also gave the UNCCP the responsibility of protecting the Holy Places, placing Jerusalem under an international regimen, ensuring the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, and compensating them for the loss of, or damage to, their properties as a result of the war.

UNRWA was established in 1949 to provide short-term relief and humanitarian assistance. With the continuation of the conflict, UNRWA’s services expanded to include educational programs, health provision, social services, shelter and camp improvement, microfinance and microenterprise development programmes.

By the mid-1950s, it was obvious that the UNCCP failed to fulfill its mandate. The failure has been attributed to Israel’s opposition to the repatriation of Palestinian refugees and the lack of international political and financial support. While the agency has not been formally abolished, it became inactive.

The inactive status, legal scholars argue, should automatically revoke article 1D since the second paragraph of the Refugee Convention states the following:

“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.”

As such, while the first paragraph acts as an ‘exclusion clause’, the second paragraph acts as a contingency ‘inclusion clause’.

UNHCR initially adopted a restrictive interpretation of article 1D of the 1951 convention ignoring the inclusionary paragraph. However, in 2002 and 2009 respectively, UNHCR issued two Notes on the Applicability of Article 1D of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to Palestinian Refugees. In these notes, UNHCR affirmed that Palestinians refugees who were displaced in 1948 and 1967 are entitled to the benefits of the Convention as long as they reside outside UNRWA’s areas of operations.

UNRWA operates in five locations: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank including East Jerusalem. These locations are the ones that received the largest influx of Palestinians refugees after the 1948 and 1967 wars. Palestinians in these locations continue to be excluded from UNHCR’s services. However, it is worth noting that the above-mentioned three countries (Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria) are not signatories to the 1951 Convention.

In the above areas of its operations and given the inactive status of UNCCP, UNRWA is increasingly getting involved in protection-related issues. UNGA resolutions are increasingly using the language of ‘protection’ and ‘legal rights’ in relation to UNRWA’s role and activities. In 2010, UNRWA drafted a ‘Medium Term Strategy’ (MTS) for 2010 to 2015 designed to mainstream protection throughout its operations as an internal matter, and expand protection activities as an external matter. Moreover, following the Syrian conflict, it collaborated with UNHCR to assist Palestinian refugees who are fleeing to non-UNRWA operation fields.

Palestinian ‘Guests’ in Egypt

Egypt, a country on the border with Gaza, received far less Palestinians refugees since 1948. The Palestinian population in Egypt before the crisis starting October 7, 2023, was estimated to be no more than 75,000 scattered across fifteen Egyptian governorates.

Palestinians who fled to Egypt after the 1948 War amounted to around 11,000 to 13,000 individuals and were mostly hosted in camps in Qantara (northeast of Cairo) without any UN relief requested by Egypt. Moreover, Egypt did not request assistance from UNRWA. Instead, it transformed the Egyptian Higher Committee for Palestinian Immigrants, created to manage Palestinian refugees who arrived in Egypt between 1948 and 1950, into an aid agency. It classified Palestinians according to economic need and established eligibility criteria for assistance.

The reason why Egypt did not allow UNRWA to operate in the country was due to its desire to safeguard the Palestinian identity and allow their eventual return after the liberation of Palestine. It is argued that this same logic is what delayed Egypt from signing the 1951 Refugee Convention upon its adoption. Despite the fact that Palestinian refugees did not fall under the treaty, there was concern that signing a convention that ensures the right to asylum will eventually lead to the permanent settlement of Palestinians in the host countries and deny them the right to return to their homeland. Egypt signed the convention in 1981 but Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and all of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have not signed it to this day.

To facilitate the work of UNRWA in the Gaza Strip that came under Egypt’s administration in 1949, the government entered into an agreement with the body to open a liaison office in Cairo to establish the terms for its operation in Gaza. Under the agreement, UNRWA and its personnel were allowed freedom of movement inside Egypt and the Gaza Strip and between the two areas. In addition, the agency was exempted from customs duties and taxes on all goods imported into Gaza and its director as well as its advisory committee were provided with diplomatic immunity.

The 1967 War, however, produced the largest influx of Palestinians into Egypt. Many among them were 1948 refugees who were internally displaced in Gaza. Despite the large influx, Egypt did not change its position and continued to treat Palestinians as visitors and guests rather than refugees in order to prevent their permanent resettlement. The status of the UNRWA office in Egypt changed from a liaison office concerned with facilitating aid to Gaza to a representative office representing the agency in the League of Arab States. As such, the main role of UNRWA in Egypt is diplomatic in terms of building and maintaining relations with the Arab League and lobbying for the agency with the member states. UNRWA was and still is not allowed to operate in Egypt or engage in any operation-like activities.

However, as of 2011 and with the influx of Palestinian refugees from Syria to Egypt, who are estimated to be around 3,000, the agency was allowed to facilitate services only for Palestinians from Syria. Services are mostly in the area of health and medical care, which are facilitated through an agreement with the Egyptian Red Crescent (ERC).

Palestinians from Syria who register on UNRWA’s mobile application, eUNRWA, are eligible for primary and secondary health care services. UNRWA provides the list to the ERC which gives those in need of medical services authorization to access the health facilities of the Mostafa Mahmoud Clinic in Mohandessin, Cairo. Moreover, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Palestinians from Syria were provided with food coupons from the World Food Programme (WFP). After the pandemic and due to the new health regulations of maintaining distance, the service changed to a monthly cash payment equivalent to four-hundred-and-fifty Egyptian pounds ($23 at the time) that is transferred through a mobile application.

Civil Society Filling the Coverage Gap

There are no official statistics made public about the exact number of Palestinians who crossed into Egypt after the Israeli offensive on Gaza in October 2023. However, it has been estimated that from October 8 to March 31, around 100,000 left Gaza and entered Egypt and that on average 300-500 individuals leave Gaza to Egypt daily—including medical evacuees, dual nationals, and staff of international organizations. The exact number of those who stay in Egypt is not known. The exception is the students from Gaza studying in Egyptian universities who are estimated to be around 11,000. Moreover, the Ministry of Health declared in February 2024 that Egypt has received 44,065 Palestinian injured and cancer patients from Gaza since the start of the war.

Given the fact that the Egyptian government, for the reason explained above, is not authorizing UNHCR to deal with Palestinian refugees and UNRWA cannot engage in operational activities, aid to Palestinians in Egypt is provided by international and local non-governmental organizations as well as private donors.

The only local non-governmental organization authorized to assist the Egyptian government is the ERC and it is the entity that is mainly responsible for delivering aid to Palestinians in both Gaza and Egypt. At the beginning of the war, UNRWA facilitated the process of aid provision to Gaza. The office used to send a request to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to approve the entry of aid. However, according to UNRWA, the Egyptian government is now requesting that the crossing of aid should only be through the ERC.

With regard to the provision of aid to Palestinians in Egypt, the ERC, as mentioned above, is authorized to provide direct assistance. The work of other local and international organizations, however, is facilitated by the Palestinian embassy in Cairo and UNRWA. Palestinians in the locations where UNRWA is operating usually register in eUNRWA. If they approach the UNRWA office in Egypt upon arrival to the country, they are advised to change their residency from Gaza to Egypt on eUNRWA so the organization can inform the Palestinian embassy. However, there is no monitoring mechanism by which UNRWA ensures that they actually changed their residency.

