"Strangely, there are not only still 'Palestinian refugees' but the numbers have ballooned from some 700,000 in 1948 to a reported five million today. Part of the blame can be pinned on the Arab countries such as Lebanon and Syria that denied the refugees full rights, cynically using them as a tool against Israel. The Palestinian Authority, too, is guilty of a dirty double game – on the one hand claiming to represent the State of Palestine (already recognized by more than 135 countries) while on the other protesting their ongoing condition of being refugees.
Above all, the UN has contributed to the problem. When it uniquely granted the Palestinians 'perpetual refugee status,' a status that is passed down through the generations, it ensured the perpetuation of their plight (and Israel's). UNRWA is not the solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, it is the reason the problem still exists.
UNRWA was founded in 1949, ostensibly to help the Palestinians until the refugee problem would be solved. In the intervening decades it has become a big business, with a multimillion-dollar budget (some $300 million per annum courtesy of the US) and some 30,000 employees. It has no motivation to end the crisis.
All other refugees in the world, a heartbreaking 65.6 million in 2016, are handled by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The funding that could go to the UNHCR to help the Rohingya or the millions made homeless in the civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen or throughout Africa, is instead being spent on the great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees of '48. I can't help wonder whether the preferential treatment of the Palestinians over millions of their Muslim brethren is because they point a judgmental finger at Jews as the source of their sorrows..."