Currently, the blockaded strip suffers from a 44 percent unemployment rate. Last Wednesday, the agency fired a further 113 employees, all because of the United States' 80 percent budget cut.Palestinian are very accustomed to using hyperbole in order to whip people up into a frenzy as well as to cow Westerners into doing their will (because normal people wouldn't talk that way unless there was really a huge catastrophe looming.)
Furthermore, UNRWA announced the contracts of 1,000 of its employees in the Gaza Strip - Abu Hashim among them - will not have their contracts renewed. This includes the termination of the mental health programme, which employs 430 people.
"This is a massacre against the employees," Amal al-Batsh, deputy chairman of the UNRWA'S staff union, told Al Jazeera. "The solution to the crisis should not be at the expense of the staff providing services to the tens of thousands of refugees in the Gaza Strip."
A thousand people losing their jobs is something that happens every day all over the world. UNRWA's model of an ever-increasing budget for an ever-increasing population was known for decades not to be sustainable, yet no one wanted to change it as long as the money was flowing. This sort of thing was going to happen, inevitably.
It is not a tragedy. It is not a "massacre." It is the result of a deliberate policy of perpetuating a problem.