On March 6th, Marc Lassouaoui from UNRWA spent some quality time with our Community in Geneva, discussing the role of the Agency, its challenges and its future. 

We all learnt something from this TALK, namely:

• • The UNRWA mandate has been TEMPORARY since the establishment of UNRWA, 76 years ago, and has been renewed every 3 years ever since.
  • UNRWA's main mandate is to provide Government Services (Education, Health), with a provision to provide also "Emergency Services" such as food aid and psychosocial assistance in times of war: "we have become the backbone of the humanitarian response in Gaza today, not by choice but because of the reality on the ground"
  • What UNRWA is not: it is not a guarantor of the "refugee status rights". The refugee status is anchored in the United Nations General Assembly resolution, so if tomorrow UNRWA were to disappear, the Palestine refugees would remain such until a solution is found for them
  • UNRWA is currently threatened at a number of levels; 2 laws passed by Israel's Knesset are respectively "preventing UNRWA from operating in the sovereign territory of Israel" and "preventing any contacts between Israeli authorities and UNRWA"; these two laws make it very hard to keep working on the ground, for obvious reasons.
  • West Bank: a number of refugee camps have been "emptied", the whole of the North of the West Bank has been affected by operation "iron wall" since January 21st: are we seeing a Gaza-ification of the West Bank? only future will tell, in the meantime UNRWA wants to continue their work in the West Bank.
  • UNWA still has 9-10 international staff working in Gaza: they were advised to leave but they chose to stay, well aware that if they leave they shall not be allowed back in under the current circumstances.
  • Unexploded mines are everywhere in the Gaza strip: extremely dangerous, especially for the children.
  • In Gaza, UNRWA have been providing approximately 17,000 health consultations every day: a total of 365,000 consultations were provided since the ceasefire began.
  • In Gaza 650,000 children have been out of school since the start of the war : the priority is to support them mentally due to the trauma they are living through, before they can be taught again (not to mention that most schools have become shelters and some have been destroyed and that the teachers themselves are traumatised at the moment); "we have gone back by 67 years and we are organising informal teaching groups in tents... "
  • Over 60% of UNRWA's budget is allocated to teachers’ salary.
  • UNRWA's overall budget is approximately 1.5bn$ per year; last year for the first time ever, UNRWA received 150m$ from the private sector including ordinary people (not governments) from all over the world, who chose to show their solidarity
  • 600 staff who left Gaza have had to be placed on "leave without pay", just a small example of the impact of tight funding. "We may have to suspend salary payment for more and scale back critical services in Gaza if we don't get more resources "
  • "The lack of funding is not due to the lack of efforts to address neutrality matters": please see UNRWA website at THIS address for their detailed address of claims versus facts
  • "Preserving UNRWA is a means to an end, not an end in itself"

More lessons learnt from UNRWA in our 3-min summary video by Warebo Agency :

A special thanks to Stephanie Simpson from Terre des Hommes and Joeline Studer from MEDAIR for their help organising this special series of SEP Talks X International Geneva