The popular committees of the Palestinian refugee camps in the northern West Bank will shut down UNRWA's offices Tuesday protesting reductions in services provided to Palestinian refugees in the region.UNRWA was originally meant to find real jobs for Palestinian Arabs so that they would no longer need handouts. In recent decades UNRWA itself became a major employer of Palestinians since Arab countries didn't want to give them jobs. This program was not intended to provide real jobs.
The decision came after UNRWA decided to end the UN Money for Work program in Jenin district in the northern West Bank. The program offered temporary job opportunities to 23,000 family providers across the West Bank suffering dire economic conditions.
The popular committees of Palestinian refugee camps in the northern West Bank added that the UNRWA decided suddenly to end the program in villages and cities by the beginning of 2014. The program will continue for a few months in 2014 but only in the West Bank refugee camps "in an attempt to somehow calm the angry refugees."
More than 50 coordinators who worked on the program were discharged "under the pretext that the UNRWA doesn’t have enough money to employ them."
Here is an example of the "Money for Work" program in 2011, showing both how the program itself was a joke and how UNRWA is - against its own mandate - an anti-Israel political organization:
The outgoing director of UNRWA operations Barbara Shenstone on Monday planted olive tree saplings on land slated for confiscation in the northern Palestinian Bank.
Shenstone joined Palestinian beneficiaries of the UN Money for Work program to plant 360 saplings in an attempt to save over 30,000 square meters of land in the the village of Burin, south of Nablus.
Participants considered Shenstone's attendance a message reflective of the UN agency's continuous support for Palestinian refugees and farmers to help them protect their lands.
Palestinian Authority ministry officials and EC humanitarian aid representatives were also present.
Shenstone said planting olive trees was a way to protect Palestinian lands from confiscation by Israeli settlers. The activity would also recruit international attention to the village, she added.
The PA isn't paying its people to execute a land grab in a disputed area - UNRWA is.
Good riddance to "Money for Work." Instead, do what is needed to get real jobs for Palestinian Arabs - like lifting restrictions on jobs they can have in Lebanon.