UNRWA and the Problem of Data Stewardship

UNRWA cannot deny that it is stewarding validated data that Palestinians lived on their ancestral land before 1948.

Three weeks ago, I was digging into population data for Palestine.

Population pyramids offer a crude picture of health for a population, and unsurprisingly, Palestine’s trends failed to show population stability. Due to premature death, many children do not age into adulthood and few adults grow old to become elders. Typically, members of a population only “exit” a population in two ways: 1) death and 2) physically leaving the geographic bounds that define this population. This leaving could be a willful emigration or a forced displacement.

It’s one thing to locate data for death rates and survivorship curves. It’s another thing to track down refugee data. For the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt as defined by the U.N.), refugee data is poorly defined and deeply political. And this data is stewarded solely by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

If it were the 90s, I would be slumped over a series of bloated desktops like Julia Roberts. *adjusts tin foil hat*

On January 26th, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel could no longer act with impunity and had to immediately permit the delivery of basic services and essential humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza. However, Israel has moved to accuse UNRWA staff members of conspiring with Hamas for the October 7th attack. The United States and Western nations have taken their cue to suspend funding to UNRWA.

To recap: now that the ICJ has ordered humanitarian aid to enter the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt), Western nations have cut funding to the U.N. arm delivering that very humanitarian aid in the region.

152 UNRWA workers have been killed and 145 UNRWA facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Over 1 million Palestinians are currently taking shelter in ~154 UNRWA buildings (via OCHA’s reliefweb). Al Jazeera reports that the United States, Germany, the EU, and Sweden together fund ~62% of UNRWA’s total funding. As these countries suspend their funding, it’s predicted that UNRWA will run out of funds within weeks.

29 January 2024 statement from NGOs:

The suspension of funding by donor states will impact life-saving assistance for over two million civilians, over half of whom are children, who rely on UNRWA aid in Gaza. The population faces starvation, looming famine and an outbreak of disease under Israel’s continued indiscriminate bombardment and deliberate deprivation of aid in Gaza.

We welcome UNRWA’s swift investigation into the alleged involvement of a small number of UN staff members in the October 7th attacks. We are shocked by the reckless decision to cut a lifeline for an entire population by some of the very countries that had called for aid in Gaza to be stepped up and for humanitarians to be protected while doing their job. This decision comes as the International Court of Justice ordered immediate and effective action to ensure the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza.

152 UNRWA staff have already been killed and 145 UNRWA facilities damaged by bombardment. UNRWA is the largest humanitarian agency in Gaza and their delivery of humanitarian assistance cannot be replaced by other agencies working in Gaza. If the funding suspensions are not reversed we may see a complete collapse of the already restricted humanitarian response in Gaza.

Letting UNRWA sputter out and die has grave implications for Palestinian refugees past, present, and future. Why? UNRWA is the only recognized entity that grants Palestinians their legal claim to their ancestral land and their refugee status.

Piecing together the data on Palestinian refugees is Kafkaesque.

The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) operates in 135 countries and estimates that ~108.4 million people are forcibly displaced globally. However, UNHCR is a distinct entity from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) serves every single country but Palestine.

UNRWA was established in 1949 and is mandated to serve Registered Palestinian Refugees™️. Registered Palestinian Refugees™️ are defined as “any person whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict” (UNRWA FAQs).

Registered Palestinian Refugee™️ status extended to biological and adoptive descendants of male lineage only. Registration closed after the 1950s and re-opened decades later in 1992 to allow new appeals for registration from persons “able to produce valid documentation proving their 1948 refugee status.” Only in 2006 could Registered Palestinian Refugee™️ women have their own husbands and descendants registered as Registered Palestinian Refugees™️.

Census data has never been used to build UNRWA’s registry of Registered Palestinian Refugees™️. All registered persons are registered voluntarily.

So here we are in 2024. The current database of Registered Palestinian Refugees™️ only captures individuals who voluntarily registered to maintain their legal claim to the land they were displaced from. Individual men who, from 1949 to 1959, had physical documents proving that they and their family lived in Palestine. Individual men who, over 40 years later, submitted physical documents (themselves or posthumously through their children) proving that they and their family lived in Palestine. Then, individual women, who almost 60 years later, submitted physical documents (themselves or posthumously through their children) proving that they and their family lived in Palestine.

