Jordan: Palestinian refugees struggling amid UNRWA funding cuts | UNRWA News

Amman, Jordan – In Jordan, Ali is a foreigner on the Gaza Strip. But outside, he is considered a Jordanian.

“How?” asks the 35-year-old. “I’m stuck in the middle; not here, not there ”.

Although he was born and raised in Jordan, Ali has no Jordanian nationality. His ID card states that he is a Palestinian on the Gaza Strip, at the hands of his grandfather, who fled the territory during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

A small plastic card is the only indicator that Ali is “foreign”; it is a label that limits almost every aspect of his life, from his job to the car he drives to the nationality of his children. He studied electrical engineering, but was unable to get a job in the field, working in a medical laboratory in Amman performing COVID-19 tests. He says he can’t vote, pays more than four times his driver’s license and passport fees, and has to go through a lengthy security clearance process before buying an apartment.

“Life goes on,” the father of the two children told Al Jazeera. “But you spend your whole life looking for another nationality, looking for a better one. For your children. I don’t want my children to live in the same way I live. ”

“If you think I’m Jordanian, give me full citizenship,” he said. “If you think I’m in Palestine, return me to Palestine.”

“Think Chronic Funding”

When the West Bank came under Jordanian administrative control in 1950, its residents were entitled to Jordanian citizenship. This left Palestinians outside the Gaza Strip, which was under Egyptian rule, Jawad al-Anani, a former Jordanian labor minister, told Al Jazeera. In the 1967 war, those fleeing the Israeli-occupied West Bank were neighbors of Jordan, not those fleeing the Gaza Strip. When Jordan severed administrative ties with the West Bank in 1988, people originally living in Jordan’s pre-1950 lands retained full citizenship rights, while Gaza residents remained foreigners, al-Anani said.

For these Palestinian refugees without citizenship in Jordan, nearly 175,000 who were forcibly relocated from Gaza in 1967 and another 18,000 who fled the war-torn Syrian regions, public benefits are almost non-existent, said Widian Othman, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. ).

This leaves UNRWA – a funded and low-income agency – with its only support network. In Jordan, UNRWA runs 161 schools for nearly 120,000 students, 25 health centers and provides food and funding to about 60,000 of the most vulnerable Palestinian refugees, essential for non-Jordanian nationals, Othman said.

A UNRWA donor conferenceIt was held in Brussels in mid-November, leaving UNRWA spokeswoman Tamara Alrifai with about 40 percent of the funds requested from the agency.

“UNRWA’s chronic underfunding has caused tremendous distress to the agency, staff and the refugee community,” Alrifai said. “UNRWA has prevented it from being able to truly upgrade and modernize its services.”

The UN agency provides services to 5.7 million Palestinian refugees, mostly those who were forcibly relocated from Palestinian towns, villages and cities in 1948 and 1967 and ended up in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

About 40 percent of these refugees live in Jordan, according to UNRWA data.

“Palestinian refugees are facing the oldest unresolved conflict in the region, which is playing against them, the fatigue of donors and the slow erosion of their status and history,” Alrifai said.

UNRWA delays wages, reduces benefits

UNRWA chief commissioner Philippe Lazzarini warns 28,000 workers last month he could not pay his November salary on time.

Nearly 90 UNRWA staff members are Palestinian refugees, according to Alrifai.

The director of the UNRWA school at al-Baqa’a, the largest refugee camp in Palestine, Jordan, said teachers were frustrated.

“Everyone has families, bills, loans,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that he had made an effort to pay for gas for half an hour’s daily commute from the Gaza camp. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the UNRWA clause banning employees from speaking to the media.

The principal stated that four of the 28 teachers at the school had stopped attending because they did not receive a salary. In a crowded facility, where each class has nearly 50 students, such an absence disrupts the education of hundreds of children, he said.

The delay in wage payments came three days before a sit-in and a strike in November alone, in protest of UNRWA’s failure to pay and pay benefits to current and retired workers, according to a statement from Jordan Labor Watch.

