The Plight of Palestinian Refugees, Explained

Months into the war between Israel and Hamas, the plight of the “largest stateless community worldwide” is receiving greater attention.

Since the start of the conflict, sparked by Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 assault on Israel, the Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip has surpassed 20,000 and about 1.9 million have been forced to flee their homes and relocate within the enclave.

Displacement is all too familiar to Palestinians. Many fled their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war in a forced migration known in Arabic as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” After the establishment of Israel, many sought temporary shelter in the Jordan-controlled West Bank and the Egypt-controlled Gaza Strip. Thousands fled once again after the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel captured control of the territories.

“I think up until this current conflict, it has kind of been a forgotten issue,” says Kelsey Norman, a fellow for the Middle East and director of the Women’s Rights, Human Rights and Refugees Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “It's seen as this just unresolvable displacement, ongoing for multiple generations without an end in sight.”

How Many Palestinian Refugees Are There? 

Today, there are about 6 million Palestinian refugees scattered across three countries, the West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip. The United Nations defines Palestinian refugees as people “whose normal place of residence was Palestine” between June 1, 1946 and May 15, 1948, and “who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Descendants from the male line are also eligible for registration.

Because that conflict occurred before the establishment of the U.N.’s 1951 Refugee Convention, Palestinian refugees are not typically served by the U.N.’s official refugee agency but by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, according to a Migration Policy Institute analysis co-authored by Norman and two others. The agency began operations in 1950 and served about 750,000 Palestinians at the time – and that number has ballooned since. UNRWA does not resettle Palestinian refugees, but it provides other services such as education and health care to refugees across five separate locations.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, however, can designate Palestinians as refugees, but only when they are outside UNRWA’s jurisdiction, according to reporting by Voice of America. When someone is defined as a refugee, they get access to assistance from states or countries, the U.N. refugee agency and other organizations. Obtaining that status means a state or country specifically “will protect the person against refoulement, permit the person to remain on the territory and provide access to humane standards of treatment,” according to the U.N.

What Countries Take the Most Palestinian Refugees?

“Palestinians are everywhere,” Norman says. “They’re in the U.S. They’re in Western countries. They're in the Gulf – they're all over. But it's really only in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, West Bank and Gaza where you have UNRWA operating, where you have the sort of structure in place to deal with those Palestinians that do have refugee status.”

With nearly 2.4 million registered Palestinian refugees – close to half of the total of all Palestinian refugees – Jordan is home to the largest number, followed by Syria (about 584,000) and Lebanon (about 491,000), according to the agency’s 2023 estimates. In Jordan, about 20% of its population are Palestinians and many of them have full citizenship.

Palestinians by Country: A Visual Look

The remaining approximately 2.5 million Palestinian refugees are located in the territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, with the majority living in the former. About a third of the total have historically lived in 58 recognized Palestinian refugee camps, according to the U.N., and the West Bank is home to the most camps. The rest live in and around the cities and towns of the three host countries and in two territories.

Are There Palestinian Refugees in the U.S.? 

The United States has welcomed a varying number of Palestinian refugees over recent years. The country has already admitted 10 Palestinian refugees through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in the first two months of fiscal year 2024 – with eight resettled in Illinois and two in Georgia – and processed 56 throughout fiscal year 2023. During an early November 2023 meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Secretary of State Antony Blinken “made clear that Palestinians must not be forcibly displaced,” according to the State Department.

What Are the Living Conditions of Palestinian Refugees?

Indeed, Palestinian refugees’ rights and circumstances vary depending on where they live, analysts say.

“It's a mixed bag as far as how they've been treated,” notes Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow and director of the Program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs at the Middle East Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank. “And it's mixed depending on the country and the jurisdiction, but also mixed over time. So the treatment today is not necessarily what it was 20, 50, 60 years ago.”

How Are Palestinian Refugees Treated in Jordan?

It could be argued that Jordan not only hosts the most refugees, but also has gone the furthest toward upholding the principles established by Arab states in 1965, which held that Palestinians should have rights “basically” equal to citizens in host countries, Norman says. About three-quarters of Palestinians hosted there are Jordanian citizens and “fairly integrated into its society and economy,” according to her Migration Policy Institute article. But Jordan has also tried to roll back some of Palestinian refugees’ rights and there have been different hierarchies over the years depending on, for example, one’s gender and when they came, she adds.