Moreover, only those who approach UNRWA are requested to change their residency. As such, it is difficult to know the exact number of Palestinians who entered Egypt from Gaza. Those who do change their residency on eUNRWA are able to register with the embassy and can receive assistance from local and international organizations. Accordingly, the embassy monitors, organizes, and facilitates the process of aid provision to Palestinians from Gaza in Egypt. Save the Children and the Egyptian Food Bank have provided cash assistance in this way. UNRWA also works with medical cases coming from Gaza under the umbrella of the Egyptian Ministry of Health.

Some local organizations that provide assistance to refugees in Egypt do include Palestinian refugees as beneficiaries of their services. However, since most of these organizations are implementing partners to UNHCR, they cannot publicize their services to Palestinians given the fact that UNHCR is not authorized to include Palestinians in their services provision. For example, last year, one of these organizations provided entrepreneurship training to Palestinians from Syria living in female-headed households. Twenty-one women benefited from the training and were able to seek funds to start their small business at home.

Funding Cuts Have Far-Reaching Repercussions

In January 2024, Israeli authorities provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the Hamas attacks of October 7. In response, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini terminated the contracts of these staff members and launched an investigation. Seventeen countries, including major donors, as well as the European Union, immediately suspended their UNRWA funding until further information is made available. Suspension is with regard to pledging new donations as countries are obliged to deliver what they already pledged.

In March 2024, several states resumed funding, including Sweden, Canada, Finland, Japan, France, and Australia, as well as the European Union. Germany resumed funding for all of UNRWA’s field of operations except Gaza until the investigations were completed, and in late April included Gaza after the Colonna Report indicated that Israel had failed to provide evidence of its claims over three months later. Most recently, Italy resumed funding, while the United States has not.

The disruption in funding at this critical time with the continuation of atrocities in Gaza represents a serious obstacle for UNRWA to continue with its emergency response in Gaza and its regional humanitarian operations. To compensate for the reduction in funds, the agency tried to mobilize public support and raise funds from private individuals and institutions through its fundraising activities. However, no matter how successful these fundraising activities are, they cannot compensate for the loss of funds from major donor countries like the United States.

UNRWA’s office in Egypt, as mentioned, is a representative office whose role is mostly diplomatic and does not provide direct funding to Palestinians residing in Egypt. However, the suspension of funding has negatively impacted the ability of the UNRWA office in Egypt to facilitate the mobilization of funds from its other offices to the international and local organizations in Egypt who can directly provide aid to Palestinians. The efforts of the Egyptian government and the local and international organizations operating in Egypt cannot be underestimated. However, without sustainable funding through an organized mechanism of aid delivery, Palestinians in Egypt will continue to suffer in the absence of UNHCR’s and UNRWA’s operational activities.

Eight months into the genocide in Gaza, the severity of the crisis is staggering. Over 75 percent of the population has been displaced while more than 36,000 have been killed, with an estimated more than 8,100 missing or under the rubble. The whole of Gaza´s population is at imminent risk of famine as Israel continues to flout orders by the International Court of Justice to allow aid into the Strip. Already, at least 30 Palestinians have died from starvation and dehydration, while 31 per cent of children under the age of two suffer from acute malnutrition in the northern Gaza Strip. The health system has been decimated with 84 percent of health facilities damaged or destroyed. The speed at which the humanitarian crisis is unfolding is appalling, especially as desperately needed assistance is ready to be delivered just a few miles away.

In December, UN Secretary-General António Guterres invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter—one of the most powerful tools at his disposal—to sound the alarm on “a severe risk of collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza” and to call on the Security Council to declare a full humanitarian ceasefire. The Security Council did not heed the call as different resolutions calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire were vetoed by the United States.

Against the backdrop of this staggering crisis, the political contours of humanitarian aid are especially startling when taking into account the politically motivated withdrawal of UNRWA funding and the efforts to set up a new “humanitarian maritime corridor”. To unpack the fundamental relationship between politics and humanitarian aid in the case of Gaza, it is crucial to scrutinize efforts to delegitimize UNRWA—the largest humanitarian organization providing life-saving support for the besieged population of over two million in the Gaza Strip—the continuous obstruction of the entry and distribution of humanitarian supplies, and the ensuing efforts to develop new “humanitarian corridors”.

Halting Funding of UNRWA is a Political Act

Israel´s longlasting campaign to delegitimize UNRWA—as the last standing embodiment of the international community’s commitment left toward the right of return of Palestinians—escalated during the onslaught on Gaza despite the crucial role the agency has been playing.

Informed by the understanding that Palestinian displacement is a result of the UN Partition plan of 1947 and the creation of the State of Israel, to which the UN bore responsibility, the international community recognized that the question of Palestine and the plight of displaced Palestinians warranted special measures. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 194(III), affirming the right of refugees to return to their homes in Palestine, and establishing the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP); the latter would become one leg of the unique institutional framework devised for Palestinian refugees. The following year, the UN established UNRWA with a temporary mandate to provide services to refugees awaiting their repatriation. In 1960, the UNCCP fell into demise due to the lack of prospect in reaching a political settlement to the refugee issue. This took away one of the unique framework’s legs, and put more pressure on UNRWA to address the underlying political predicaments that Israel put in place to bar Palestinian return.

UNRWA is a reminder of the Palestinians’ inalienable right of return. The campaign against UNRWA thus aims to erase the question of Palestinian refugees and bring about the demise of their collective right of return as expressed by Resolution 194. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for UNRWA to be dissolved in his post-war plans for Gaza, while similar calls were made to close down the UNRWA office in Jerusalem. Two bills currently being considered by the Israeli parliament move to realize these calls by designating the agency as a terrorist entity and sever all ties with it.

UNRWA´s operations—and indeed its very existence—is under jeopardy as it faces a politically induced financial crisis following the decision of its largest contributors, the United States and Germany alongside others, to suspend their funding. The decision followed uncorroborated Israeli allegations that a dozen of UNRWA´s 13,000 local staff in Gaza may have been involved in Hamas´s Al-Aqsa Flood Operation of  October 7. To date, the United States and United Kingdom have not resumed funding, although other countries, including Germany, have.

Cutting off UNRWA’s funding at this critical time is not only a serious blow to its humanitarian work in the region, but is also divorced from the lifesaving needs of the millions of Palestinians in Gaza.  As the population in Gaza continues to face an unprecedented humanitarian crisis marked by relentless Israeli bombardment, cutting off assistance to UNRWA amidst the unfolding genocide hampers the agency’s ability to service Palestinian refugees and to sufficiently fulfill its assistance mandate.

The timing of the defunding campaign of UNRWA is significant as it came the day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) recognized that the risk of genocide by Israel in Gaza is plausive and ordered that Israel “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”. Since then, the Court has twice ordered further provisional measures at South Africa’s request, most recently demanding Israel  halt its genocidal military offensive on Rafah.

