Why you should donate money to UNRWA
Their mission is now more important than ever.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—UNRWA for short—is currently in a brutal financial position. Just two months ago in June, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini described things in his own words as “extremely dire,” claiming they do not have the funds to continue beyond September.
On Monday, it will be September, and while some donations have come in here and there, the budgetary shortfall is massive. This crisis was intentionally triggered by former President of the United States Joe Biden, who revoked America’s funding for UNRWA in 2024, and pressured several other nations to do the same.
Although Trump has continued this policy, he does not own it fully. This has been a bipartisan effort by both Democrats and Republicans alike, to starve Palestinians and close their schools and hospitals. Israel has passed outrageous legislation banning UNRWA, a UN agency, from operating within Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem.
This is blatantly illegal under their obligations as a UN member state, and has resulted in a new ICJ proceeding against Israel in addition to their other cases already happening at The Hague. But the illegality of such things has not changed the real impact on the ground: UNRWA can no longer provide assistance to Palestinians inside Palestine.
Nonetheless, it is now more important than ever for you to donate what you can to UNRWA, because Palestinian refugees also live outside Palestine’s occupied land, and UNRWA is just as important in supporting their wellbeing as well.
UNRWA was created by the UN General Assembly on December 8th, 1949, to provide a variety of services for Palestinian refugees following the genocidal events known as the Nakba, in which roughly 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist paramilitaries and the nascent IDF.
Since then, UNRWA’s mandate has expanded to include the additional wave of Palestinian refugees created by the 1967 Arab—Israeli War. The important factor, however, is that UNRWA’s mandate serves Palestinians not only living in Palestine, but also in the neighbouring states of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
UNRWA recognizes 19 refugee camps in the West Bank and 8 in the Gaza Strip, but over 50% of recognized camps are actually in these neighbouring states, with 10 for Jordan, 12 for Lebanon, and 9 for Syria. There are also large Palestinian populations that live outside these official recognized camps, such as the Yarmouk municipality in Syria’s capital Damascus, visible in the header photo. UNRWA supports these Palestinian communities as well, even if they aren’t officially recognized as refugee camps.
One of the major problems that Palestinian refugees face in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon is that they largely suffer from a lack of citizenship, and thus equal rights to participate in the fundamental aspects of society that we take for granted.
Many Palestinians do have citizenship in Jordan, primarily those who lived in Jordan or the Jordan-controlled West Bank prior to the 1967 war, but by 2016 over 630,000 Palestinians lived in Jordan without Jordanian citizenship, and thus are legally restricted from pursuing skilled and well-compensated professions, like becoming a dentist or a pharmacist.
Most Palestinians in Lebanon are stateless, and have faced four generations of discrimination against not only employment opportunities like their cousins in Jordan, but also the right to own property; as a result, 80% of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon lived below the poverty line as of March 2023.
Palestinians in Syria have technically had employment and property rights, but until very recently suffered persecution under the brutal authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad. In 2018 during the Syrian Civil War, Yarmouk was turned into a “death camp” by the Assad regime; the photo you saw in the header is part of UNRWA’s attempts to make Yarmouk safe again for the ~160,000 Palestinians who used to live there.
But under new President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who successfully overthrew Bashar al-Assad’s regime and leads the Syrian transitional government, there are new concerns. Just last month in July, Zaman al-Wasl displayed information from a source revealing that Palestinians were receiving new official documents, retroactively changing their designation from “Palestinian Syrian” to “Palestinian resident”, and replaced the governorate column for their subnational jurisdiction with “foreigner”.
For all of these Palestinians living outside Palestine, UNRWA services are just as essential as they are for those who UNRWA recently served inside Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children, including a large proportion of girls, are educated across hundreds of UNRWA schools. UNRWA also provides Palestinian refugees with university scholarships, as well as vocational training.
Millions of Palestinian refugees receive healthcare through UNRWA, including reproductive care such as pregnancy services and family planning, widespread immunization of children for MMR, polio, tuberculosis, and other diseases, rehabilitation and physiotherapy, specialist and diagnostic services, as well as general outpatient and inpatient care.
For Palestinian refugees living in poverty, UNRWA operates the Social Safety Net Programme, and for those with women, youth, elderly, and persons with disabilities they operate the Social Services Programme. Recognizing that the refugee “camps” have now become multigenerational communities with built-up structures that need repair and renovation, UNRWA funds important infrastructure improvements to raise quality of life for residents.
And to help Palestinian refugees build wealth and spur the growth of their local economies, UNRWA has awarded ten of thousands of microfinance loans, totalling more than $531 million USD. 25% of these loans have gone to youth between 18 and 30 years old pursuing self-employment, and 48% of recipients are women, including women who work from the home, ensuring these capital infusions create economic growth in disadvantaged parts of society.
What UNRWA does for Palestinian refugees is what the government of an unoccupied State of Palestine would be doing, what any government or authority is supposed to do. They are creating the basic building blocks of civil society, providing healthcare, education, infrastructure, and economic stimulus.
That is exactly why Israel does not like UNRWA. Israel does not want Palestinians to have a robust civil society, they want to shatter Palestinian society. That is why Israel and the United States have teamed up to target UNRWA, and the International Criminal Court, and any other international body that helps Palestinians to create lasting and viable institutions.
But Israel and the United States cannot stop UNRWA from continuing to assist Palestinians who live outside Israeli occupation zones. They cannot stop UNRWA from doing all this important work in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan…that is, unless UNRWA runs out of money.
UNRWA does receive voluntary donations from UN member states, but as I’ve made clear with the multiple “Donate to UNRWA” buttons in this piece, private individuals can also donate funds in a wide variety of global currencies. In Canada, you can even claim donations to a United Nations agency like UNRWA as a deduction on your personal income tax, under the rules for Line 34900.
I hope, with all that I’ve said about the importance of UNRWA’s work, that you don’t need a tax credit to motivate you. But whatever does convince you to donate to UNRWA, know that the money you give will make all the difference in the world to a Palestinian family in need.
I’m proud to say that I’ve given a few hundred dollars to UNRWA, and while my income is modest, I’m still working to give more. So whether it’s one-time or recurring every month, I hope you’ll join me in helping Palestinian refugees through a gift of your money.