U.S. Funding Cut Reignites Debate on Palestinian Refugee Agency
Outside a falafel shop at the Shatila camp in Beirut, Fayal al-Ahmad, 61, who works with an affiliate of Unrwa
that helps Palestinians from Syria, said that, one way or the other, "We need to get our rights." "If they’re going to claim we’re not refugees who deserve services, then they either need to begin providing naturalization, or they need to allow us to return to our homeland, to Palestine," she said.
If that aid were to stop, Mr. Ferwana said on Wednesday, "I and my children will die."
That aid, to Mr. Ferwana and more than five million other Palestinians living in refugee camps across the Middle East, is now endangered by what the agency’s leaders are calling the worst financial crisis in its seven-decade history.
Asaf Romirowsky said that At the rate we’re going now, it’s going to be 15 million soon,
Hence the Palestinian refugee population has grown from approximately 700,000 Palestinians who fled the wars in 1948
and 1967 to more than 5.2 million Palestinians living in Unrwa-administered camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria today.
"But it’s a Palestinian political organization, devoted to the Palestinian agenda of erasing Israel." The agency’s defenders say
that it is the existence of the refugee population that sticks in the craw of those Israelis who do not want to acknowledge that their country’s creation displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and would prefer to deny the refugee problem or resolve it once and for all.
Israel said that Unrwa will tell you they’ll leave the situation when there is a resolution to the conflict, but it’s a catch-22: They are the gatekeepers for the one single issue
that perpetuates the conflict from generation to generation.