The dissonance in defunding UNRWA while simultaneously arming Israel at this critical moment is no coincidence. Instead of immediately suspending financial aid and military assistance to the Israeli government to put an end to economic and diplomatic support for a colonial regime responsible for genocide, allies of Israel chose to suspend the provision of humanitarian aid and the vital services that UNRWA provides to Palestinian refugees based on yet unproven allegations. Instead of pushing for accountability, U.S. officials are time and again affirming their unconditional support for the Israeli regime and distracting from the ICJ ruling to prevent the enforcement of the order.

New Humanitarian Response or Political Bankruptcy? 

As much as the withdrawal of funding for UNRWA is politically motivated, the international “humanitarian” response, including aid airdrops and efforts to set up a maritime corridor to Gaza, are no less political. Presenting the alleviation of the humanitarian crisis as the solution—obscuring the political underpinnings of the unfolding crisis instead of lifting the blockade on Gaza and ending military occupation—pointedly reflects the juxtaposition of politics and humanitarian aid.

Humanitarian airdrops

In March, five months after the Israeli war against Gaza began, the United States and other states began airdropping food into northern Gaza, as Palestinians continue to face starvation and indiscriminate bombardment. However, airdrops are an ineffective way to deliver the much-needed aid to a population of 2.2 million people at the outbreak of famine.

Airdrops are typically used in situations of natural disasters where conventional ground transportation may be hindered or impossible and the only way to provide humanitarian aid to people is by air.  The first airdrop of humanitarian relief under the UN system happened in 1973 in Africa´s Western Sahel due to drought. Humanitarian organizations have since resorted to airdrops as a last resort to meet the needs of people under their control where political, environmental, or logistical factors may impede humanitarian relief. For example, airdrops were used in 2012 and 2014 to deliver emergency food assistance to the northern Central African Republic and South Sudan, where rain had made these areas inaccessible and movement of food transportation by road impossible. In 2016, the World Food Programme airdropped tons of food assistance over Syria’s Deir Ezzor following Daesh´s siege of the city when it was impossible to deliver relief in any other way.

While humanitarian airdrops may offer short term help, their high cost—seven times the cost of road transport—and the small quantities that can be delivered in each flight, as opposed to convoys of trucks, make them only viable as a last resort. They are typically used when all other access to people in need is blocked. However, the situation in Gaza is different as the impediment on the entry of aid is by design.

In Gaza, as Israel controls the land crossings, it intentionally denies the entry of aid and uses forced starvation as a tool of war in the context of genocide. Israel´s recent ground operations in Rafah and its takeover of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt further weaponizes the entry of aid into the Strip, already brought to a near halt.

On the other hand, airdrops allow Israel’s allies to appear to fill the vacuum of its own duties and obligations as an occupying power under international law, specifically its duty to ensure that the civilian population is adequately supplied with crucial goods and resources. As Israel controls the airspace in the Gaza Strip, airdrops are only made possible through close coordination with the Israeli authorities.

Instead of throwing their political weight to pressure Israel to open land crossings and to end its systematic and intentional campaign of starvation, allies of Israel use airdrops as a diversion strategy. Through airdrops, states are effectively relieving Israel of pressure to lift its brutal siege, hence buying it more time to continue inflicting maximum suffering and death to as many Palestinians as possible.

In addition, the use of airdrops by Israel’s allies further cements the exclusion of UNRWA from the distribution of aid in Gaza. The transportation of aid by air instead of by land is one step closer to pulling the rug from under UNRWA´s feet. Airdrops, done with neither consideration for proper distribution, nor the safety of those receiving them, contribute to Israel´s strategy of replacing UNRWA by excluding it from continuing to organize and provide direct lifesaving aid in such unprecedented time.

Not only do airdrops not respect the dignity of people or reach the most vulnerable, but they also do not change the atrocious reality on the ground. In effect, aid is dropped in the same breath as bombs are raining down on people, not to mention the several massacres Israel committed against hungry Palestinians scrambling for aid.

Maritime Corridor

Similarly, in March, the European Commission, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others, expressed their intent to open a maritime corridor to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea. In that pursuit, aid shipments from Cyprus to Gaza were set sail and the U.S. military was tasked with building a pier off Gaza for the delivery of the much-needed humanitarian aid.

While Palestinian calls for equipment to remove the rubble of their bombed homes and to retrieve the bodies of their deceased were not heeded, numerous bulldozers and trucks were sent by Israel to the Gaza border to transport thousands of tons of rubble from demolished homes in Gaza for the construction of the new pier. On May 17, 2024, aid began to arrive in Gaza coming from Cyprus, where it was first inspected by Israel.

Like airdrops, the maritime corridor is faulted for painting the onslaught in Gaza as a humanitarian crisis, attempting to substitute humanitarian aid for accountability and justice. The corridor contributes to deepening Israel´s control by weaponizing humanitarian aid. It does not challenge the Israeli closure of land crossings or its restrictions on the entry of aid. Furthermore, as ground deliveries are the most effective and easiest way to provide urgent and immediate relief, aid entering by sea will only contribute to Israel´s ongoing engineered starvation of the Palestinian people.

Most importantly, however, is that the maritime corridor will entrench the exclusion of international agencies, especially UNRWA, from the distribution and delivery of aid. To this end, Israeli intent was made clear in its horrific targeting and killing of any attempt to organize aid distribution in Gaza, whether Palestinian civil police, prominent families that rejected coordination with Israel, local self-organized committees, or volunteer teams. The maritime corridor therefore aligns with Israeli plans of establishing parallel “humanitarian mechanisms” that support its goal to eliminate and replace UNRWA. By ending UNRWA operations in the Gaza Strip, which serves more than 25 percent of the whole Palestinian refugee population, Israel and its allies intend to obliterate UNRWA beyond Gaza, and with it the right of return.

Supplying Israel with the bombs on the one hand and airdropping or shipping aid to the survivors on the other is nothing but a spectacle designed to evade responsibility for the policies of Israel’s allies which are contributing to the ongoing atrocities and famine in Gaza. For states to fulfill their international obligations, they must halt all arms transfers to Israel and exert all means to enforce an immediate ceasefire and unrestricted humanitarian access and accountability.

A meaningful humanitarian response can only be achieved if it is accompanied by a political mechanism that addresses decades of colonization, dispossession, and siege. Anything painting the situation as only a humanitarian crisis is a farce and signals utter political bankruptcy.

The brutal Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, 2023 and the genocidal Israeli response thereto, have comprehensively and irrevocably broken the status quo with respect to the Question of Palestine.

The prevailing notions of Israel and Western elites that the oppression, systematic discrimination, and  denial of self-determination of the Palestinian people could be sustained into eternity have been shattered forever. One way this denial manifests itself is denial of the right of return of Palestinian refugees, while the discrimination they face amounts to apartheid—to different degrees dependent on whether they live in Israel proper, the Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, or the Palestinian diaspora.

Some Israeli and diaspora Jews have begun a process of reflection, including on what some of them refer to as the failure of Zionism (here and here), Israel’s self-destruction, an imperative for an exodus from Zionism, and its relationship to Judaism in the aftermath of 7 October.

