UNRWA school in Gaza
UNRWA school in GazaFlash 90

UNRWA schools in Gaza and Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria may not open next month for the new school year, said Sandra Mitchell, deputy head of the organization. The agency needs $101 million in order to open schools on time, she said at a press conference Monday.

"If funding does not arrive" soon, she said, 700 schools that serve Palestinians in Gaza, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and PA-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria will not open their doors. Some 500,000 students attend these schools, she said.

UNRWA schools have been accused of being "incubators of terror" in teaching radicalism, aside from being weapons storehouses for Hamas, as seen last summer when rockets were found at three different UNRWA facilities. After the first discovery of rockets at an UNRWA school, the organization's workers reportedly called Hamas to come remove them.

According to UN statistics the numbers of so-called "Palestinian refugees" - namely the descendants of the roughly 800,000 Arabs who left Israel in the 1948 War of Independence, and whose descendants uniquely "inherit" their refugee status - in Gaza stands at 1.3 million, in Judea and Samaria at 914,000, in Lebanon 447,000, 2.1 million in Jordan, and 500,000 in Syria.

While UNRWA was established specifically for "Palestinian refugees" and is separate from the UNHRC - which handles all other refugees, and unlike UNRWA actually seeks to resettle those it aids - no UN body was formed to aid the 850,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab lands after the establishment of the state of Israel.

Journalist David Bedein, head of the Center for Near East Policy Research, has revealed how UNRWA schools indoctrinate children in Gaza to create a "civilian army." He has also documented the symbiotic relationship between the agency and Hamas.