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

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 by 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.

When UNRWA began operations in 1950, it catered to nearly 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Today it serves nearly 6 million, in Gaza, the West Bank and neighboring Arab states. In Gaza, UNRWA’s services are in dire need, with almost the entire population relying on the aid group for basic necessities, including food, water, and hygiene supplies.

Daoud credits UNRWA for the education he received. “Despite the fact that we were very poor and destitute and refugees, our educational level as Palestinians was one