For Palestinians, the events since October 7 have parachuted the Palestinian question back to the top of the international agenda. The unprecedented Hamas attack and the Israeli response have brought into stark focus the need to urgently revamp the Palestinian national movement or, more generally, the question of Palestinian representation—as a precursor to addressing the broader questions related to liberation and statehood from colonization, occupation, apartheid and, now, genocide.

For the Arab States, the events since October 7 have highlighted the risks of ‘normalizing’ relations with Israel prior to resolving the Palestine question, which continues to represent an open wound to the Arab soul and consciousness. More generally, the outpouring of extraordinary popular anger with respect to the ongoing genocide in Gaza—exacerbated by the lack of political will among Western elites to put a stop to it—and the unprecedented solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinian people in all four corners of the globe are reiterating that the unresolved Question of Palestine remains a permanent international responsibility. October 7 and its aftermath forces all of the above actors to engage in a fundamental rethink on the way forward with respect to all the key issues at stake.

Al-Nakba was the ‘catastrophe’ that saw the forced displacement and exile of three quarters of the Palestinian people as Israel was established in 1948. Since then, the rights, situation, and future of the Palestinian refugees, and those subsequently displaced, have represented the human dimension at the heart of the unresolved Palestine question. Palestinian displacement has been ongoing: after the 1967 War, another 350,000 to 400,000 Palestinians were forced to flee from Israel, followed by some 250,000 within or from the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) and some 700,000 from the Arab region during the subsequent decades. Forced displacement has been at the forefront in the current war in Gaza, with at least 1.7 million Gaza Palestinians internally displaced, many multiple times, and as many as 100,000 displaced into Egypt. Further displacement is taking place as a result of the ongoing Israeli ground operation in Rafah and renewed fighting in the north of Gaza.

UNRWA at a Crossroads

UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, was set up in the aftermath of the Nakba and continues to be a lifeline for the millions of Palestine refugees that it supports through basic education, primary health care services, relief and social services, microfinance, infrastructure works, and other assistance. It was originally established upon the initiative of the United States to shift focus toward a resolution of the Palestinian refugee question from return—as required by international law and demanded by the UN General Assembly in late 1948—to integration into Arab host countries.

The agency has come under unprecedented attack by Israel since the end of January, accused by the Netanyahu government of serious breaches of UN neutrality. The unproven allegations made by Israel that twelve UNRWA workers were involved in the October 7 attacks resulted in suspensions of funding by the agency’s largest donors.

Although Israel had been occasionally attacking UNRWA from 1967 onwards, it is only since the onset of the current extreme rightwing Israeli government, and in particular since 7 October 2023, that the Israeli government appears intent on shutting down UNRWA’s operations in the OPT.

UNRWA’s future in Gaza is now in serious jeopardy after Israel informed the agency that it would prevent it from distributing humanitarian aid in northern Gaza, and has more generally ceased cooperation with it in the Strip. Even if the rift with Israel can be overcome, UNRWA’s future in Gaza is now inherently connected with the future of the Strip more generally. UNRWA’s future in the West Bank hangs in the balance after Israeli lawmakers submitted legislation to close down the agency’s operations in the city (and possibly the West Bank), and violent Israeli demonstrators torched its West Bank Field Office, forcing its temporary closure.

It is possible that Israel’s machinations might reduce the agency to a “rump UNRWA” confined to supporting Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. UNRWA’s Commissioner-General recently observed that the Israeli attacks on the agency are not about its neutrality, but rather attempts to erase the Palestinian refugee question once and for all. Even though the question of refugees and their rights and historical claims are not dependent on UNRWA’s continued existence, the attacks underscore the current Israeli government’s attitude with respect to the possibility of ever entertaining a just and durable solution to the millions of forcibly displaced Palestinians.

The attacks on UNRWA should be seen also as a wider attack on the global refugee regime and the broader international humanitarian system as it evolved after WWII. Even though under UNHCR’s Statute, the cessation of its ability to assist and protect Palestinian refugees triggers the responsibility of the global refugee agency with respect to these refugees, to date no efforts have been made to extend the protections of the global refugee regime to them—including with respect to Palestinians who were able to flee to Egypt.

Beyond this, both Israel and the United States have made it clear that they envisage an approach to long-term humanitarian support in Gaza through privatization of aid deployment. Fogbow, a private Swiss-based humanitarian contractor founded by former senior U.S. military and intelligence personnel, has been contracted by Western donors to manage the Cyprus-based maritime relief operation in Gaza. It is now also reportedly favored to manage the deployment of relief supplies brought in through the new U.S.-built pier, making use of private Palestinian contractors and working in close cooperation with and under protection from the Israeli military. Israeli Prime Ministet Benjamin Netanyahu appears to increasingly favor a weakened Hamas in combination with a longer-term Israeli military presence in Gaza—with permanent Israeli army bases at the pier, the crossing points, and at the permanent barrier being constructed in Wadi Gaza.

Instead of being governed by the Palestinian Authority or the UN, Gaza may well turn into a dystopian “humanitarian” experiment characterised by privatization, militarisation, and authoritarianism, whereby eligibility for and deployment of aid is managed by paramilitary contractors, aided by artificial intelligence, under overall Israeli (and U.S.) control.

These ongoing and planned developments highlight the need for an urgent and fundamental rethink of the approach to the refugee question now compounded by the dramatic further internal and external mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. A comprehensive, multi-stakeholder approach is needed to the Gaza crisis, led by the UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator, with the displacement issue at its center. The existential pressures on UNRWA in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, further prompt a sharp reflection on the future of support to the Palestinian refugees in the oPt at large.

In our book, Palestinian Refugees in International Law and subsequent papers (here and here), rights expert and current UN Special Rapporteur for the oPt Francesca Albanese and I make the case for a fundamental paradigm shift with respect to the approach to the Palestinian refugee question. We envision a framework where the 2016 New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants (NYD) serves as the basis for its implementation.

It is clear that the role and future of UNRWA cannot be considered in isolation as it has become part of a UN humanitarian and development system in the oPt comprising over a dozen agencies. A way forward to the current crisis cannot be found by individual agencies strategizing in isolation, with occasional turf battles and inefficiencies. If the United Nations is to remain relevant with respect to the Palestine question, and if it is to prevent the above dystopian scenario from becoming the reality of humanitarian aid—not just in Gaza but beyond, then this is the time for a forceful and fundamental reset. The opportunity and mandate offered by the NYD should be urgently seized. It has the potential to not only provide a way forward for UNRWA, but more generally to address the broader aspects of the Question of Palestine in the context of the current crisis and through a holistic and multidimensional approach.

A Comprehensive Response Framework for Palestinian Refugees

The NYD, unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2016 in response to the refugee crisis in Europe a year earlier, provides a powerful political reaffirmation of the legal and institutional international refugee regime that was put in place after WWII and subsequent decades, including the centrality of international law in protecting the human rights and fundamental freedoms of refugees, and the approach in promoting durable solutions for refugee situations. In the words of UN High Commissioner of Refugees Filippo Grandi, “The New York Declaration marks a political commitment of unprecedented force and resonance. It fills what has been a perennial gap in the international protection system—that of truly sharing responsibility for refugees”.

