Palestinian Refugees
Palestinian refugees are individuals and their descendants who were displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and subsequent conflicts, particularly the Six-Day War in 1967. Following the establishment of Israel in 1948, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, leading to a humanitarian crisis that has persisted for generations. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was established in 1949 to provide assistance and services to these refugees, who often live in camps across the Middle East, including in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. As of the 2020s, around 5.9 million Palestinians qualify as refugees according to UNRWA criteria.
The right of return is a central issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian leaders insisting on the recognition of this right for refugees to return to their former homes in Israel. However, Israel has consistently refused this demand, citing concerns about the implications for the Jewish state. The situation remains complicated by ongoing conflicts, including recent escalations that have exacerbated the plight of Palestinian refugees and created new waves of displacement. The humanitarian conditions in many refugee camps are precarious, and funding for UNRWA has faced significant challenges, threatening the agency's ability to provide essential services. Understanding the historical and contemporary contexts of Palestinian refugees is crucial for grasping the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ongoing struggles faced by this population.
Palestinian Refugees
Introduction
After the founding of Israel in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Arab former residents of the British Palestine Mandate fled areas controlled by Israel and were scattered among surrounding territories. Another wave of displacement came in 1967, when Israel occupied several disputed territories including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Lacking a state of their own and denied citizenship by most surrounding nations, Palestinian refugees developed a distinct identity. Many of those originally displaced in 1948 and their descendents continue to live in refugee camps run by host nations and serviced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) that was established in 1949. The United Nations (UN) and other international groups have long supported the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. The Palestinian Authority frequently insisted that this "right of return" must be honored by Israel as a condition of a permanent peace agreement, but Israel consistently refused. Disagreement over the fate of Palestinian refugees remains a major point of tension in the Middle East well into the twenty-first century.
Who Are the Palestinian Refugees?
According to the official definition of the UNRWA, a Palestinian refugee is "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," as well as "descendants of fathers fulfilling the definition." Spouses of individuals who fled Palestine may also register as refugees.
In May 1951 UNRWA inherited a list of 950,000 persons described as refugees by predecessor agencies. In the first four months of operations, this list was reduced to 860,000 persons "based on painstaking census efforts and identification of fraudulent claims," according to the UNRWA. The agency's later estimates place the original number of refugees at around 750,000.
The 1967 Six-Day War, during which Israel captured the West Bank and Sinai Peninsula (including the Gaza Strip) resulted in a second, smaller, wave of displaced Palestinians. The UNRWA formed ten more camps to house these people, but did not officially classify all of them as refugees. Some other human rights advocacy groups have more broadly considered all Palestinians who fled across borders during the 1948 and 1967 wars as "Palestinian refugees." (Those uprooted from their homes but remaining in Israel are usually instead classified as internally displaced persons.) Some Palestinian activists go even further, and include Palestinians fleeing any stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their definition of refugees. On the other hand, other organizations sometimes take a narrower view, such as only considering people actually displaced in 1948 (and not their descendants) as refugees.
According to the UNWRA definition, there were approximately 5.9 million people who qualified as Palestinian refugees by the 2020s. Of those refugees officially registered with the UNWRA, about 1.5 million lived in the agency's fifty-eight officially recognized refugee camps throughout the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Most others lived near the camps. Other displaced Palestinians and their descendants not meeting the UNWRA refugee criteria could be found living in various countries around the world.
Overview
The issue of Palestinian refugees is deeply rooted in the complex history of tensions in the Middle East, and specifically the formation of Israel as a Jewish state. The early twentieth century saw a marked increase in Jewish immigration to the Middle East as the Zionist movement called for the establishment of an official Jewish homeland there. After World War II, Great Britain moved to relinquish its control over the region historically known as Palestine, and in 1947 the UN endorsed the division of the area into one state for Jews and another for Arabs. However, Arab leaders rejected this proposal as contrary to principles of the UN Charter.
As tensions mounted, Jewish gangs and paramilitary groups launched harassment campaigns and outright attacks against Palestinian Arabs. In one notable incident, over one hundred Arabs, including women and children, were killed in the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, by members of the Zionist militias Irgun and Lehi (Stern Gang). In May 1948 Jewish leaders announced the formation of Israel, which led to the first Arab-Israeli War as Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria invaded in an unsuccessful attempt to eradicate the new Jewish state. Amid this violence approximately half the Palestinian Arab population—more than 700,000 people—fled for safety in surrounding areas. After Israel prevailed in the 1948 war, most of those who fled were unable to return to their homes. They became the initial Palestinian refugees, and largely settled into refugee camps throughout the region. The violence, displacement, and dispossession experienced by Palestinians in 1948 would become known as the Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe"), commemorated with an annual day of remembrance.
