This Agency Has Been A Lifeline For Palestinian Refugees. It's Hanging On By A Thread.

UNRWA has provided direct relief and aid to Palestinians for 75 years. Damaging claims by Israel have left its fate in question.

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 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.