UNRWA has been with me since birth, I cannot imagine a future without it
The UN body has been part of the lives of millions of Palestinian refugees. Post-genocide Gaza cannot cope without it. I do not recall my
The UN body has been part of the lives of millions of Palestinian refugees. Post-genocide Gaza cannot cope without it. I do not recall my first encounter with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) because I was just a baby. In the months after I was born, medics gave me my first vaccines in an UNRWA-run clinic. Since then, the agency has been present in almost every part of my life. It has become a core piece of my identity as a Palestinian refugee. And so, as I read in the news statements by US officials that UNRWA needs to be banned from Gaza, as I hear that Israel is preparing to raid an UNRWA compound in occupied East Jerusalem, which houses schools and clinics, or that the Israeli High Court is likely to reject an appeal against anti-UNRWA laws, my heart is aching. I realise it is difficult for non-Palestinians to understand why the attacks on UNRWA are such an emotional issue for us. For the rest of the world, it is just another humanitarian body providing services in a conflict zone. But for us, UNRWA is so much more. Let me explain. Fifty-two years before an UNRWA nurse gave me a measles shot in a medical facility in the Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza City, UNRWA employees approached my grandfather, Ahmed Abo Aisha, who was just six years old at that time. It was 1950, a year after UNRWA was created by the UN to deal with a refugee disaster it played an active role in creating. Two years earlier, during the Nakba of 1948, my grandfather and his family had fled on foot from their hometown of Bir al-Sabea, as Zionist militias advanced. My great-grandfather, Ibrahim Abo Aisha, a well-known livestock merchant, thought they were coming back, so he locked up the home, leaving behind title deeds, birth certificates, all his livestock and possessions.
As a result, the family had no documents to prove their existence. “Imagine, Nour, I didn’t know my real date of birth. When UNRWA came, they designed a certificate for me and wrote in it a random date of birth so that I could live with a documented existence,” my grandfather told me recently. Thanks to this document, my grandfather was able to obtain an official identity card issued by the Egyptians when he was 16. But ensuring he had an identity document was by far not the only thing UNRWA did for my grandfather. It issued his family a “kart al-moun” – a family registration card – that would serve as the only legal and political proof of their refugee status. The card allowed them to benefit from the various services UNRWA gradually set up. In the following months, UNRWA proceeded to build tent camps, accommodating hundreds of thousands of refugees who had been sleeping out in the open air. Little by little, it transformed what was an expanse of desert land around the historical city of Gaza into refugee camps: from Jabalia and Shati in the north, through Nuseirat, Bureij, Maghazi, and Deir el-Balah in the centre, and on to Khan Younis and Rafah in the south. It supplied each camp with schools and clinics to create a community for refugees. My grandfather was soon enrolled in a primary school run by UNRWA. When he had children of his own – including my father – he also enrolled them in an UNRWA school. By the time our generation came of school age, UNRWA had built and was running nearly 200 schools across the Gaza Strip. I watched as my two older sisters started school and wanted so badly to go, as well. I used to take their blue and white uniforms and put them on, as they laughed at me. When I turned five, it was finally my turn.
The BriefWire