What it means to be a Palestine refugee has a long and complicated history dating to the 1948 Nakba, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in Palestine, including nearly 75,000 who were displaced from Jerusalem and 40 rural villages around it.1 The question became more complicated following the displacement of about 300,000 more Palestinians during the 1967 Naksa, as well as more than 300,000 following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This Short Take examines the international humanitarian and legal measures taken since 1948 to define, count, and provide support for the millions of Palestinians who are legally defined as “Palestine refugees” and who qualify for UNRWA assistance, as well as the dire challenges they face.

Immediately after the Nakba, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Red Cross Societies, and the American Friends Service Committee provided services for displaced Palestinians across the region. In December 1949, the UN General Assembly established the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to provide services for these Palestinians. The UNRWA subsequently established 58 refugee camps in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria as temporary “tented cities” to house the displaced Palestinians until they could return to their homes.2

By the UNRWA’s definition, Palestinians qualifying for registration with the UNRWA—and hence, eligible for services—are the citizens of Mandate Palestine and their qualifying descendants who were displaced from their homes in Palestine as a result of the Nakba and the Naksa. Specifically, Palestinian refugees are

Using records the aforementioned organizations compiled, the UNRWA began to conduct a census in 1950–51 to accurately determine the number of Palestinian refugees who would qualify for its services. 

The census recorded approximately 875,000 Palestinian refugees scattered in refugee camps in neighboring countries at that time.4 But the 1967 War resulted in the displacement of about 300,000 more Palestinians. Although the UNRWA’s initial definition of Palestinian refugees did not apply to those Palestinians displaced in 1967, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly has been encouraging the UNRWA to “provide humanitarian assistance on an emergency basis” to those Palestinians.5

Therefore, the UNRWA established another 10 refugee camps for this new wave of Palestinian refugees.6 According to the UNRWA website, “Since then, UNRWA has been updating files from voluntarily supplied documentation on the original refugees and their descendants through the male line,” and today, it has registered 5.9 million  Palestinian refugees who are eligible for its services in 68 refugee camps in the region.7 The UNRWA has also identified an additional 685,000 “persons of concern”8 who have not registered with it but are eligible for its services according to its Consolidated Eligibility and Registration Instructions (CERI), created in 2009 to ease the UNRWA’s operations.9

Palestinians are not the only refugees in the world, but their plight set a precedent for the UN to legislate laws protecting refugees everywhere. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol define the term “refugee” and determine the international standards for affording refugees protections and services through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), established in 1950 to address the refugee crisis that resulted from World War II. While the 1951 Refugee Convention outlined the UNHCR’s scope and responsibilities, Palestinian refugees were excluded from its mandate since they fell under the UNRWA’s. Nonetheless, “definitions of refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention and of Palestine refugees per the UN General Assembly are complementary.”10 

Indeed, Article I A (2) of the 1951 Refugee Convention applies in theory to Palestinians, as well. The convention determined that

Article 1 D of the convention defines those who are ineligible for protection under the UNHCR: “This Convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance.” This included Palestinians receiving assistance from the UNRWA. However, it makes a provision for the event that other UN agencies cease to operate:

Accordingly, should the UNRWA cease its services, Palestinian refugees would come under the mandate of the UNHCR.

In 1992, and with the displacement of more than 300,000 Palestinians from Kuwait upon Iraq’s invasion of the country, the UNRWA restarted its voluntary registration process for Palestinians wishing to receive its services.13 In other words:

In 1996, the UNRWA digitized its registration process, and in 2010, it created an online system, the Refugee Registration Information System (RRIS), to store and manage the millions of files in its records. Palestinians who are registered in the system can access their records upon request through a secure online portal containing “documents pertaining to their family history over the last 70 years.”15

On November 18, 2019, the UN General Assembly convened a special committee to affirm the critical role that the UNRWA continues to play in providing assistance to Palestinian refugees.16

Specifically, the draft resolution, titled “Assistance to Palestine Refugees,” stated that the committee acknowledges

In the next draft resolution, titled “Persons Displaced as a Result of the June 1967 and Subsequent Hostilities,” the General Assembly reaffirmed the rights of Palestinians displaced during 1967 “to return to their homes or former places of residence in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967,” stressing the necessity of accelerating this process. “In the meantime,” it noted, the resolution

But for a decade, the UNRWA has been suffering from shortages in aid due to a range of political, economic, and natural factors, including global austerity measures, instability in countries like Syria and Lebanon, and devastating regional earthquakes. Contributing to the crisis, former US president Donald Trump eliminated US contributions to the organization in 2018;19 the United Arab Emirates followed suit, slashing funds to the organization from $51.8 million in 2018 to $1 million in 2020. A November 2018 UN resolution “strongly appeal[ed] to all Governments and to organizations and individuals to contribute generously” to remedy the UNRWA’s “structural underfunding” in a 10-page resolution, “Operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East,” the longest draft resolution that emerged from the November meeting.20

Despite the resumption of US contributions by President Biden in 2021, the UNRWA has been struggling to provide basic services to the growing number of Palestinian refugees, especially in Lebanon, where the economy has been in freefall and where violence in and around Palestinian refugee camps is rampant.21 Beyond Lebanon, the UNRWA needs about $1 billion annually to manage and provide services to the 5.9 million Palestinian refugees in the region. 

On June 2, 2023, the UN held a conference in New York to garner pledges for the UNRWA. Member states in attendance expressed their commitment to supporting the organization and pledged $828.3 million, “of which US$13.2 were fresh contributions.” Nonetheless, Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini lamented, “While we are grateful for the pledges announced, they are below the funds that the Agency needs to keep over 700 UNRWA schools and 140 clinics open from September onwards.”22

In a separate appeal published the same month, the UNRWA clearly laid out its budgetary needs in several diagrams in order to show the “critical financial shortage” expected to start in September 2023. Specifically, it urgently appealed for: 

• US$75 million to secure food assistance to nearly 1.2 million people in the Gaza Strip (with US$35 million needed by August)
• Funding for cash assistance (US$30 million) in the fourth quarter for more than 600,000 Palestine Refugees in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon
• Nearly US$15 million in Lebanon for hospitalization and support to 5,000 cancer patients amid a healthcare collapse in that country
• An additional US$9.8 million for the response to the earthquake in Syria, to help repair Palestine refugee homes and other emergency response
• Nearly US$7 million in the occupied West Bank, amid unprecedented levels of violence, for cash assistance, emergency health, education, and environmental health. 
• Some US$12 million in Jordan to maintain cash assistance for Palestine Refugees displaced from Syria.

Given the dire conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Gaza—in addition to the worsening global and regional economic, political, and environmental climate—UNRWA representatives remain wary of the organization’s future and its ability to provide services for the largest number of refugees it has ever served.