UNRWA’s “Palestine Refugee” Hoax

The Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, revealed the extent of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s involvement with that terror organization. Israeli intelligence estimates about 1,200 UNRWA workers are Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives. Around 6,000, nearly half of the UNRWA workforce in Gaza, have immediate family that are members of these terrorist groups.

Not only does UNRWA share personnel with terror organizations, but for decades UNRWA has incorporated in its lesson plans incitement, hatred, and even jihad against Israel while indoctrinating students in its extensive educational system. Gazan UNRWA teachers praised the October 7, 2023, attacks on a Telegram chat group set up to discuss working conditions and to share curriculum.¹

UNRWA’s former Legal Advisor James Lindsay concluded in his 2009 report, “Fixing UNRWA,” that the organization made no attempt to remove individuals who support extremist positions, taking “no steps at all to prevent members of terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, from joining its staff.”² A few years later, UNRWA’s assistance to Hamas in Gaza during the fighting in Operation Protective Edge in 2014 was documented.

From its inception in 1950 through UN General Assembly Resolution 302, UNRWA was sustained as a separate entity for Palestinian refugees despite the existence of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the general worldwide UN refugee agency mandated to resettle refugees. This is because UNWRA’s very establishment was meant to serve a propaganda campaign to perpetuate the “refugee” problem to realize the Palestinian “right of return,”³ a right not given to any other refugee population, including the approximately one million Jews exiled from Arab and Muslim lands after 1948. “Return” would mean the erasure of Israel.

Perpetuating a unique and inherited ”refugee” status, handed down from one Palestinian generation to the next, UNRWA exacerbated the conflict. The number of Palestinian refugees has increased from about half a million in 1948 to about 6 million today.

The UNRWA “numbers game” is yet another aspect of its political war against Israel. Long accused of massive corruption, UNRWA established in February 2023 an online “population dashboard” to respond to the criticism. The “UNRWA Registered Population Dashboard”⁴ was meant to provide transparency, providing a genuine picture of the number of “Palestine refugees” served by the agency. In reality, as the numbers of refugees in Lebanon unequivocally prove, the dashboard merely perpetuates the false figures UNRWA has been presenting to the world for decades.

UNRWA’s Numbers Game

The question of the number of “Palestine refugees” has been debated since 1948. From the start, estimates differed dramatically, from 540,000 to 711,000. ⁵ Within this context, the number of “Palestine refugees” who receive services from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has also been a subject of much contention.

The subject of the number of “Palestine refugees” resident in Lebanon proves that UNRWA either has no accurate statistics or that UNRWA does have accurate statistics and opted to inflate them.

According to the United Nations, 97,000 “Palestine refugees” reportedly fled to Lebanon in 1947-1949. ⁶

By 2017, according to the “General Population Census in the Camps and Palestinian Communities in Lebanon,”⁷ conducted by the Lebanese Central Bureau of Statistics in partnership with the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the number of “Palestine refugees” in Lebanon had grown to 174,422.

In that same year, in its annual report, UNRWA reported that there were “469,555 Palestine refugees in Lebanon … registered with the Agency.” ⁸

UNRWA dismissed the almost 300,000-person discrepancy, with many excuses.

First UNRWA claimed that the census carried out by the Lebanese and Palestinian Central Bureaus of Statistics “did not aim to provide a headcount of all Palestine refugees living in the country.” ⁹

This claim was contradicted by the statement of Lebanon’s then-Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who when presenting the results of the joint census, said: ¹⁰

The figures and indicators provided by this comprehensive census of population and housing in the Palestinian camps and gatherings in Lebanon draw a clear picture of the reality of the situation of the refugees and contribute to the formulation of projects and plans for solutions.

Hariri’s statement reflected the agreements that had been reached between the Lebanese authorities and the Palestinian Authority to carry out the census, with the expressed purpose of “conducting a comprehensive census of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon comprising the refugees as well as their socio-economic status in all camps, adjacent areas, Palestinian gatherings and other places of residence.” ¹¹

Alternatively, UNRWA claimed that “using a different methodology, a survey conducted by the American University of Beirut in 2015, estimated that the number of Palestine refugee residents is approximately 260,000 to 280,000.” ¹²

While the American University of Beirut survey provided a number closer to the number of refugees reported by UNRWA, it is also less reliable as an accurate source for the number of “Palestine refugees” in Lebanon, than the 2017 census.

