Dalal Mughrabi was a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon who led one of the deadliest suicide attacks in Israel's history: the March 1978 hijacking of a bus on Route 2 in which 38 Israelis were murdered, including 13 children.
Mughrabi is also a Palestinian national hero, a role model who is portrayed as a martyr who sacrificed herself on the altar of resistance to the occupation. Her name is commemorated at rallies and schools, and city squares are named after her. The terror attack is also presented as a story of national heroism in Palestinian Authority textbooks.
Despite widespread criticism of PA schoolbooks in recent years and the level of incitement in them, only five years ago an entire chapter was added about Mughrabi. In it, she is described as "the shahida [female martyr] who recorded in her struggle one of the images of heroism, and is therefore forever remembered in our hearts and minds."
These textbooks are also used in the schools of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. UNRWA operates over 700 schools in Palestinian refugee camps the world over, with 284 in Gaza alone (where over half the coastal enclave's children study).
Since the October 7 massacre, every day seemingly brings more stories about alleged connections between Hamas and UNRWA and its institutions in the Gaza Strip: from open and widespread identification with the terror group on social media by UNRWA workers or students who were educated by the organization, to the alleged involvement of some of them in actual terrorism.
Late last month, for instance, journalist Almog Boker reported that one of the released Israeli hostages said he had been held in the home of an UNRWA teacher – a father of 10 who gave him barely any food and medicine. (In response, UNRWA accused Boker of spreading a baseless claim, and demanded proof. Boker replied that he couldn't expose the identity of the hostage and called on the organization to investigate the matter.)
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit has revealed that dozens of rockets and other arms were found under UNRWA crates in private homes in the northern Gaza Strip.
Research institutes that have been tracking the organization for many years, meanwhile, revealed that many members of the Nukhba Force (the elite Hamas unit that led the massacre) and additional Hamas members who perpetrated the slaughter are graduates of UNRWA schools or employees of the organization.
One of the senior terrorists who was killed in the fighting in Gaza, Hamas' Economy Minister Jawad Abu Shamala, was even a teacher at an UNRWA school in Khan Yunis. Another UNRWA teacher in Gaza, Sara A-Dirawi, posted a video clip on her Facebook page on the day of the massacre, in which Hamas terrorists are seen walking around Israeli streets with their rifles drawn and firing at Israeli cars. She added a verse from the Quran that seemingly encourages the actions: "For we will surely come to them with soldiers that they will be powerless to encounter, and we will surely expel them therefrom in humiliation, and they will be debased."
But these are merely points on a continuum of far greater importance than any school textbook: how UNRWA, the UN refugee agency for Palestinian refugees, has become an organization that many now see as a key player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, serving entities that have no interest in seeing it resolved.
From 700,000 to 5.9 million refugees
There's nothing routine about UNRWA's existence and activity. The agency was established in 1949 after the Israeli War of Independence, in order to provide shelter, welfare and health services for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. A year later, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to handle all of the world's refugees. However, following pressure from Arab countries, the Palestinian refugees remained the sole responsibility of UNRWA – which to this day remains the world's only refugee agency dedicated to a specific population.
Dr. Einat Wilf, a former lawmaker and co-author of the book "The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace," has in recent years devoted her time to global activity on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and UNRWA's part in it.
"UNRWA was established as a temporary agency because the UN focused at the time mainly on refugees from Europe. There were about 700,000 Arab refugees from the war – they weren't called Palestinians yet – and it was assumed that UNRWA would take care of them by providing welfare services and employment in cooperation with the host countries, would settle all of them and close three to four years later – as happened with the temporary agency that arose at the same time to take care of Korean refugees after World War II."
But unlike Korea, things were more complicated in the Middle East. "The Palestinian refugees themselves refused to be absorbed into the new countries, because they understood that this would mean they had lost the war – and they haven't been willing to accept that to this day," Wilf says.
Not only did the refugees themselves refuse, but the Arab host countries also refused to integrate them, since any absorption would presumably have constituted an agreement about the outcome of the war and ran contrary to the refugees' right of return to Israel.
According to Wilf, UNRWA had good intentions initially. "There were budgets, good people, employment projects. People from the U.S. New Deal program [the 1930s program for rehabilitation after the Great Depression] came here – it was their idea for the Arab refugees to engage in development work in the Arab world."
If the mission of any refugee agency is to resettle people and end their refugee status, UNRWA has failed miserably at this. Over the years, there were changes and simplifications for the terms to receive refugee status and the eligibility of descendants to receive services from the agency. If at first only those who had lost their home and livelihood as a result of the 1948 war were considered refugees (with the definition later broadened to include their children), beginning in 1982, the right to be defined as a refugee was expanded to include every generation of descendants. In other words, even the great-grandchild of a refugee will also be considered a refugee.
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