Yassine Daoud remembers when he first eyed the flyer at the refugee camp in Lebanon where he grew up. It was for a scholarship to study in the United States.
He was a nosy and curious kid, memorizing every license plate he saw in town for fun, and he was a voracious reader. He wanted to apply, but the deadline was the next morning.
That didn’t deter Daoud. He immediately enlisted the help of his teacher, who worked at a school supported by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The school’s administrator kept it open after hours so Daoud could gather his transcript for his application. Together, they worked late into the night under by a kerosene lamp and met Daoud’s deadline.
Thirty-five years later, Daoud is the chair of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins Howard County Medical Center in Maryland, thanks to the education and the support he received from UNRWA.
UNRWA was created by a U.N. General Assembly resolution in 1949 after Israel’s founding — and after what Palestinians call the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe, when 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly driven from their homes. The agency’s goal was to provide direct relief and aid to Palestine’s refugees.
When UNRWA began operations in 1950, it catered to nearly 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Today it serves nearly 6 million, in Gaza, the West Bank and neighboring Arab states. In Gaza, UNRWA’s services are in dire need, with almost the entire population relying on the aid group for basic necessities, including food, water, and hygiene supplies.
Daoud credits UNRWA for the education he received. “Despite the fact that we were very poor and destitute and refugees, our educational level as Palestinians was one of the highest in the Middle East and actually in the world,” he said.
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The fate of UNRWA has been hanging by a thread since last month, when Israeli officials alleged that 12 of the agency’s 13,000-member staff took part in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people. On Friday, Israel released more details about those employees, including their names, photos and alleged ties to Hamas.
The backlash to Israel’s report was swift. Sixteen countries suspended their funding to the nonprofit organization, including Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland ― as well as the U.S., one of its top funders. On Wednesday, the Senate passed a bill that includes language to end all U.S. support for UNRWA entirely, though that bill is unlikely to become law.
The U.N. agency said that it would run out of funding by the end of February if countries did not resume donations and that millions of people would be at risk of losing access to essential aid.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has appointed a panel to review the allegations against UNRWA. While some media reports have cast doubt on some Israeli claims ― the U.K.’s Channel 4 News even reported that Israel provided no evidence that UNRWA staff participated in the Oct. 7 attacks ― the Biden administration said it would not resume donations until the investigation is complete. A second U.N. investigation into Israel’s allegations against the UNRWA is ongoing. And the European Commission ― the third-biggest donor to UNRWA after the United States and Germany ― has demanded a separate audit.
But those investigations could take weeks, if not months, and many Palestinians say time is working against them. Refugees like Daoud say they wouldn’t have made it out of such debilitating and arduous conditions if it wasn’t for the support of UNRWA.
Daoud grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Baalbek, Lebanon, northeast of the capital. His home was composed of one room, where he resided with his parents and 9 siblings. It was their bedroom, kitchen, dining and living room.
Their livelihood depended on the aid provided by UNRWA, which included food and water rations, and they attended the UNRWA schools. There, Daoud excelled and he received a scholarship to study at United World College-USA in New Mexico.
After graduating, he went on to complete his education at Amherst College on a full scholarship. In 2005, he received his medical degree from Harvard, then completed a three-year residency at Duke University Eye Center, followed by a medical internship at John Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.
To date, Daoud said he performed over 10,000 surgeries.
“Without that scholarship, I wouldn’t know where I would be,” said Daoud.
The patients who received his care, he argued, also “benefitted from the groundwork that UNRWA was doing in my refugee camp to enable me to be the person who I am.”
Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images
Palestinian American physician, translator, and award-winning poet Fady Joudah, says UNRWA doesn’t only provide a critical lifeline for Palestinians’ survival but is a key organization in upholding Palestinian culture.
Joudah’s parents were able to receive an education through UNRWA during their time in northern Gaza. His father went on to become a UNRWA teaching assistant in the early 1950s and generated an income to provide for his family. He went on to study in Egypt and then immigrated to the U.S., where he worked on his master’s and doctorate degrees. Joudah was born there in 1971. Joudah’s mother and her six siblings all received health care from UNRWA.
“UNRWA contributed to the general sense of Palestinian society through education and health care, to kind of begin to envision a future for the future generations,” said Joudah, who now lives in Austin, Texas.
Joudah, whose poems focus on the complexity of Palestinian identity, said the loss of UNRWA as an organization would be a loss for Palestinian roots and traditions.
“The shutting down or destroying of UNRWA is really about cultural genocide,” he said. “UNRWA is not a perfect body, but it has provided an avenue and a window for [people in] Palestinian society to empower themselves. It was one of the avenues to create Palestinian culture, through self-empowerment and self-sufficiency with jobs, education, and health care.”
Since Israel began bombing Gaza after the Hamas attacks, more than 150 UNRWA staff members have been killed. Nearly 45% of the general population has sought shelter in UNRWA schools, clinics, and other public buildings.
Israel has tried to dismantle the agency for years, arguing it fosters anti-Israel sentiment. UNRWA has long disputed those claims.
Earlier this month, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters that Israeli allegations needed to be vetted, given the country’s longstanding desires to see it ended.
“The presumption of innocence is valid for everyone, at any time, even for UNRWA. It is not a secret that the Israeli government wants to get rid of UNRWA,” said Borell.
“Nobody else can do what UNRWA is doing,” he added.
UNRWA has also faced other controversies in the past. In 2019, the head of the agency resigned over allegations of abuses of power. In 2014, the head of the United Nations expressed alarm after rockets were found at a vacant UNRWA school and later went missing.
Earlier this week, Israel’s military alleged that it located Hamas tunnels partly under the UNRWA’s headquarters, which the organization evacuated at the start of the war.
The aid group’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, said on X (formerly Twitter) that they were not “aware of any activity that may have taken place at their headquarters since staff evacuated the premises following the Israeli evacuation orders last October.”
Daoud said the importance of UNRWA’s work stems beyond saving civilians in Gaza, to a lifelong solution for peace for the Palestinian population as a whole.
“Hunger may not kill people, but ignorance can. Therefore educating the population and educating the students and enabling them to explore the world and to give them these opportunities is what keeps the population afloat,” said Daoud.
“If you don’t do that, the destitution be more and the violence will be more, and then no one benefits from that. It’s a safety net. If anything, UNRWA needs help, it does not need to be cut off.”