Violence since 1948 has repeatedly displaced Palestinians. Most notably is the 1967 Naksa, when Israel annexed the remaining Palestinian territories after the Six-Day War. Though UNRWA serves Palestinians who have been displaced “as a result of the 1967 and subsequent hostilities,” these persons are NOT Registered Palestinian Refugees™️ — they can receive services from UNRWA, but only persons and lineages connected to the 1948 Nakba fall under the definition of Registered Palestinian Refugees™️.

This wholly fucks up the numbers.

This data is hardly complete. It is miraculous that there are any Registered Palestinian Refugees™️ given how bureaucratically violent and prohibitive this process is. How do you present documentation when the registration window finally re-opened in 1992… if your entire family line was wiped out? How do you present documentation of where your family lived some 40 years after they were driven from their home with just the clothes on their back?

In public health, it has been widely studied and proven that stigma, violence, and distrust are durable drivers of surveillance avoidance. Victimized people will refuse to engage systems that capture any of their identifying information because of their fear of surveillance. They are, rightfully so, afraid of being revictimized by peoples and powers beyond them.

And so: Can you imagine having your home seized by a Western-backed nation, your family dying and suffering on a Trail of Tears, and then being asked to sign up for a Western-backed registry tracking your genetic family lineage?

Every single Registered Palestinian Refugee™️ took a grave risk to maintain their legal claim to their ancestral land. A deadly risk. UNRWA now stewards this data and all claim to land that Palestinians past, present, and future depend on.

Even if UNRWA wishes to deny that it grants any type of legal status, it cannot deny that it is stewarding validated data that Palestinians lived on their ancestral land before 1948.

UNRWA only operates in 5 regions: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Gaza. It cannot operate outside of these regions. With that said, the U.N. is only tracking Registered Palestinian Refugees™️ who are internally displaced within the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt) or have crossed borders into one of these 5 regions.

Apparently the U.N. banks on Palestinians being unable to find resettlement outside of these 5 regions. From VOA News:

UNRWA does not have the authority to give Palestinians refugee status under the 1951 Geneva Convention. Nor does the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees have that authority while they are in UNRWA’s area of operations; it can designate Palestinians as refugees only when they are outside UNRWA’s jurisdiction.

“The Refugee Convention was written such that it excluded [Palestinians] from protection and consideration by the UNHCR,” Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, told VOA.

Unsurprisingly, there have been continued efforts to dissolve UNRWA. Doing so would transfer its mandate over to Arab powers within the 5 regions and subsequently dissolve the registry of Registered Palestinian Refugees™️. 

In a 2021 letter, UNRWA’s Director of Legal Affairs pens a letter “at the request of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) for the purposes of describing the Agency’s mandate and services that it is able to provide, and limitations thereto.”

The letter defines the purpose of UNRWA and the state of its funding as such:

UNRWA’s fields of operations are Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The Agency does not have a mandate to operate outside of its five fields, and therefore, other than maintaining regional representative offices, does not have offices anywhere else. UNRWA pursues its mission within its five fields of operations through the provision of humanitarian assistance and mandated services.

UNRWA mandated services are concerned with:
- Basic education,
- Primary health care,
- Relief and social services,
- Infrastructure and camp improvement, and microcredit, and,
- Emergency assistance, including in situations of armed conflict.

The Agency contributes to the protection of Palestine refugees both through its service delivery and by advocating for their rights with relevant stakeholders. UNRWA does not have a mandate to seek durable solutions for Palestine refugees.

UNRWA does not manage refugee camps and is not responsible for protecting the physical safety or security of Palestine refugees or maintaining law and order in UNRWA’s five fields of operations. The Agency cannot guarantee any individual’s physical security. Ensuring the physical security of Palestine refugees residing in any of UNRWA’s five fields is the responsibility of the respective host state or authority.
[…]

Operating within a resource-constrained environment, and reliant on voluntary funding, UNRWA allocates its limited resources among the services provided to Palestine refugees, prioritizing the needs of the most vulnerable. The level of services that UNRWA is able to provide depends on the Agency’s funding situation, which is largely dependent on voluntary contributions by States, and may not correspond to the needs of Palestine refugees. The Agency’s funding situation, which has steadily deteriorated over the past several years, reached a critical point in 2020. UNRWA received US$ 940 million, US$ 649 million short of total requirements and US$ 60 million less than in 2019. The Agency’s financial situation remains uncertain with a shortfall of US$ 100 million as at mid- September 2021.

