“Sixty-five percent of the refugees are under 25, are marginalized, desperate and frustrated by the lack of a just solution,” says Christofer Gunness, from UNRWA.
Regional vulnerability has always existed here but in recent years has exploded with the crisis in Syria and Iraq, the expansion of the Islamic State and instability and crises in countries such as Yemen, Libya, Egypt and others in the area.
In the case of the Palestinians, this vulnerability “is added to several other layers of vulnerability that were already there, because they are dispossessed and exiled for so long.”
“This year more than ever the Palestinian refugees do not feel they have a home, a safe place anywhere. And that is leading many to risk their lives and those of their children. They crawl on boats to escape their situation,” says Christofer Gunness, spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
“On paper it is very clear what has to happen: they have to give them a viable state and a just solution to their right of return,” which could, for example, mean that there is a pact so that there is compensation but that, in any case, “it must be a solution agreed by the parties”. Today there are more than five million Palestinian refugees registered with the UN.
According to Gunness, it is necessary for the international community to find a solution to the more than five million refugees that are trying to leave their own land due to war conditions and points out that thousands of them are being forced to undertake exile due to increased violence in the region.