Funding Cuts Deepen Hardship for Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon as UNRWA Trims Schools and Clinics

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are facing increasingly dire circumstances, as funding cuts and Israel's war deepen their hardship. Doumoua al-Baitan, who sat on the roof of a building in Beirut's Palestinian refugee camp of Bourj el-Barajneh, is one of them; like many Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, she was born and raised in this camp.

For decades, Palestinians in Lebanon have been supported by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. But funding cuts have impeded its ability to provide crucial aid, particularly since the Trump administration's decision in February 2025 to maintain a US funding freeze imposed the previous year.

Between the cuts and shortfalls, UNRWA has had to close or reduce the hours of schools, healthcare centres and clinics in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps. Palestinians say that alongside less work and less medical support, children are being crammed into overcrowded classrooms and the use and sale of illegal drugs has become more prevalent.

Al-Baitan, a divorced mother of four, said her children cannot retain what they are taught in class because of the overcrowding. She has started paying $200 a month — the same as her monthly rent — for after-school lessons for two of her children.

Since 1950, UNRWA has supported Palestinian refugees across the Middle East. Lebanon has 12 Palestinian refugee camps, where a large proportion of the country's approximately 230,000 Palestinians live. Palestinians first became refugees in Lebanon during the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were turned into refugees.

UNRWA's role in the camps includes education, healthcare, relief and social services, camp infrastructure and improvement, microfinance and emergency assistance. The majority of Palestinians in Lebanon are de facto stateless and do not have Lebanese citizenship. As a result, they are effectively banned from a number of professions, including medicine, law, engineering and pharmacy, making the community one of the most vulnerable in Lebanon.

UNRWA spokesperson Fadi al-Tayyar said in October that the agency needed around $70m to $80m more for 2026, a shortfall that has forced it to reduce service working hours by 20 percent since February.

Education has been hit directly. Many schools have been forced to reduce the school week from five days to four for the 2026-27 academic year. More than 35,000 pupils attend 58 schools, with 15 additional classrooms in the northern Beddawi camp in Tripoli. Residents of Bourj el-Barajneh said most of the camp's schools had shut down and students were being crammed into classrooms of 40 or more.

A monthly report by the Jafra Foundation, a nonprofit supporting vulnerable communities in Lebanon including Palestinian refugees, said the shortfall threatens the education, healthcare, water and sanitation services UNRWA provides and exacerbates pressures on millions of Palestinian refugees in its five areas of operation: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

Healthcare shows the same picture. UNRWA's June 2026 emergency report found that of 26 primary healthcare centres and clinics, only 15 were operational; 11 had shut down.

Some refugees face compounding difficulties. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are undocumented. An estimated 19,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria also live in Lebanon, many of whom fled during that country's 13-year war. A policy change in Lebanon in May 2024 halted residency renewals for many Palestinians from Syria, increasing their exposure to detention and making legal employment, education registration and civil matters harder.