Deputy Minister Gila Gamliel on Monday called to dismantle the refugee camps for Palestinian Authority Arabs in Arab countries and disband UNRWA as an organization which perpetuates the ‘Palestinian refugees.’

“International discourse relates to two types of refugees: one type, which is enshrined in the UN Convention, applies to all the world's refugees and states that a refugee is a person who is outside the country of his citizenship due to a founded fear of persecution and that he cannot or does not want to return to that country because of that,” she said, adding, “In this context it is important to distinguish between refugees and immigrant workers and infiltrators. The definition of refugee status is granted only to the person himself and not to his descendants.”

“The second type of refugee is the type invented by UNRWA,” she added. “According to this artificial definition, those who UNRWA calls by the misleading name ‘Palestinian refugees’, are people who lived in Israel from June 1946 to May 1948 and lost their homes or livelihoods as a result of Israeli -Arab conflict. The UNRWA refugee definition applies also to the spouses of those ‘refugees’ and their descendants so that instead of their number being reduced over the years, it has grown from about 700 thousand in the 1950s to about 50 million today.”