Aiding Palestine refugees is not political

Attacks on UNRWA are aimed at politicising a humanitarian organisation that has remained neutral in its work.

Mohammad is a seven-year-old boy living in Gaza, which in June will enter its 15th year of a land, air, and sea blockade. Like the nearly 300,000 students in Gaza who attend schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), he has been in and out of in-person and remote learning since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic a year ago. He battles against electricity cuts every day to receive online educational materials prepared by UNRWA teachers who also struggle to get access to electricity and the internet. Mohammad’s right to education remains inalienable even during a pandemic and a humanitarian crisis. He is just one of the 5.7 million Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA today, many of whom have faced unimaginable suffering since their ancestors were displaced from their homeland over 70 years ago. The one-year anniversary of the global lockdown marks 12 months of even greater suffering for Palestine refugees across the region. As commissioner-general of UNRWA, my responsibility is to ensure that Palestine refugees in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, receive the basic services to which they are entitled. And yet, in the past year, UNRWA has been the subject of attacks of unprecedented ferocity and bias.