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
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