UNRWA Was Supposed to Help Palestinians. It Helped Preserve the Conflict

Ville Tavio—Finland’s Minister for Foreign Trade and Development—has announced that Finland will not renew its multi-year funding agreement with UNRWA when the current agreement expires at the end of 2026.

This is a great step for Finland, and I believe the more time passes, the more justified this decision will look.

“It is important that Finnish taxpayers’ money does not end up in the wrong hands. When it is possible to reduce that risk, it is worth doing so,” Tavio said.

This is precisely the point.

Finland has been giving UNRWA approximately €5 million a year to help fund schools, health clinics and other services for Palestinians. But at every turn, this organisation increasingly appears to be contributing to the radicalisation of Palestinians rather than playing the much-needed role of neutrality and deradicalisation.

It seems remarkably willing to look away from Hamas’s exploitation of civilian infrastructure, yet eager to condemn Israel for its war against Hamas.

UNRWA itself discovered tunnels running beneath its schools in Gaza in 2017. It condemned them at the time. So the organisation has first-hand experience with this morbid practice of placing military infrastructure beneath and amongst civilians.

And yet, since October 7, it has remained remarkably tight-lipped about the broader phenomenon. Its condemnation of Israel is sharp and immediate, often removing Hamas—and its tactics—from the equation entirely.

This, to be fair, is the common way critics of Israel approach this conflict.

In their telling, Israel is bombing civilian infrastructure because it is evil. Or “waging a genocidal war”, as The Helsinki Times puts it.

You would think an organisation that claims to “help Palestinians” would be one of the loudest voices condemning a terrorist organisation for putting those very people at risk—fighting amongst civilians and operating from or around schools, hospitals, mosques and residential areas.

But it isn’t.

Why not?

UNRWA’s hands are becoming increasingly soiled as more information emerges about employees allegedly involved in terrorist activities.

From Israel’s initial accusations after October 7, to UN Watch’s years of research and documentation, to the investigations now being conducted by USAID’s independent Office of Inspector General—it is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss the problem as a few unfortunate bad apples.

The USAID investigation has now referred more than 100 current or former UNRWA employees for alleged participation in the October 7 attacks and/or affiliation with Hamas’s military wing.

Teachers.

School principals.

Security personnel.

Medical workers.

People employed by an organisation funded by Western taxpayers to provide humanitarian assistance.

To be clear, Tavio’s decision does not stop Finland’s aid to Palestinians. It simply changes the hands receiving it.

That didn’t stop Yle—the BBC of Finland—from writing that:

“Tavio was unable to provide any concrete examples of cases where Finnish tax money had ended up in the wrong hands at UNRWA.”

This is such a narrow framing of the issue that it almost completely misses the point.

Tavio pointed to the USAID investigation. He also brought up cases like Fateh Sharif, a man who worked as a principal at an UNRWA school in Lebanon and headed UNRWA’s teachers’ union there while also being Hamas’s leader in Lebanon.

After his death, Hamas itself publicly acknowledged his leadership role.

That is beyond insane.

Almost any other organisation would be broken by a revelation like that. A Hamas leader was simultaneously running a school under a United Nations agency and heading its teachers’ union.

Yet outlets like Yle still act bewildered that some countries might want to reassess their support?

Remember, UNRWA is an official part of the United Nations—an institution that is, at least in theory, supposed to represent a higher standard of neutrality.

But apparently the bigotry of low expectations doesn’t just extend to the Palestinians themselves. It also extends to institutions that claim to “help” them.

The deeper problem with UNRWA

There is a much bigger problem with UNRWA than meets the eye. Something more subtle.

In my view, it is the snake in the grass. The Trojan horse of the Israel-Palestine conflict. An institution that promises to alleviate the consequences of the conflict, yet in practice plays an important role in making the conflict almost irreconcilable.

For this part, I’m going to lean on Einat Wilf’s excellent book, The War of Return.

Almost every other refugee population on earth falls under UNHCR—the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The bare-bones philosophy of that organisation is something like this:

This is terrible. I’m sorry for what happened to you. But now let’s help you rebuild your life—somewhere else, if necessary.

Of course, UNHCR does not simply resettle everyone. Its durable solutions can include returning people home when that is realistically possible, integrating them where they currently live, or resettling them elsewhere.

But the direction is important.

The objective is eventually to stop people from being refugees.

Except, when it comes to Palestinians, we have an entirely different system.

They have an entire UN agency of their own.

UNRWA.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was established in 1949 following the first Arab-Israeli war.

Israel had declared independence in 1948. The surrounding Arab states rejected the creation of a Jewish state and went to war to destroy it. This was not some ordinary border dispute. Arab leaders openly spoke of a “war of annihilation” and of defeating the Jews so completely that the new state would cease to exist.

Israel survived.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were displaced during the fighting.

The Nakba.

A term you have probably heard endlessly.

As a side note, the term was popularised by the Syrian intellectual Constantin Zureiq. And what is fascinating about his original use of Nakba, meaning “catastrophe”, is that he was not describing the displacement of Palestinian Arabs. He was describing the catastrophic Arab defeat itself—the humiliation and failure of the Arab world against the newly created Jewish state.

Many Palestinian Arabs fled during the war for different reasons: fear, fighting, expulsions and, in some cases, instructions or encouragement from Arab commanders and local leaders to evacuate particular areas.

But when the war ended, Israel refused to allow a mass return. A major reason was security: it feared that allowing hundreds of thousands of people from a population that had just been at war with the new state back across its borders, would be suicidal.

The Arabs who remained inside Israel, meanwhile, eventually became Israeli citizens.

