UNRWA director claims Palestinian refugee status would continue if @UNRWA ends.

[duluxe]

Al Jazeera interviewed UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini last week outside the Munich Security Conference, and he told a whopper of a lie:

Interviewer: Are there plans being made for a Plan B if if UNRWA wasn't there or is there not a plan B?

Lazzarini: Well, if UNRWA cannot operate anymore we will have to go back to the General Assembly. Now I have also warned the member states, please do not make any mistake: if we are unable to provide basic services to the Palestine refugees they will not lose their refugee status, and if they do not lose the refugee status, I mean, there will be more pressure on issues related to return or resettlement.

OK, let's read the Refugee Convention, article 1D:

This Convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance.

This is the UNRWA exception to which refugees get protected by the Refugee Convention.

When such protection or assistance has ceased for any reason, without the position of such persons being definitively settled in accordance with the relevant resolutions adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, these persons shall ipso facto be entitled to the benefits of this Convention.

This says that as long as UNRWA exists, Palestinians get protection from UNRWA, not the UNHRC like the rest of the world.

If UNRWA no longer exists or cannot provide protection for any reason, then Palestinians who are refugees would be protected by the UNHRC - and therefore have to follow the UNHRC eligibility requirements for being defined as refugees, which would exclude nearly all of the Palestinians that UNRWA considers "Palestine Refugees" today.

This is international law - an international law that Lazzarini chooses to ignore.

Lazzarini also gave a press conference in Munich, and see how he pretends to care about international law there in context of Trump's suggestion to relocate Gazans:

The plan talks also about forcible displacement of Gazans from their homeland which would be totally contrary to International laws.

But if they are living in their homeland, then they are not refugees - under international law! The Refugee Convention says this explicitly that a refugee must be "outside the country of his former habitual residence."

UNRWA continues to play fast and loose around its mandate, claiming simultaneously that Palestinians under UNRWA protection are both refugees and residents of their homeland. The two statements cannot be both true under any definition of refugee.

It is a shame that no reporter at the press conference seems to be knowledgeable enough to point out the contradictions.