The Declaration underscores the importance of a systematic and comprehensive response in addressing refugee questions. It calls, among other things, for the development of a Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) for each large-scale refugee situation, including protracted ones. These CRRFs are to be developed through a multi-stakeholder approach, with a key role for national and local authorities, international organizations, international financial institutions, civil society, and, last but not least, refugees themselves. It also calls for addressing all aspects of a refugee response, including root causes, ending refugee status and statelessness through a combination of durable solutions and humanitarian assistance. CRRFs have already been adopted in Central America, among other places.

The NYD applies to all refugees, including Palestinian refugees, as evident from the number of references therein to UNRWA. In spite of this, to date no such framework has been developed for Palestinian refugees but doing so now could be a powerful way forward to address the current crisis. It would give new impetus to international action in favor of Palestinian refugees and displaced and need not wait for—and could help advance—a more positive outlook for the broader political process. It could also help UNRWA to overcome the current existential crisis.

The idea is for a CRRF for Palestinian refugees to first articulate the general legal framework for refugees and other displaced persons, with reference to the NYD, and then set out the specific rights that Palestinian refugees enjoy under the applicable binding international instruments, rulings from the ICJ, and other courts and relevant UN resolutions. Since there is often so much disagreement about the rights to which Palestinian refugees are entitled, it would be important to explicitly spell these out in a document that purports to provide a comprehensive international response to their situation as it continues to exist.

Elaborating a Comprehensive Response Framework for Palestinian Refugees (CRF-PR) would:

1. Restore the leading role of the United Nations with respect to addressing the Palestinian refugee issue and the broader Palestine question

The Middle East Peace Process and Oslo Accords turned the refugee issue into an essentially bilateral issue to be negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians, starting from the premise of a false equivalence between two vastly unequal parties. The same applies to other aspects of the unresolved Palestine question. This situation must end and the UN must resume its leading role as demanded by its permanent responsibility for the Question of Palestine.

2. Reestablish international law as the framework and “lighthouse” for resolving the various aspects of the Palestinian refugee question and the broader Question of Palestine. 

According to the international normative framework that emerged from WWII, ending the systematic violation of the Palestinian refugees’ right to return, restitution and compensation  and the Palestinian people’s rights to self-determination, freedom from foreign military occupation, colonialism, and apartheid should be inherent in any solution and cannot be a matter for negotiation. In this respect, the upcoming Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the legal consequences of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the oPt is expected to further underscore this point.

3. Adopt a multi-stakeholder approach in responding to the various aspects to the question of Palestinian forced displacement since 1948, including the current mass displacement inside Gaza, involving national and international actors, governmental and non-governmental, as emphasized by the NYD. 

The development of the CRF-PR could be led (initially) by the UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator or another senior UN envoy with strong involvement of UNRWA and UNHCR, each with respect to Palestinian refugees and displaced under their respective mandates. The Palestinian political leadership and the refugees must have a central and leading role in this process.

4. Reaffirm the applicable legal framework, as affirmed in relevant binding legal instruments, rulings of the International Court of Justice and other judiciary bodies, and applicable UN resolutions. 

A reaffirmation of the various rights Palestinian refugees enjoy under international law would help bring clarity of the status applicable, collectively and individually, to Palestinian refugees: as refugees, internally displaced, often stateless persons, and protected in situations of armed conflict and occupation, and as human beings.

5. Strengthen protection of Palestinian civilians through the deployment of a protective presence similar to UNRWA’s Refugee Affairs Officers program and related arrangements during the first intifada. 

This was also suggested in response to a request from the General Assembly in 2018 (UNGA res. ES-10/20). Such an arrangement should include special protective measures for Palestinian children, with 2023 having been the deadliest year on record and the current war in Gaza among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history.

6. Fill the durable solutions gap left by the demise of the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine. 

Palestinian refugees need and deserve, like all other refugees, an international arrangement engaged not only in supporting their humanitarian needs but also in upholding their human rights, including to return, restitution, and compensation, as well as facilitating such other durable solutions that refugees may want to pursue. These are inalienable and non-derogable rights and have only become stronger with the passage of time and the further advancement of international law.

7. Align the search for solutions with international refugee law and practice.

A combination of the durable solutions that have helped resolve other protracted refugee situations could help do so for Palestinian refugees. There has been a long-held belief by Palestinian leaders and refugees, as well as representatives of Arab States, that pursuing solutions for Palestinian refugees more holistically would undermine their rights and claims towards Israel, and as such jeopardize the Palestinian cause, which is not the case at all.

Accordingly, Palestinian refugees and their political advocates should not fear pursuing solutions more closely aligned with the global international refugee regime, as many individual Palestinian refugees have done over the years and others demand. This would in fact be a way to empower the refugees, improve their life, and enable them to influence their political future.

Along with returning the Palestinian refugee question back to the UN and reestablishing the primacy of international law, this is the third element of the paradigm shift brought about by a CFR-PR.

8. Provide a platform to begin acknowledgment of the pain and trauma of the other as a necessary precondition for advancing solutions.

The development of the CRF-PR could provide a setting to initiate a public discussion on the root causes of the Palestinian refugee question: the still to be addressed forced displacement and dispossession since 1948. This would include both its origins, constituting elements, and evolution (the past), as well as the broader context of the unresolved dispute between Israel and the Palestinians (the present).

Securing UNRWA’s Future

UNRWA’s future in the oPt is very much in the balance. While it is a subsidiary organ of the UN General Assembly, Israel has no power to abolish or amend the agency’s mandate. But it is in a position to prevent UNRWA from continuing to operate in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including from its East Jerusalem headquarters. UNRWA depends on Israel for visa and permits for its international and Palestinian employees, for overseas and local money transfers including salary payments, for imports of goods and services, for registration of vehicles, and for security of its operations. Under these circumstances, it is critical that UNRWA’s future and the delivery of its services to Palestinian refugees be considered in the broader context of a CRF-PR.

UNRWA’s pioneering human development strategy has proved to be a success as millions of refugees over the 75 years of its existence have benefitted from its education, health and other services. Refugees have also looked to UNRWA when crises strike, and the agency has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to respond timely and appropriately to recurrent emergencies, as has been the case during the current war in Gaza.

While both roles remain critical, Palestinians have indicated proof of refugee status as the main significance of registration with UNRWA. Refugees, the Palestinian leadership, and host governments see in UNRWA’s existence confirmation that the refugees’ unfulfilled rights remain an international responsibility. As mentioned earlier, this is exactly the reason why the current Israeli government wants to see UNRWA abolished.

The provision of basic services and emergency assistance could potentially be taken over by other actors, but there is no alternative for the agency’s protection mandate. Building on its existing role in protecting the rights of the Palestinian refugees, the agency should expand this role supporting the protection of their most critical rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights, as well as those related to return, restitution, and compensation. The agency should also further expand its role in supporting the various UN and other efforts at holding Israel and Hamas accountable to the gross violations of international criminal law perpetrated during the current and previous wars in Gaza (and in the West Bank).