In fact, the 2015 study did not provide new information. Rather, the population estimate of 260,000 to 280,000 “Palestine refugees” was based on a 2010 study funded by the European Union and conducted by the same university. In the 2010 study, the authors found: ¹³

At present, there are in excess of 425,640 Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA in Lebanon. However, according to our survey figures, it is estimated that only between 260,000 and 280,000 are residents in the country, with a margin of error of ±5%… Some refugees were “naturalized” and have been granted Lebanese citizenship. Some 200,000 Palestinian refugees have left Lebanon, many to Europe, particularly the Scandinavian countries and Germany (Dorai 2003), especially after the 1982 Israeli invasion and the “War of the Camps,” fleeing the conflict but also rampant social exclusion in more recent years.

The American University of Beirut studies were less reliable than the 2017 census because they were based upon a population survey and estimates and not a comprehensive census as was conducted by the Lebanese authorities.

Moreover, the American University of Beirut report was not the first to question the UNRWA figures. A 2005 report funded by the European Commission’s European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations and conducted by Danish Refugee Council, also undermined UNRWA’s figures: ¹⁴

Registered refugees. This group consists of refugees registered by both UNRWA and the Lebanese authorities. According to UNRWA statistics of March 2005 this group constitutes 100,000 households with a total of 400,000 people. 53 % (224,000) of these live in the 12 UNRWA camps, while the remaining (176,000) live in gatherings or are scattered in the Lebanese community. One should however be aware that a large number of Palestinian refugees remain registered with UNRWA in spite of living permanently abroad – this often in order not to loose (sic) their legal rights as internationally recognised refugees. Some estimates therefore go as low as 250,000 Palestinian refugees actually present in Lebanon.

While never amending its inflated number of “Palestine refugees” in Lebanon, UNRWA did concede in its 2017 Annual report: “At the end of 2017, 469,555 Palestine refugees in Lebanon (PRL) were registered with the Agency although many left the country over the years without notifying UNRWA.”¹⁵

UNRWA then added that despite the high number of refugees “registered with the Agency,” the number of actual recipients of UNRWA services was much lower: “A total of 204,631 eligible PRL, PRS and other beneficiaries, such as non-refugee husbands of Palestine refugee women and their children, accessed UNRWA services in 2017.”

This figure¹⁶ would seem to be a much more relevant estimate of the actual number of “Palestine refugees” in Lebanon.

Nonetheless, according to UNRWA’s population dashboard, the number of “Palestine refugees” in Lebanon stood at 492,946 in the second quarter of 2024.

Can the International Community Rely on UNRWA’s Population Dashboard?

The fundamental flaws of UNRWA’s “Palestine refugee” headcount are not unique to Lebanon. While the “Population dashboard” was meant to provide an accurate picture of the entire “Palestine refugee” population, in reality, it exposed the warped nature of UNRWA.

Thus, for example, the dashboard presents the false reality that all the “Palestine refugees” are only residents in five geographical areas: Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. While most commentators have already recognized that many “Palestine refugees” are no longer resident in those areas and moved abroad, according to UNRWA, the entirety of the “Palestine refugees” have remained in the same countries in which they have been resident since 1947/48.

This understanding exposes another fundamental flaw with the UNRWA figures. In normal circumstances, a person ceases to be defined as a “refugee” once he or she receives permanent residency in a foreign country and certainly when they receive citizenship in their country of residence or other citizenship. UNRWA’s population dashboard, not only ignores natural or even forced¹⁷ migration, but it also ignores the question of whether the “refugee” has either permanently settled in a foreign country or even received citizenship. Thus, potentially, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of the so-called “Palestine refugees” could potentially hold foreign citizenship and would not be considered in any other circumstances to still be “refugees.”

Despite its shortcomings, the UNRWA population dashboard does expose another critical insight. According to the population dashboard, over 90 percent of the so-called “Palestine refugees” are younger than 76 – i.e. younger than the State of Israel – and never set foot in Israel or in “Palestine.” Had UNRWA not adopted the unique definition of “Palestine refugee” status that allows for the status to be handed down from generation to generation, the number of bona fides “Palestine refugees” would be no more than 300,000 people, and would be in constant decline.

In stark contrast, according to UNRWA’s population dashboard, from the second quarter of 2020 to the second quarter of 2024, the “Palestine refugee” population did not decrease but rather grew by 312,169 people. Almost miraculously, considering their living conditions, the number of “Palestine refugees” aged over 80 years old grew from 207,125 in 2020 to 255,461 in 2024.

While UNRWA’s direct involvement in terror is the source of the international community’s primary concern, UNWRA’s consistent misleading of the international community regarding the actual number of “Palestine refugees” should be a close second. Together, both facts point to UNRWA’s wholesale corruption, refuting it from being a humanitarian organization and showing it to be one that morphed into a political weapon.

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