UNRWA was supposed to be temporary.

Its purpose was to provide relief and rehabilitation to the displaced while a political solution was hammered out. Its early programmes were explicitly concerned with employment, self-sufficiency and eventually getting refugees off international relief.

But that solution never came.

The surrounding Arab states resisted allowing permanent resettlement to replace the demand for return. Palestinian refugees themselves also strongly resisted resettlement, seeing it as potentially surrendering their claim to the homes and land they had lost.

Israel, having just fought a war for its existence, was never going to accept a mass influx of people from populations that had just been at war with it.

And here we find one of the biggest sticking points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

The demand to “return”.

The refugee crisis that never ended

Another thing worth remembering is that the Palestinians were not unique in becoming refugees during this period of history.

The Second World War and its aftermath displaced tens of millions of people.

Borders moved. Countries disappeared. Populations were expelled. Ethnic Germans were forced out of large areas of Eastern Europe. Poles, Ukrainians, Jews and countless others lost homes they had lived in for generations.

Millions of people had to find new lives in new places and do the painful work of rebuilding.

That is the tragedy of war.

The world should have pushed much harder on the Palestinian refugee issue too. It should have made clear that whatever political settlement eventually emerged, millions of people could not indefinitely build their future around reversing the outcome of 1948.

As brutal as that reality was for the people who had actually lost their homes, there eventually had to be a path forward.

Instead, “return” became sacred.

And therein lies the problem.

After the 1948 war, UNRWA initially dealt with roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees.

Today, nearly six million people are registered as Palestine refugees under UNRWA’s mandate.

How is that possible?

Because UNRWA operates an intergenerational registration system. Descendants of the original refugees can themselves be registered as Palestine refugees.

And here is where things become particularly strange.

Refugeehood is normally something the international system ultimately seeks to resolve. People return home where possible, integrate into their new society, receive citizenship, or rebuild elsewhere.

Not here.

Even Palestinians whose families have acquired citizenship elsewhere—including millions in Jordan—can remain registered Palestine refugees under UNRWA’s mandate.

This is an untenable situation.

It has to stop.

UNRWA does not single-handedly create this policy. Its mandate comes from the wider United Nations system, and it does not itself determine the final political settlement.

But UNRWA is the mechanism that keeps the category operational.

It maintains the registry.

It serves the descendants.

It produces the numbers.

Generation after generation, the refugee population remains institutionally alive, and that matters because the refugee question is not some obscure side issue in this conflict.

It is the issue.

It is politically impossible that nearly six million Palestinians are going to “return” en masse to what is today the State of Israel.

There is no going backwards to 1948.

That ship sailed more than seventy years ago.

Israel exists.

Yet Palestinian political culture has enshrined the “right of return” as something sacred—an inherited right that millions of descendants are told remains theirs.

In practical terms, what does that mean?

If millions of Palestinians retain the right to enter Israel because their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents once lived there, then the conflict does not end with a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The conflict ends only when the demographic reality of Israel itself is undone.

No Israeli government is ever going to accept that.

And no serious peace process can be built around pretending otherwise.

An organisation staffed by the conflict it claims to manage

Then there is the structure of UNRWA itself.

Despite being a United Nations agency, its workforce is overwhelmingly drawn from the Palestinian communities it serves. Roughly 90 percent of its employees are themselves registered Palestine refugees, while approximately 99 percent of personnel are locally recruited.

That brings with it obvious neutrality challenges.

Especially in Gaza.

Polling conducted after October 7 found, at various points, that majorities of Gazans believed Hamas had been right to launch the attack. This is a society in which Hamas has ruled for almost two decades, and where political violence and the idea of “resistance” have been deeply embedded into public life.

UNRWA cannot recruit tens of thousands of people from this environment and magically exist outside of it.

That doesn’t mean every Palestinian working for UNRWA supports Hamas.

But it does mean that when UNRWA employees are discovered celebrating October 7 in Telegram groups, when teachers are accused of belonging to Hamas’s military wing, when school principals appear in terrorism investigations, and when the head of an UNRWA teachers’ union turns out to have simultaneously been a Hamas leader, we should stop pretending these things are completely inexplicable aberrations.

The overlap between the society and the organisation is enormous.

UNRWA is not primarily an army of international humanitarian workers travelling to Gaza from Geneva.

It is, overwhelmingly, Palestinians serving Palestinians beneath a United Nations umbrella.

And when that population has itself been deeply radicalised, neutrality cannot simply be assumed because there is a UN logo on the building.

It has to be proven.

Again and again, UNRWA has failed that test.

On and on the problems go.

But underneath all of them sits something even more fundamental.

UNRWA helps maintain the mechanism through which the Palestinian refugee grievance survives from one generation to the next. It administers a system that tells millions of people, institutionally, that the story of 1948 is still unfinished.

And surrounding that system is a political culture telling them that one day they will return.

That dream has to die if any real solution is going to live.

Ending funding to UNRWA is therefore not only good.

It is necessary.

Hopefully more countries will follow Finland and Sweden.

Palestinians can be helped.

Food and medicine can be provided.

Children can be educated—but not through systems that radicalise them.

Healthcare can be funded—but through institutions that are properly vetted and kept free from terrorist influence.

Whatever comes next has to look fundamentally different from what came before.

Help can continue.

The machinery that helps perpetuate the problem cannot.

If the world actually wants peace, then at some point the message has to become the same painful message that countless other refugee populations throughout history eventually had to hear:

This is terrible. We are sorry for what happened to you.

But now we will help you move forward and rebuild, somewhere else if necessary.