humanitarian actors, while retaining core functions like education and health which are, paradoxically, the most expensive. This creates a structural contradiction: retain the hardest services to sustain, but outsource the rest, creating fragmentation without functionality. Yet the deeper implication lies in the political logic of fragmentation: transferring responsibilities strips UNRWA of its identity as the only active UN body ensuring the international community’s responsibilities toward Palestinian refugees’ rights. The refugee body becomes scattered across multiple actors, erasing the unified legal status that ties them to a historical injustice and future reparation and restitution. It reproduces imperialist control, while shifting the cost burden of oppression. By embedding service reduction into permanent policy, this scenario would institutionalize UNRWA’s collapse. It masks withdrawal in the language of efficiency, while erasing the connection between services and Article 11 of Resolution 194. It is, in essence, UNRWA without UNRWA—a shell of operations emptied of political meaning, delivered through a colonial veneer of cost-benefit analysis. The Assessment recognizes its own fallacy, stating “This scenario would not fundamentally resolve the financial gap and would carry risks of service gaps and loss of institutional memory, as well as resistance from stakeholders.”23 4.3. Scenario Three: “Institutionalizing collective responsibility” - Collapse by Co-optation This scenario proposes “institutionalized collective responsibility” through a new Executive Board composed of major donors. It does not offer any meaningful reform as this solution is partial and contingent on the political will and preferences of states, and, as the report itself 23 United Nations. Report to the Secretary-General: UNRWA Strategic Assessment, 2025, 24. 9