In this context, UNRWA’s registration system has the potential to become the central archive and repository of evidence of the refugees’ historic claims. This would have a huge symbolic and practical impact for the refugees, especially once the registration system gets harmonized and synchronised with UNCCP records. The latter would connect property loss and damages in 1947/1949 to individual refugees and their families and descendants. UNRWA is in the process of integrating its registration system and other historic archives and refugee data maintained by the agency into a Palestine Refugee Data Center, an initiative that deserves strong support, especially by Palestinians in the region and beyond. In view of the vicious attacks on the agency, serious consideration should be given to move the Center to Europe, or another safe location at the earliest practicable opportunity.

The future of UNRWA and the Palestinian refugees it serves has never been more dire. In view of the events since October 7, and the vicious existential attacks on the agency, the “muddling through” approach of the past decades no longer works, and a fundamental reconsideration of the way forward must commence immediately. Seizing the opportunity afforded by the NYD will be difficult and face many challenges. But doing nothing whilst the situation of the refugees and displaced continues to deteriorate and UNRWA’s future hangs in the balance, with the potential danger this entails for the  global refugee regime and the broader international humanitarian system, carries far greater risks.

The successful development of a CRF-PR, reaffirming the historical rights of the Palestinian refugees, seeking practical ways for materialization of such rights, while also allowing solutions that are at present possible to be realized, would give the refugees and displaced a more secure present and a more hopeful future. It would support them in advancing their search for justice and accountability and in playing an active role in a platform that they have long been denied.

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The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development.

Since its establishment in 1949, UNRWA—the UN agency for Palestine refugees—has provided aid, shelter, healthcare, and education to refugees across the Middle East. Today it serves almost six million Palestinans, including 1.5 million in Gaza. With Israel’s current onslaught continuing to devastate the Strip, UNRWA is now providing life-saving services to three-quarters of the population there. Its aid includes food assistance for more than a million Palestinians in Gaza, as Israel’s bombardment and blockade causes famine to spread across the territory.

Yet UNRWA’s essential humanitarian role in Gaza is currently under threat from a funding bill passed by the U.S. Congress in March. The bill extended the ban on the provision of any funding to the agency until March 2025. Supporters of the funding ban, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, have pointed to Israeli allegations, unproven and reportedly based on false confessions coerced by torture, that twelve of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gaza staff participated in the October 7 attacks. Johnson says it is necessary to “halt funding for the UN agency which employed terrorists”, and members of Congress from both parties concur.

However, the move stands in stark contrast to the United States’ response to other incidents involving the UN. It continued to fund UN peacekeeping operations following repeated scandals of sexual exploitation and abuse and even complicity in war crimes. Its stance also diverges from European governments, many of which have resumed their funding to UNRWA after Israel failed to provide evidence for its allegations. The language used in the U.S bill is best understood, then, not as a response to the Israeli claims about staff involvement in October 7, but as part of an ongoing political campaign against UNRWA and Palestinian refugee rights writ large.

In fact, decision-making about funding UNRWA has always been politicized. Since the agency’s inception, governments have opted to finance its work—or not—on the basis of their own political calculations. Recognizing and responding to this, UNRWA management have in turn sought to position the agency’s work in line with donor preferences. As a result, UNRWA’s funding has always been burdened by the conditionality of donor demands, with its ability to operate hinging on the requirements of its funders.

UNRWA and the Politics of Aid 

Political leaders in both Israel and the United States have for many years called for UNRWA to be dismantled. Benjamin Netanyahu first did so in 2017, claiming that the agency is biased against Israel and lacks the neutrality required of an aid body. In withdrawing financial support for UNRWA, U.S. President Joe Biden—who quickly signed the congressional bill into law—is acting in step with his administration’s allegiance to Israel, which has only intensified over the last six months.

Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who voted against the budget bill, was right when she described the defunding as “highly political”. Yet, what should not be missed in this conversation is the fact that U.S. financing of UNRWA’s work has always been political—even when funding was forthcoming. From the outset, donors have used UNRWA as a tool to manage, contain, and at times punish Palestinian refugees, precisely to achieve political objectives—whether the objective is to promote the refugees’ reintegration in Arab host countries, or to undermine  political rights. Both the provision and the withdrawal of support for the agency has always been embedded in the governments’ political calculations of UN member states.

Of course, the politics of aid is a well-documented reality that is not limited to the case of UNRWA and the ongoing Palestinian refugee crisis. While aid is posited as a politically neutral act, its financing, logistics and delivery are always entangled with political dynamics and machinations. But for UNRWA, with its particularly central role in Gaza, the consequences can be especially fatal.

Paradoxically, the case of UNRWA also demonstrates what scholar Linda Tabar calls the anti-politics of humanitarianism, whereby aid recipients are depoliticized and constructed in terms devoid of any context. In the Palestinian case, this means treating the refugees as people in need of services, without taking account of the fundamentally political nature of their dispossession and displacement. The juxtaposition of these two strands in UNRWA’s work—politics and anti-politics—can explain many of the tensions around the agency’s work and purpose today.

The Politics of UNRWA’s Set-Up

Acting on the recommendations of a U.S.-supported Economic Survey Mission (ESM) in the region, the General Assembly established UNRWA in 1949 as a special agency to carry out “direct relief and works programs” for registered refugees from Palestine. Since beginning operations in May 1950, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East has become one of the largest service providers and employers in the Levant.

Despite creating UNRWA and regularly renewing its mandate every three to five years, the UN has never set up a reliable income stream to finance its work. Instead, UNRWA has relied on donations, mostly from UN member states in addition to a small portion from organizations and individuals. This set-up gives donors a high degree of leverage over the agency, as they can attach conditions to their funding and withdraw it according to their own whims. Over the last seven decades, UNRWA’s General Fund was overwhelmingly financed by Western donor states, particularly the United States and United Kingdom. It did not go unnoticed that these same states were close to Israel, and their support for UNRWA was one of several factors informing Palestinian suspicion of the agency’s political positioning.

Western donor states, chiefly the United States and the United Kingdom, have long treated their financial support for UNRWA as part of a broader political strategy for Palestine and Israel. One year before creating the agency, the UN passed General Assembly Resolution 194, recognizing Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes. While both the United States and United Kingdom voted in favor of the resolution, behind the scenes they quickly began pushing for an alternative “solution” that would see the refugees permanently resettled in neighboring Arab countries. In their eyes, UNRWA’s work was a way to facilitate this, particularly as it had a foothold in the bordering host states of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Indeed, the “works” in the agency’s title signaled its early emphasis on job creation schemes, designed with a view to encouraging the refugees’ resettlement and eventual naturalization in these states.

The job schemes had been a key element of the ESM’s recommendations, but they failed to take off—largely due to opposition from Palestinian refugees themselves. Demonstrating the autonomy and agency that has characterized Palestinian refugee history, communities across the region refused to participate in UNRWA’s works program, correctly intuiting that it was designed to undercut their right of return. Demanding that the agency recognize their political rights, they successfully rejected its pressure on them to enroll in the job schemes. Within a few years, these schemes were defunct and the agency’s focus shifted to education—in line with the preferences of the refugees themselves. In subsequent decades, Palestinian refugee communities would, despite their structural vulnerabilities, continue to achieve striking success in forcing changes in UNRWA’s approach.

