How the UN's aid agency for Palestinians works — and why it's under fire now
CBC
The federal government announced last week it was suspending "additional funding" for a UN agency that supports Palestinians in Gaza and employs about 13,000 people there, as well as another 17,000 in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the West Bank and elsewhere.
Ottawa took the step after Israel claimed staff members at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) played a role in the Hamas attack in Israel on Oct. 7.
So what is UNRWA? What does it do? And why is it under pressure now?
UNRWA exists only to serve Palestinian refugees displaced in the 1948 and 1967 wars between Israel and its Arab neighbours, along with their descendants.
It is separate from the main UN refugee agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which deals with all non-Palestinian refugees in the world.
The United States helped to promote General Assembly Resolution 302(IV), which created UNRWA as a separate agency in 1949. UNRWA replaced the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees, an organization that was more focused on repatriating displaced Palestinians. By 1949, it had become clear that such a return was not likely to happen in the short term.
At the time, both Israel and the U.S. were in favour of separate treatment for Palestinian refugees. Israel did not want Palestinians to return to the homes they had left in 1948, but it did want to continue to settle Jewish refugees from Europe in Israel through the UNHCR, then called the International Refugee Organization.
Over time, Israel has come to regret that original position because UNRWA refugees are able to pass on their refugee status to their children. UNHCR refugees — about 80 per cent of the world's registered refugees — do not have that right.
Consequently, UNRWA has continued to serve the descendants of the original 700,000 refugees displaced in 1948 and the 300,000 displaced in 1967. Today, it provides health and educational services to 5.9 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.
About 13,000 of its total staff of 30,000 live in Gaza.
UNRWA's biggest single source of funding is the United States, which provided about a quarter of UNRWA's total budget of $1.6 billion US last year. Other major funding sources include the European Union, Germany, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Sweden.
Canada currently provides UNRWA with $25 million Cdn per year in regular baseline funding.
Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada suspended all funding to UNRWA in 2010, making Canada the only G7 country not to contribute.
In 2016, the Trudeau government restored the funding, though at a lower level than the $37 million annual contribution that existed prior to the Harper government.
