UNRWA, the UN agency tasked with providing healthcare, education and loans to the descendants of Arabs who used to live in Israel, has come under fire recently because the head of the agency was caught extending favors to his girlfriend. The accusations caused the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium to suspend donations to the agency.

Past accusations of supporting terrorism and producing school textbooks which promoted antisemitism never generated such an outcry, perhaps because the Europeans viewed those reports as biased, coming from pro-Israel corners of the world.

But raw statistics as provided by UNRWA itself show the agency to be deeply flawed. Consider the following:

UNRWA staff grows faster than the population it serves.  From 2017 to 2018, the local staff at UNRWA grew by 3.0%, from 30,799 to 31,726, while the number of registered persons served by UNRWA grew by only 2.6%, from 5,869,733 to 6,021,510. There is no reason for a 70-year old agency to grow (hire local Palestinian Arabs) at such an aggressive level.

UNRWA keeps adding (manufacturing?) new Palestinians wards. The number of “registered persons” who are serviced by UNRWA include “registered refugees” which is defined as people who lived (or are descended from males who lived) in Israel between June 1, 1946 and May 15, 1948, together with “other registered persons” who might include wives of people who are registered refugees. (For clarity, the UN decided that a woman who marries a grandson of an Arab who used to live in Jaffa for a few months in the 1940’s, becomes entitled to free healthcare and education for life, as do all of her kids- even those from a previous marriage).

From 2017 to 2018, while the number of registered refugees in Gaza grew by 2.8%, the number of “other registered persons” grew by a whopping 48.4%! The refugee count in Gaza grew by 37,919 people from 1.35 million to 1.39 million, while the number of “others” grew by an insane 42,114 people, from 87,080 to 129,194. It is as though UNRWA in Gaza was officiating at 100 wedding ceremonies every single day to enroll more wards onto its ledgers.

These are figures supplied by UNRWA itself, not an external report which may have some qualitative bias.

UNRWA is a highly corrupt agency focused on self-preservation which wastes billions of dollars of global aid, as it actively undermines any chance for peace in the Arab-Israel conflict. That the Europeans would suddenly become “woke” because of the toxic environment at the top is more tragic than laughable.

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