How Are Palestinian Refugees Treated in Syria?

In Syria, Palestinian refugees have not been able to become citizens but have had access to employment, health care and education opportunities. That included special scholarships for refugee students, Elgindy notes. But the humanitarian situation for refugees there has been challenging since the 2011 civil war, with several camps being nearly destroyed and more than 120,000 Palestinians fleeing to other countries.

How Are Palestinian Refugees Treated in Lebanon?

Refugees face challenges in Lebanon, where they also cannot gain citizenship and have “very limited access to public health care, education or the formal economy,” according to the institute. Palestinians born there acquired access to some employment opportunities in recent years, but still face other roadblocks, such as isolation and restrictions on their right to work and own property.

“Lebanon has been quite draconian in the kinds of restrictions placed on Palestinian refugees,” Elgindy adds.

How Are Palestinian Refugees Treated in Egypt?

Egypt, which lies just south of Israel and the Gaza Strip, doesn’t host any Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA. About 50,000-100,000 Palestinians do live in Egypt but mostly act as an “invisible community,” as Norman and a co-author noted in a recent piece for Inkstick.

The smaller number is tied to Egypt’s complicated history with Palestinian refugees. They were allowed into Egypt starting in 1948 and arrived in larger waves years later, but after the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the assassination of a government official reportedly by a pro-Palestinian faction around the same time, Egyptian laws were changed to remove Palestinians’ right to residency and exclude them from state services, according to the Inkstick article.

“The world system that we live in is one where your rights are derived from your nationality,” says Anne Irfan, a lecturer and expert in displacement with a focus on Palestinian refugee history and the modern Middle East at University College London in the United Kingdom. “And without any need to protect your rights, you're fundamentally vulnerable.”

Can Palestinians Leave the Gaza Strip Now?

As the conflict rages on, very few Gazans have been able to leave the territory and cross into Egypt – the only exit point at the moment. And because they “truly are trapped,” they have difficulty getting visas, says Albert Mokhiber, an attorney with a background in immigration at the Washington, D.C.-area law firm Mokhiber & Moretti.

“Under the best of times, it takes an extremely long period to get to that stage,” Mokhiber says, referring to Palestinian refugees getting a referral to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. “And now we're in the worst of times.”

There’s also the matter of which countries, if any, would be willing to take in Palestinians. Egypt’s more recent reluctance, for example, is related to former President Mohammed Morsi’s suspected ties to Hamas. The organization designated as a terrorist group by many countries is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was Morsi’s political party. When President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi came to power in 2014, there was a “demonization of anything to do with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt” and Palestinians from Gaza are “tied up with that,” Norman says.

El-Sissi himself said in October that he rejected the idea of Palestinians being displaced, NPR reported, and added that the war was in part “an attempt to push the civilian inhabitants to ... migrate to Egypt.” And Jordanian King Abdullah II said directly around the same time, “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt,” according to the Associated Press.

Lebanon and Syria also are unlikely to take in more Palestinians refugees, Irfan says, noting that many of these Arab states have already taken in large numbers of Palestinians over the years and could say they “don’t have the capacity to take in any more.”

In addition to the more logistical reasons, she adds there is a “deep suspicion” that what’s happening in the Gaza Strip is “cover for a second ‘Nakba,’” referencing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the late 1940s.

“None of these states want to be complicit in that,” Irfan notes.

Asked whether there’s the possibility that these countries simply don’t want the responsibility of caring for more Palestinian refugees, Norman, of Rice University, says “that certainly plays into it.” This especially applies to Egypt, given the country’s history with regard to Palestinians.

“I think there's both that historic context of not wanting to sort of be the ones to actually deal with the Palestinian issue in terms of physically hosting people,” Norman says. “But then there's also Egypt’s politics around immigration and refugees that are not just Palestinians now.”

But, she adds, the messy politics of hosting Palestinian refugees extends beyond Egypt.

“Name a country where it's not going to be politically contentious,” Norman says.

Julia Haines contributed to reporting.