At present, the UNRWA runs about 700 schools for half a million Palestinian refugee students. Plans are now afoot to create a central parliament for all the nearly 700 UNRWA schools. This poses a huge challenge since the schools are dispersed across countries and locations where Palestinian refugees live: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Sujata Mehta, secretary (west) in the ministry of external affairs, lived in Gaza and knows issues related to Palestinian refugees first hand, better than anyone else in this government. It is unfortunate that with television screens full of heart-rending images from Syria and of five million Syrian refugees, the plight of 5.2 million Palestinian refugees — the world’s longest major refugee problem — is in danger of being overlooked.

Source: The Telegraph September 06, 2016 21:22 UTC