Despite the early failure of the jobs program, Western powers continued to fund UNRWA. The reason was simple: they calculated that on balance, its work still served their interests in the region. In particular, the United States and its European allies judged that UNRWA’s provision of essential services to thousands of destitute Palestinian refugees would help “stabilize” the Middle East and prevent further political turmoil.

In the post-WWII context, one major consideration on this front was the potential spread of communism amidst Soviet expansion. In 1948—the same year that Zionist militias and Israeli forces expelled and displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians—the United States had spent billions of dollars on the Marshall Plan, supporting economic recovery programs in Europe. So-called “Marshall Aid” became a pillar of U.S. foreign policy, based on the rationale that economic prosperity would provide a bulwark against communist recruitment and expansion. On a similar basis, U.S. policymakers judged that UNRWA services would render Palestinian refugees less susceptible to communist recruitment. The rationale underpinning this thinking is of course up for serious debate.

Yet, so committed were the United States and the United Kingdom to this approach that they not only funded UNRWA themselves but also fundraised for it. Records show that in the 1950s, they appealed to their allies around the world to support the agency diplomatically and financially. In letters to counterparts, the UK Foreign Office extolled UNRWA as essential for creating and maintaining stability in the Middle East¹. In later decades, UNRWA itself would often cite its “stabilizing impact” when appealing to Western states for funding—a sign not only of the argument’s potency, but of the politically informed nature of its funding.

Political considerations continued to drive Western funding for UNRWA in subsequent decades. In the 1970s, UK officials openly acknowledged that they funded UNRWA for “overwhelmingly political” reasons². The Foreign Office described support for the agency as “an important humanitarian and political priority.”³ And donor states—particularly the US—sometimes attached conditions to their funding that clearly showed the dynamics at play. In 1970, for example, the U.S. donation came with the condition that UNRWA “take all possible measures to assure that no part of [this] contribution shall be used to furnish assistance to any refugee who is receiving military training [from] the Palestine Liberation Army or any other guerrilla-type organization.”⁴ It would reiterate this warning repeatedly in subsequent years.

Such conditions placed a serious burden on the agency, requiring it to investigate the activities of nearly 1.5 million registered refugees. In turn, this necessitated further funding to cover the costs of the required additional resources. The result was a cycle of dependence as donor leverage over the agency increased further. Once again, UNRWA’s set-up was the root of the issue, as the absence of a reliable funding stream from the UN engendered these dynamics of donor conditionality.

In attaching such qualifications to its contributions, the United States essentially recruited UNRWA into a policing role—while at the same time insisting that the agency must remain outside the politics of the situation. In 1978, the U.S. abstained to vote on renewing UNRWA’s mandate at the UN, protesting that the inclusion of a clause about the right of return—added at the behest of a coalition of Arab states—was inappropriately political for an aid agency. This doublespeak was a common characteristic of U.S. discourse around UNRWA over the decades.

Israel’s Covert Support for UNRWA 

Israeli leaders and public figures routinely label UNRWA as biased, ineffectual, and even militant. Yet, the history of Israel’s relationship with the agency betrays a more complicated dynamic. UNRWA is mandated to serve Palestine—rather than Palestinian—refugees; in other words, those displaced from Palestine rather than those who are Palestinian. This originally included Jewish refugees, and in its early years UNRWA provided services to around 45,000 refugees inside Israel, 17,000 of whom were Jewish. To do so, the agency liaised with the Israeli government, which had supported UNRWA’s creation at the UN.

In 1952, UNRWA ceased working inside Israel at the government’s request, and after that the two entities had limited interactions for fifteen years. Then in 1967, Israel occupied two of the areas where UNRWA worked: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In so doing, it became the governing authority over more than half a million UNRWA-registered refugees and 27 UNRWA-run refugee camps. This new set-up created a dilemma for the Israeli government over how to navigate its relationship with the agency, and finances would prove a major factor in its deliberations.

In stark contrast to the rhetoric of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today, the Israeli government of 1967 assessed that UNRWA’s work served its interests. Shortly after the occupation began, the two entities signed the Comay-Michelmore Agreement (named in reference to the then-UNRWA Commissioner-General and Israeli Representative to the UN). Under its terms, Israel requested that UNRWA continue to provide services to registered refugees in the West Bank and Gaza and agreed to facilitate its operations in both spaces.

Through the lens of Israeli rhetoric today, its historical support for UNRWA’s work may be surprising. An explanation can be found in the words of Moshe Dayan, the prominent Israeli military leader who strongly favored the continuation of UNRWA’s work. Calling Michaelmore-Comay a “huge achievement”, he feted the fact that “UNRWA agrees to continue to bear this burden [of serving Palestinian refugees]”. In other words, the Israeli government chose to facilitate UNRWA’s work because doing so alleviated its own responsibility (or “burden”) for supporting the Palestinian refugees it governed as military occupier. In subsequent years, Israel emphasized UNRWA’s duty to the Palestinians and played down its own responsibility—an approach that belies the contemporary discourse positing UNRWA’s work as hostile to Israeli interests.

The Turn Against UNRWA

The history outlined above gives lie to contemporary claims—usually made by UNRWA’s critics—that the agency should be defunded or even dismantled because it is “inappropriately political”. Political results are, in fact, precisely what donors have always wanted from the agency’s work. What’s more, Israel has tacitly supported this—partly explaining why UNRWA consistently received so much funding from the United States, Israel’s closest ally.

Nor is this approach as consigned to the past as may be assumed. Netanyahu himself, despite publicly calling for the agency to be abolished, has at times privately lobbied for its continued funding. When the Trump administration began threatening to end its funding of UNRWA at the beginning of 2018, the move appeared to be closely aligned with the Israeli prime minister’s own statements. Yet, behind the scenes, Netanyahu reportedly appealed to the U.S. to continue funding the agency’s work, on the well-worn grounds that it was necessary for “stability”. When Trump went ahead with fully ceasing to fund UNRWA regardless, the Netanyahu government allegedly arranged for the German government to offset the resulting cuts, according to one Israeli researcher and former intelligence officer.

Such actions are at odds with Netanyahu’s policies in 2023-24. Indeed, his “day after” plan for Gaza’s future includes a proposal for shutting down UNRWA entirely. In removing all funding for the agency for at least twelve months, the United States is once again aligning itself with the Israeli position.

After decades of both overt and covert support for UNRWA’s work, why have both governments now moved so decisively against its very existence?

One answer may be that Israel, with U.S. backing, has now abandoned its earlier approach of indefinitely maintaining the occupation, in favor of seeking to radically remake all of Palestine. Indeed, it is hard to draw any other conclusion from Israel’s thorough destruction of Gaza, where Israeli forces have now killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, including at least 13,000 children, and where the International Court of Justice has ruled there is a plausible danger of genocide. Israel’s plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai, where they would be re-defined as refugees under the mandate of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), was blocked by Egypt—but had it succeeded, it would have gone hand-in-hand with abolishing UNRWA. All this points to a refashioning of both Israeli and U.S. political goals in the region.

