Press Releases

3/10/2025

BADIL Resource Center and the Global Palestinian Refugee and Internally Displaced Person’s Network (GPRN) appreciate the increase in states’ political and financial support expressed at the UNGA High-Level UNRWA Ministerial Meeting (25 September 2025) on UNRWA. However, the Agency continues to face a significant financial deficit and banning by the Israeli regime. At the same time, states’ support to UNRWA was conditioned with their acceptance and endorsement of the New York Declaration (July 2025), which conflicts with UNRWA's mandate and purpose, ignores Palestinian rights and instrumentalizes the Agency into an interim state-building tool tied to Palestinian statehood. As states continue to fail to ensure UNRWA’s mandate and uphold Palestinian rights,  this entrenches states’ complicity in genocide and constitutes an evasion of states’ legal obligations to ensure international protection to Palestinian refugees, including their right to a durable solution based on their free choice.

Article 11 of UNGA Resolution 194 (1948), establishes the right of Palestinian refugees to reparations—including return, property restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, and guarantees of non-repetition. Article 5 of UNGA Resolution 302 (1949) grounds UNRWA’s mandate in this still-unrealized right of return, stipulating that its operations are without prejudice to it. The Agency’s existence is a direct consequence of non-implementation of this right, and its dismantlement could only be justified once that right has been fully realized.

Therefore, the obligation of states to ensure UNRWA’s continued existence and operations cannot be transferred, diluted, conditioned, or deferred - not by declarations nor assessments. The overwhelming majority of states voted in favor of the New York Declaration (July 2025) and cited it at the Ministerial Meeting. At Paragraph 14, the Declaration states that UNRWA should “hand over its public-like services in the Palestinian territory to empowered and prepared Palestinian institutions.” By linking support for UNRWA with a Declaration that foresees its dissolution, states are effectively reformulating UNRWA’s constitution from a rights-based UN agency for Palestinian protection and services, into an interim state-building tool tied to the aspiration of Palestinian statehood. Through the New York Declaration, states are also endorsing the dismantlement of UNRWA upon Palestinian “state succession.” 

States must reject these frameworks that contravene Palestinian rights, UNRWA’s mandate and their obligations. Their support to UNRWA must be unconditional and ensure that UNRWA is fully enabled to deliver aid now and until return is implemented, and not contingent on the two-state framework.

Simultaneously, the majority of states continue to refuse to recognise the Israeli genocide in Gaza—despite the UN Commission of Inquiry’s findings, other experts reports and statements made by UN officials. The conditional financial support offered, still insufficient to sustain the Agency, not only violates international protection and laws on displacement but along with states’ refusal to impose sanctions, unseat the Israeli regime at the UN for violating UNRWA’s immunities and privileges, or compel it to lift its ban and obstruction on UNRWA, constitutes inaction that evades binding obligations to stop and prevent genocide.

Furthermore, states’ defunding of UNRWA constitutes complicity in genocide, as it has enabled famine, and the denial of international protection via the humanitarian and assistance UNRWA is mandated to provide. Both by withholding contributions and inaction, states align themselves with the long running US-Israeli campaign to delegitimize and dismantle UNRWA through defunding, demonization and replacement by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

In each of these forms—defunding, inaction, and conditional support—states are instrumentalizing UNRWA to evade their legal responsibilities and rendering themselves complicit in enabling Israeli genocide. States must not substitute financial pledges or rhetoric for decisive enforcement and continuation of the Agency’s mandate.

As the vote to renew UNRWA’s mandate approaches, BADIL and the GPRN call on states to:

1. Affirm that UNRWA’s existence and operations are contingent on the implementation of UNGA Resolution 194, not the implementation of the two-states framework; 
2. Uphold their obligations by renewing UNRWA’s mandate as it stands;
3. Provide full, unconditional political and financial support until the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights to return and self-determination are fully realized.