UNRWA began operations on 1 May 1950. Its first priority was to secure a reasonable standard of living for refugees by providing basic food rations, shelter and social welfare facilities. UNRWA’s first decade of work established the blueprint for its…
As noted in preceding articles, UNRWA was created in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. After fleeing or being expelled, over 900,000 Palestinians sought refuge in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, while others were displaced to the West Bank or…
Since DRC established an office in Lebanon in August 2004 we have identified around 3,000 individual non-ID refugees living in informal refugee camps in the south and the Beq’a valley. Unlike 1948 refugees, most are not settled in camps with…
Palestinians who arrived in Jordan in the immediate aftermath of the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 were granted Jordanian citizenship. As Jordanian citizens they and their descendants hold passports valid for five years, enjoy the right to vote and have full…
According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Revised Disengagement Plan of 6 June 2004,[1] the evacuation of Gaza means that there will be no permanent presence of Israeli security forces within Gaza. The Plan, however, also provides that “Israel will guard…
Palestinian refugees came to Iraq in several waves. The first group, some 5,000 persons from Haifa and Jaffa, came in 1948. Others arrived after the 1967 War and a third group arrived in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War…
The closure system in the West Bank refers to a series of restrictions placed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to control the movement of more than 2.3 million Palestinians living there. The Israeli government states that these closure measures…
It is estimated that the average lifespan of a refugee camp is 17 years, with such settlements developing gradually and usually organically from an emergency camp into what is fundamentally a new town. With this reality in mind, what role…
Humanitarian guidelines and standards for how to work with shelter in displacement have been formulated but in practice are often understood in too general terms and do not always take into account fast-changing and diverse conflict contexts. There is little…
As teachers in a school of architecture, we challenged our students to consider how our city – A Coruña, in north-west Spain – would cope if we had to accommodate a large number of refugees. We all felt that what…