Aida, Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – Among the children playing in the street in the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank is 10-year-old Ahmad Damaseh, who dreams of being a doctor when he grows up.
He belongs to the fourth generation of the Damaseh family to live in this refugee camp since his ancestors fled the Nakba of Jerusalem's Deir Aban neighborhood 75 years ago, when some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to give step to the creation of the State. From Israel.
Central to Damaseh's dream is a United Nations agency that has since served Palestinian refugees in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and neighboring nations.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) provided the Damaseh family with their first tent in Aida.
It is responsible for 702 schools providing education to 500,000 children and students, according to Anwar Hammam, deputy director of the PLO's Department of Refugee Affairs. She provides aid to 400,000 people living in the Aida refugee camp.
At the heart of UNRWA's mission is the idea that it would support displaced Palestinians until they could return to their homes, something Israel has denied generations of Palestinians.
Israel has also set its sights on UNRWA, which is now on the brink of collapse as funding is withdrawn and more news headlines hint that Israel and the United States want to end its mandate.
After the Israeli government accused the organization of having links to those responsible for the attacks by the Qassam Brigades and other armed Palestinian fighters in southern Israel on October 7, many large donors and donor nations (which together provide more of 80 percent of UNRWA funding) have withdrawn their financial support.
Only a handful of countries, including Belgium, Norway, Ireland and Saudi Arabia, have committed to continuing funding. The largest donors, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain, have suspended funding entirely.
For now, Aida residents say, their dreams are on hold and possibly gone forever.
“No one else can manage the fields”
The Aida refugee camp, located between Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Jerusalem, is home to more than 8,000 Palestinian refugees, two schools for boys and girls, and a clinic that serves refugees from all the camps near Bethlehem.
For seven and a half decades, four generations of the Damaseh family have held out hope of returning to their original village.
The Damaseh have depended on UNRWA for food, healthcare and education over the years since the Nakba. Now, they are terrified of what will become of them if the agency is forced to cease all operations in the near future, as they have warned could happen.
“There is no Palestinian or international entity capable of taking responsibility for the camps, neither in education nor in health,” said Ahmad's father, Muhammad. Like other members of the community, he firmly believed that the cessation of funding to UNRWA is part of a broader plot against the Palestinians.
“As refugees, we know that there is a major political plan to end the existence of UNRWA, preventing the right of return. This is something we will not allow. “My son Ahmed will study at the Aida camp school until he returns to our village of origin,” he added defiantly.
If UNRWA disappears, they said, so will the dream of returning home. Instead, these camps are likely to be absorbed as cities under the authority of the broader Palestinian Authority.
While Ahmad's father is particularly concerned about the future of his son's education (and what that means for his dreams of studying medicine), his grandmother, Haleema Damaseh, 70, worries about health care services. .
Even before the war in Gaza began last October, services offered by UNRWA clinics had been dwindling, with only medical treatments and prescriptions for chronic illnesses available, Muhammad said. Even that will stop if UNRWA can no longer operate.
Her mother, Haleema, told Al Jazeera: “The UNRWA clinic has stopped providing me with, among other things, diabetes medications that I need. So my son buys it for almost $100 a month.”
He feared this would not be sustainable in the long term, especially with the severe economic crisis in the occupied West Bank that has taken hold due to repression in the occupied Palestinian territories since the war began.
This crackdown has taken the form of multiple roadblocks throughout the occupied West Bank, raids on camps and towns, and a strict curfew for residents. Employment has plummeted and prices have skyrocketed, as the Palestinian Authority struggles to pay salaries to public employees.
“The Palestinians will take a stand”
Saeed al-Azha, head of the People's Services Committee in Aida, part of the PLO's Department of Refugee Affairs, explained that the camps have been frequently attacked, and raids and arrests have increased recently, exacerbating refugee conditions. Palestinians.
He warned that conditions would only deteriorate further if funding for UNRWA operations were suspended.
“Palestinian refugees will fight against the loss of UNRWA,” he said. “They will take a stand in the five regions where the agency works: Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, in addition to the occupied West Bank.
“UNRWA has political importance as a witness to the Nakba and as a UN-mandated agency that no Palestinian wants to lose before the refugees gain their right to return to the homes from which they were displaced in 1948.”
UNRWA director of operations in the West Bank region, Adam Pollock, told Al Jazeera that the elimination of UNRWA and its services “would be a recipe for increasing tensions, especially considering that the youth population in the camps exceeds 30 percent”.