As stated, UNRWA does not operate or fund refugee camps, as they can only deliver services; refugees become the financial responsibility of the host nations. Thus, pushing Registered Palestinian Refugees™️ across borders is to the advantage of UNRWA in a few ways. If Registered Palestinian Refugees™️ are pushed outside of UNRWA’s 5 regions, through the Rafah crossing into Egypt let’s say, then UNRWA washes its hands of these refugees from both a financial and jurisdiction standpoint.

To reiterate from before: At least 152 UNRWA workers have been killed and most of UNRWA’s physical infrastructure has been blown up and destroyed. Over 1 million Palestinians are taking refuge in remaining UNRWA buildings. Nations that account for ~62% of UNRWA’s total funding and are now suspending their funds one-by-one. It’s predicted that UNRWA will run out of funding within weeks.

Sounds like a convenient solution for the problem of Registered Palestinian Refugees™️. And again, this brings up concerns regarding data stewardship.

If UNRWA dies, then all Palestinians would be absorbed into the umbrella title of Internally Displaced Persons™️ (IDP) – forcibly-displaced persons who do not cross borders. “People become internally displaced when they are forced to leave their homes due to conflict, violence, human rights violations, natural hazards, or other crises within the borders of their country. This can include situations where people move voluntarily to seek safety or to access essential services” (via OCHA).

IDP is a regionally-agnostic and globally-used term, as opposed to Registered Palestinian Refugee™️. The U.N. body primarily concerned with IDPs is the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Defined solely by geographic bounds, IDPs are not refugees, even if they’ve been displaced for generations. Those IDPs are just experiencing protracted internal displacement: “Protracted Internal Displacement refers to IDPs who, for significant periods of time, cannot take steps to progressively reduce their vulnerability, impoverishment and marginalization, and find a durable solution” (United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel
on Internal Displacement, 2021).

There is a current movement to apply the term IDP to Palestinians. On one hand, it’s accurate and helpful in garnering resources. On the other hand, it further erodes the UNRWA classification of Registered Palestinian Refugee™️.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (a Norwegian organization) put out an interesting report in 2015 regarding this language shift and foreshadows a mandate shift for UNRWA:

Until 2006, local NGOs, INGOs and the media generally referred to Palestinians displaced by house demolitions and evictions as “homeless”, not as IDPs. At that time, some did not see the utility of the IDP label, especially given that the status of Palestinian refugee used by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) conferred some degree of assistance to Palestinians. Over time there has been growing recognition of the validity of the IDP label in Israel-Palestine and its potential to ensure greater visibility.

This new awareness of internal displacement and its triggers and consequences in the region was reflected in the 2008 creation of the Inter-Agency Displacement Working Group (DWG) led by OCHA under the auspices of the Protection Cluster chaired by OHCHR. It rapidly grew to include over a hundred members, including UN agencies, Palestinian and Israeli local organisations, INGOs and donors. They collectively acknowledged the local applicability of the IDP definition provided by the Guiding Principles and started considering as IDPs all Palestinians, including UNRWA-registered refugees, who have been displaced as a result of policies associated with the Israeli occupation of the territories annexed in 1967. Accompanying this conceptual shift there has been increasing recognition of the applicability of the term “forcible transfer” to describe Israeli practices in the oPts.

Without UNRWA’s registry of Registered Palestinian Refugees™️, the public identity of Palestinians will irrefutably change. Both in the region and on the world stage.

Just another internally displaced person. Just another refugee. Displaced from where? Refugee from where? Not any place that they have claim to, legally or anecdotally; not any place that they have power to return to.

This is the problem of data stewardship that needs to be answered.

Anyways, a depressing rabbit hole I found myself in.