Notably, for years many Israelis disputed this portrayal of the events of 1948. Many Jewish leaders argued that Palestinian Arabs were encouraged to leave their homes by broadcasts from surrounding Arab states, which suggested their absence would be short-lived and that they could return within a few days, after Arab armies crushed the nascent state of Israel. In this view, those who left were then stranded after the Arab invasion failed, and their subsequent treatment by host nations was hardly the fault of Israel. However, historians have rejected this interpretation, pointing to extensive evidence that Palestinians fled due to widespread persecution rather than left of their own volition.
The Six-Day War in 1967 caused another wave of Palestinian refugees. Some were incorporated into the refugee camps set up in 1948, and additional camps were created as well. However, this group of displaced Palestinians did not all gain full recognition as official, registered refugees with the UNWRA. The situation was also further complicated by Israel's subsequent occupation of several disputed territories, in particular the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which had become the focal points of Palestinian society. Ongoing conflict and Jewish settlement in the occupied territories would continue to displace smaller numbers of Palestinians over the decades, but the term "refugee" would generally be reserved for those uprooted across borders in 1948 or 1967.
As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued over the decades, the Palestinian refugees were widely recognized as the largest and longest-running stateless population in the world. The group also came to be distinguished from other refugee groups in some key ways. Importantly, they remained under the purview of the UNWRA, rather than the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). While the UNWRA was mandated to directly provide services such as education and health care to Palestinian refugees until their situation could be resolved, the agency did not have the UNHCR's ability to resettle refugees elsewhere. The UNWRA also did not have administrative power over the refugee camps themselves, which fell to the relevant national government. As Palestinian refugee camps were located across multiple nations, this led to considerable variety in outcomes. For example, in Jordan most Palestinian refugees were eventually able to acquire full citizenship, while in Syria they could not officially become citizens but were otherwise granted the same rights, and in Lebanon they were denied many rights. Refugees in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank frequently faced restrictions from Israeli authorities.
The UNWRA also frequently struggled with funding issues over the decades, which experts warned threatened the well-being of millions of Palestinian refugees. In late 2022, amid broad global economic turmoil, UNWRA officials announced that the agency was verging on an inability to provide vital services. The following year brought even sharper worries of financial collapse as the agency's fundraising efforts fell short.
The war that broke out between Israel and the Palestinian organization Hamas in October 2023 further increased the strain on Palestinian refugees while also creating a new wave of displaced people. Some of the 1948 refugee camps in the Gaza Strip were hit by airstrikes or saw other violence amid the conflict. Israel urged civilians to leave Gaza altogether as it sought to destroy Hamas's presence there. Many Palestinians—including those already officially classified as refugees—had little ability to flee, however, and already poor living conditions deteriorated rapidly, leading to a major humanitarian disaster. Neighboring Arab states such as Egypt and Jordan were reluctant to take in Palestinians from Gaza, in part due to worries that this would lead to even more permanent loss of territory for the Palestinian people.
In January 2024, Israel alleged that some UNWRA employees had been involved in Hamas's October 2023 terrorist attacks, prompting the US and many other countries to suspend funding to the organization pending an investigation. The UNRWA cut ties with the accused individuals but warned that its additional funding shortages and potential shutdown would worsen the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as well as in refugee camps elsewhere.
"The Right of Return."
Palestinian leaders have long insisted that Israel recognize the "right of return," in which people classified as Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to their homes and regain their property. Israel has consistently refused this demand, however.
The phrase "right of return" implies a legal right, and Palestinians point to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (December 11, 1948), which declared that "the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible." (The same resolution called for, inter alia, the demilitarization of Jerusalem and placing the city and surrounding villages under international control.) Israel has argued that resolutions of the General Assembly are not binding (whereas resolutions of the Security Council are) and that it could not count on returning Palestinians to "live at peace with their neighbors." Israel at times offered compensation for property abandoned by refugees, pointing out that in many cases the homes or fields left behind by Arabs have been torn down and/or covered by other developments, such as office buildings.
The status of the Palestinian refugees has remained a serious obstacle to negotiating a final peace agreement between Palestinian leaders and the Israeli government. After Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat recognized Israel's right to exist, the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 set up the Palestinian Authority as a body for Palestinian self-governance and brought much optimism over negotiations toward a "two-state solution." However, this progress eventually stalled, in part due to fundamental disagreement over the right of return. Notably, during talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority held at Camp David, Maryland, in 2000, the two sides agreed on most aspects of a permanent peace between Israel and the prospective state of Palestine located in the West Bank and Gaza, but stumbled over Arab demands for the right of return and Israeli refusal to accept a prospective influx of several million Palestinian refugees. The UN and human rights groups, meanwhile, have maintained support for the right of return. For instance, on World Refugee Day in 2023, around the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nakba, a panel of UN experts issued a statement reiterating that the right of return should take precedence over politics.
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