69 years since their original displacement in 1948, Palestine refugees are still refugees, awaiting a just and durable solution to their plight.
No, they are not refugees.
As I noted in February, there is only one definition of refugee in international law, in the 1951 Refugee Convention:
Any person who...owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.While Palestinian refugees were excluded under the Refugee Convention from protection by UNHCR, there is no additional definition to include them as refugees. UNRWA has a working definition of something they made up called "Palestine refugees" that have nothing to do with actual refugee status and is entirely for UNRWA to determine who is eligible to receive their services.
Today, nearly none of the original refugees (and some of them were refugees in 1948) are alive, and their descendants aren't refugees.
UNRWA knows all this, as I noted in the earlier article. UNRWA documentation almost never calls them "refugees" but only "Palestine refugees" which has its own definition that has nothing to do with actual refugee status. They cannot apply for asylum in Europe, for example, unless they are also truly refugees fleeing from Syria or Hamas.
And in this case, for this fundraising campaign , they are knowingly lying when they say "Palestine refugees are still refugees."