In what could be a major development,
Israel Hayom reports that UNRWA's acting commissioner-general Christian Saunders is advancing a plan to gradually dismantle the agency and transfer its responsibilities to other organizations.
According to diplomatic sources, UNRWA's schools, clinics and other operations in the West Bank would be transferred to the Palestinian Authority, while its Gaza operations would move to the US-backed Board of Peace. The proposal does not appear to immediately affect UNRWA's operations in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
The Palestinian leadership is reportedly furious and has vowed to fight the plan at the United Nations.
When you understand why, you understand the Middle East better than 90% of its "experts."
Not one Palestinian would lose services. The proposal would transfer UNRWA's services, not eliminate them. Palestinian children would still attend schools, and Palestinian families would still receive medical care. The Palestinian Authority has had its own education and health ministries for over thirty years, serving Palestinians who are not registered with UNRWA.
UNRWA has provided a parallel education, health and housing infrastructure to what the Palestinian governments in the West Bank and Gaza have. Normally, one would expect a government that wants to have its own state to take more responsibility for its own people; this provides a path to doing exactly that.
As I pointed out last year, there is no compelling reason for this duplication. So why is the Palestinian leadership so determined to preserve a separate UN agency providing essentially the same services?
The answer is that UNRWA has always served a political purpose.
I have argued for years that UNRWA's essential services should be transferred to other institutions, while its unique role in perpetuating Palestinian refugee status should end. UNRWA was established as a temporary agency in 1949, yet seventy-seven years later it continues to serve millions of people, far more than it did originally, the overwhelming majority of whom were born generations after the original refugees fled or were displaced.
In 2017, I quoted Ghassan Weshah, a Palestinian academic at the Islamic University of Gaza, who explained:
"The responsibility of UNRWA is to help refugees, but it must also continue this work to remind the world of the refugee issue and the right of return. If UNRWA goes, the refugee issue is over."
That is the key. Palestinians define themselves to the world as "refugees," even though the Refugee Convention definition does not include people who live in their own land, under their own government. That is unique to Palestinians. And the fake "refugee" designation has enormous political value to them.
UNRWA institutionalizes the idea that millions of Palestinians, including those living in Palestinian-controlled territory, remain refugees whose ultimate destination is supposedly Israel. In 2011, I reported that a senior Palestinian official said even Palestinians living in a future Palestinian state would not automatically receive citizenship there.
Palestinian leaders insist on maintaining refugee status for people who would be living in their own state, because they insist that they maintain the "right" to move to Israel and destroy it demographically. Otherwise, why would they want their own people to move to a state that they tell the world is dedicated to genocide against them?
This is why the reported proposal is so significant. It would separate the legitimate humanitarian needs of Palestinians from the political machinery that has helped keep their refugee status permanent.
Saunders is an interesting figure in this story. A longtime UN administrator who previously headed UNRWA temporarily in 2019-2020, he is hardly an Israeli advocate. But he seems to prioritize the humanitarian aspect of UNRWA; he actually wants to help Palestinians. This is in marked contrast to the UNREA directors of recent decades who have prioritized the political aspect of the agency, insisting that it must remain and continue to grow indefinitely until Israel allows the "refugees" to "return." UNRWA used to try to convince Arab states to allow Palestinians to become integrated in their societies, back when it actually cared about the problem. Those days are long gone.
But here is an acting head of the agency who seems to actually care about the original mandate of UNRWA, including that it was always meant to be temporary. There is also the practical matter of UNRWA losing much of its funding; it simply cannot continue the way it has been.
The most revealing aspect of this story is the Palestinian leadership's response. If its primary concern were ensuring that Palestinian children receive education and Palestinian families receive health care, it would be negotiating the details of a transition that safeguards those services.
Instead, it is fighting to preserve UNRWA itself.
This is obviously not a done deal. There will be pressure to keep UNRWA exactly as it is, as a political tool to destroy Israel over the long term. But most of those who support UNRWA are not willing to fund it to that extent. Arab nations have drastically cut their own UNRWA support over the past 15 years. The annual UNRWA begging to demand hundreds of millions more cannot go on forever when the "refugee" population will only get bigger. The problem has been kicked down the road for a very long time, and every year it is more expensive.
Dismantling UNRWA would not solve the Middle East. But it would go a long way towards dissolving a problem that should have been resolved in the 1950s. It would remove a major institutional mechanism that has helped perpetuate the refugee issue for generations.
After seventy-seven years, that would be an enormous step forward.
Thursday, November 05, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