It is also worth considering the idea that the current open campaign against UNRWA does not signal rupture so much as continuity. Decisions around funding UNRWA have always been embedded in political dynamics; the same is true of decisions around defunding it. The Palestinian refugees whose needs should be central to such decision-making—indeed, whose very lives may depend on the provision or withdrawal of funding—have in reality been treated as collateral to political machinations. UNRWA’s own Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini recently expressed this when he remarked that “with political will, aid can be increased. Political will can also prevent a man-made famine”.

Commenting on the United States’ defunding, UNRWA’s Washington Director Elizabeth Campbell has said that the provision of essential aid to two million people should “not be held hostage to achieve any political objectives.” Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening—with Palestinian refugees across the Levant, especially those in Gaza, paying the ultimate price.

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Footnotes used exceptionally due to the absence of online sources for referenced material

1 Letters from Ernest Bevin to Foreign Ministers of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, 26 May 1950, FCO 371/82236, The National Archives, London, UK (TNA). See also: UK Brief for Colombo, ‘Palestine Refugees’, n.d., FCO 371/82243, TNA.

2 J.P.L. Gwynn, Treasury staff, letter to UN Department of FCO, Ref 2FD 541/91/01, 14 November 1974, FO 53/570 A, TNA.

3 J. McDonough, Ministry of Overseas Development, letter to J. Everett, FCO, FAO 284/358/01, 15 February 1977, FCO 93/1303 A, TNA.

4 US Representative UN to U Thant, Note A98USUN, 18 December 1970, File UN 10-4 1/1/71 Subject-Numeric File, RG 59, US National Archive, College Park, MD (USNA).

We are grateful to the Cairo Review of Global Affairs for dedicating this edition to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

UNRWA was established in 1949 as a temporary agency with a mandate that was intended to last only one year, primarily to assist Palestine refugees, defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” The continued existence of UNRWA 75 years later is no source of pride; rather, the absence of a just and lasting solution for Palestine refugees is a source of sorrow. Today, as prospects for peace remain remote, the need for UNRWA remains acute.

For Palestine refugees across Gaza, the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, UNRWA is a lifeline of hope. Our educational and vocational training programs have empowered generations of Palestinians, giving them the tools to build better futures. UNRWA encompasses the story of countless Palestine refugee lives forever changed. It is the story of engineer Loay Elbasyouni, who attended UNRWA schools in Gaza and went on to work for NASA, contributing to the Perseverance rover that landed on Mars. It is the story of Nowras Rahal, who attended an UNRWA school in Damascus before moving abroad to become a medical researcher. Today, he is working on the cutting edge of nano technology and vaccine development.

In the Middle East region at large, UNRWA stands as a pillar of stability. By offering essential services such as education, healthcare, and social support, the Agency is making vital contributions to alleviate pressure on over-stretched local governments and communities. UNRWA has been extraordinarily successful in providing a neutral civil service based on United Nations values and principles in extremely difficult—some would say impossible—circumstances.

Yet today the future of UNRWA is more uncertain than ever before. We are confronting a perfect storm of challenges.

First and foremost, the war in Gaza. Seven months after the heinous attacks of October 7th, the situation for people in Gaza is worsening by the day. They have very little to eat, hardly any access to medical care, little shelter, and nowhere safe to live. UNRWA is the backbone of the entire humanitarian operation in Gaza, coordinating and providing lifesaving assistance. Our staff, most of whom have themselves been displaced multiple times, are doing impossible work in impossible conditions. At the time of writing, we have lost 188 colleagues—an average of one life lost per day of the war, the most ever for the United Nations during any conflict in its history. More than 160 UNRWA premises, mostly used as shelters, have been damaged or destroyed and more than 400 people have been killed while seeking shelter under UNRWA’s blue flag. Our requests to deliver urgently needed humanitarian aid to the north have been repeatedly denied. Amidst the prospect of an offensive on Rafah, many fear the worst is yet to come.

Second, the financial crisis. In the wake of allegations in late January 2024 that individual UNRWA area staff in Gaza participated in the October 7th attacks on Israel, key donors of the Agency suspended their contributions. Horrified by the allegations, the Commissioner-General immediately terminated the appointments of those concerned. The UN Secretary-General ordered an investigation through the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the highest investigative authority of the United Nations. In parallel, an Independent Review Group assessed how UNRWA upholds neutrality—a core humanitarian principle guiding our work. In April 2024, it published its final report, concluding that the Agency has a solid system in place to uphold neutrality and providing recommendations to further strengthen these processes.  UNRWA is fully committed to implementing these recommendations.

Today, many donors have resumed or increased their support to UNRWA, and some Member States are giving to the Agency for the first time. What is most heartening is the generosity of private donors around the world, with an unprecedented income from individuals, private foundations, and the corporate sector. But UNRWA still has a critical funding gap, and we are forced to go month by month to manage our fragile cashflow. The continuity of the Agency’s operations across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is still in question.

Third, attacks against the Agency.  UNRWA remains the target of sustained and relentless attacks, including disinformation, that seek to discredit the Agency’s reputation and question its role. UNRWA has faced active criticism for at least two decades, but increasingly, the quiet part is being said out loud. Our critics aim to delegitimize the Agency, not for the services we provide, but for what we symbolize: the rights and needs of Palestine refugees in the absence of a lasting political solution.

Calls to eliminate UNRWA are calls to end the refugee status of millions of Palestinians. At its core, the campaign against UNRWA seeks to circumvent the long-standing political parameters for peace in the occupied Palestinian territory clearly laid out in United Nations resolutions, international law, and bilateral agreements.  But denial is not a strategy: dismantling UNRWA would not resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Silencing the reminder of that conflict does not silence the conflict—only political dialogue and good-faith negotiations can do that. Accusations that UNRWA deliberately perpetuates the refugee status of Palestinians are false and misleading. The Agency exists because a political solution does not. It exists because a Palestinian State that can deliver public services in its place to Palestine refugees does not exist.

UNRWA has no interest to continue in perpetuity. Amidst genuine, credible prospects for a political solution, the Agency is ready to retrieve its temporary status by supporting a time-bound transition, delivering education, primary healthcare, and social support until a Palestinian administration takes over these services, absorbing UNRWA’s Palestinian personnel as civil servants.

Against all odds, we are cautiously optimistic. The discussion on UNRWA has been elevated and is now part of policy discussions around the world. This reflects the growing recognition that the challenges facing the Agency are more than operational obstacles and financial constraints; they are political, striking at the Agency’s raison d’être. This recognition opens the door for more meaningful debate at the highest political levels. More importantly, we hope it will, at long last, propel real progress towards a path out of endless cycles of violence, despair, and suffering for Palestinians and Israelis alike.

This is also what makes the work of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs so timely and crucial. We look forward to the insights this edition will bring to our collective understanding and the global conversation on UNRWA, the plight of Palestine refugees, and the prospects for peace and stability in the Middle East.