A Documentary on UNRWA Opens Days Before the UN Votes

A documentary about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, known as UNRWA, made its United States debut in New York on Tuesday night, according to an account published from Jerusalem on 2 December 2025. The screening came as the UN General Assembly prepared to vote later that month on whether to renew the agency's mandate.

The film, UNraveling UNRWA, was produced by Zygote Films and brought together Palestinian, Arab, Israeli and international voices, among them former UNRWA staff and Palestinian refugees, to examine the agency's history since its founding in 1949 and its role today. Those interviewed include Scott Anderson, a former head of UNRWA operations, the agency's former legal adviser James Lindsay, and the former Knesset member Dr Einat Wilf. “The film is the story of UNRWA,” its director, Duki Dror, told The Press Service of Israel. “It opens something you haven't seen, ignored or understood about the conflict: the story of the refugees in 1948 and their demand for a return to nowadays Israel.”

The argument the film makes

Dror's central claim is about institutional capture. “One of the things the documentary reveals is the complacency of UNRWA with whoever is in control of Gaza,” he said. After Hamas took over there in 2007, he argued, the agency had to work with the authority on the ground; he cited Lindsay describing the process as “clientitis,” in which individuals come to identify with their hosts. Behind that identification, the account said, lies the fact that 99 per cent of UNRWA's employees are Palestinian. “You can't rely on the neutrality of UNRWA. And neutrality is the core idea of UN agencies,” Dror said.

He also argued that by encouraging the Palestinian right of return, the agency prolongs the crisis it exists to relieve and undermines the two-state solution it says it supports.

Why UNRWA is not like other refugee agencies

Palestinian refugees are the only refugee population with a dedicated UN agency; everyone else falls under the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. UNRWA was established in December 1949 by General Assembly resolution 302(IV), its mandate is renewed in three-year cycles by the Assembly, it now has more than 5.9 million people registered as refugees and it employs over 30,000 staff, the overwhelming majority of them locally recruited Palestinians, according to a reference account of the agency. The same account records that Israel's parliament passed legislation in October 2024 barring the agency's operations in the country, which took effect in January 2025, and that in October 2025 the International Court of Justice found Israel had not substantiated its allegation that a significant part of UNRWA's staff belonged to Hamas or other armed factions.

Dror drew a contrast with a body created at almost the same moment. “There was another refugee agency created around the same time called UNKRA,” the UN Korean Restoration Agency, he said, which cared for 1.3 million refugees from the Korean War and shut down in 1958 after five years. He said fewer than 100,000 Palestinian refugees from 1948 are still alive, and that if compensation is discussed, the 800,000 Jews driven out of Arab countries belong in the same conversation.

The vote that followed

The General Assembly voted on 5 December 2025 to extend UNRWA's mandate by three years. Israel and the United States were among ten states voting against, alongside Argentina, Fiji, Hungary, North Macedonia, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Tonga, with fourteen abstentions, according to The Jerusalem Post.

The film's route to release

UNraveling UNRWA won the Investigative Documentary Award at the 2025 Haifa International Film Festival, whose catalogue entry lists it as a 90-minute Israeli-German co-production by Zygote Films and Beetz Brothers in Hebrew, English and Arabic. A production release issued in November 2025 listed screenings in Tel Aviv and near UN headquarters in New York, and festival selections in Atlanta, Paris and Toronto through 2026. Reinhardt Beetz, founder of Beetz Brothers Film Production, said the film “gives decision makers the insight to judge whether UNRWA should continue, be reformed, or shut down.”

What is not settled here

The film is an argument, and the article reports it as one: the claims about UNRWA's neutrality and its effect on the conflict are the filmmakers' and their interviewees', not findings of fact. Lindsay, for his part, said the documentary makes “a genuine effort to show both the good that UNRWA has done, and in some cases still does,” as well as its political function. UNRWA's own response to the film was not included, and no figure was given for the film's budget or funding.