“We feel pressure because UNRWA wants to reduce or stop its services,” said Mohanad, a teacher at al-Baqa’a Camp, who preferred to use only his name.

Although November salaries were paid last week, Mohanad feared that December salaries would be delayed again.

Increasing population, reducing budget

UNRWA has been in operation for 72 years. The tents that once housed Palestinian refugees have been replaced with rudimentary concrete houses, as the harsh conditions of the land lease force them to grow the camp, not to evict them.

The camps now look like overcrowded, overcrowded cities; a maze of concrete houses for generations of families.

In the flooded Al-Baqa’a camp, more than 129,000 refugees live in an area of ​​1.4 square kilometers (0.54 square miles).

“The number of people is increasing, but services are declining,” Mohanad said.

He noted that UNRWA provided students with school uniforms, books, stationery, meals, and some vitamins, but that these services are not currently available.

Meanwhile, overcrowded classrooms and understaffed staff have left little room for schools to follow any protocols to protect against the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s no coronavirus here,” Mohanad said sarcastically.

Othman, a UNRWA spokesman in Jordan, said the financial shortage meant that the agency could not hire staff and that its operations were being carried out with less capacity.

Garbage is piled up outside the Gaza camp. Beyond the rubble, the photo shows large apartment buildings and mountain hills – a scene against what lies within the perimeters of the camp. [Hanna Davis/Al Jazeera]

Ahmad Hamada al-Bashetee grew up in what is now called the Gaza Camp, one of the poorest of the 10 Palestinian refugee camps run by UNRWA in Jordan.

“The cleaning service here has gotten worse,” he said. “The site is very compact, requiring 24 hour cleaning services. But the cleaners only come in the morning. ‘

Al-Bashet also noted that there are long waits for health centers managed by UNRWA, which are dependent on the high cost of public health services without Jordanian nationality.

“There are problems with health centers,” he said. “As the population has grown, health centers have remained the same size. There are too many people. ‘

Under political attack

The West Bank and Gaza Strip have been occupied by Israel for more than 50 years, prolonging the suffering of Palestinian refugees living in poor conditions in camps in neighboring countries.

“UNRWA’s legitimacy is being severely challenged and it is under intense political motivation to undermine its added value in an attempt to undermine the rights of Palestinian refugees,” said Alrifai, a spokesman for UNRWA.

In 2018, former US President Donald Trump cut the entire U.S. aid budget to UNRWA. Although aid was recovered under the Biden administration, it was offset by a “sharp drop” in funding for several countries, including the United Kingdom and the Gulf states, al-Rifaik said.

Critics of UNRWA say that host nations must bear the burden of absorbing them.

“It’s very rare how 50 years later, the people of Gaza are the only Palestinians who can’t get Jordanian nationality,” al-Bashet said.

There is a fear among Jordanians that if you extend citizenship to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Jordan will become an “alternative homeland” to Palestine, former Labor Minister al-Anani said.

Today, about half of Jordan’s population is of West Bank and Palestinian descent, al-Anani said. However, he said the estimate was “crude” and added that the government did not maintain an accurate count of those of Palestinian origin.

“UNRWA will continue to provide protection and assistance to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East until a just and lasting solution to their situation, which is a political solution that includes them,” Alrifai said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, UNRWA’s services were even more critical, given the overcrowded conditions in the camp, poor infrastructure and rising unemployment rates.

Al-Bashet has been out of work for more than seven months; its ambiguous legal status presents extreme difficulties.

“Employers ask me if the first thing this is is if I’m Jordanian,” he said.

Her refugee status – although she has never been trampled on the Gaza Strip – has also hampered her personal life and dream of settling in, among other things, when she tried to marry a woman she met at a university where she was a Jordanian citizen.

“When I asked for this woman’s hand to marry, her family refused me because I am a Gazan,” she recalls. “They said, ‘You don’t have citizenship, you don’t have health insurance, so you don’t have the resources to help our daughter.'”