Pierre Krähenbühl, the Commissioner General for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), said on Tuesday 4 April that war-related trauma was often underestimated by the international community.
“The conflict in Syria has lasted longer than the Second World War (…). It is a massive thing for communities to live with this intensity of atrocity, what it means at human level”, he told an interview with EUROPE. Recently returned from Syria, he said that he had seen a “huge level of exhaustion in terms of health, but also psychologically”. “Under normal circumstances, the act of saving lives will always come first, but shock and trauma are still underestimated by the humanitarian community”, he regretted, adding that his office was working on it, but needed to make progress.
Palestinian refugees in Syria also face dual uncertainty over their futures. Of the 560,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria before the war, 440,000 of them are still there and 65% of them are displaced. Krähenbühl said that Palestinian refugees were living “for a second time with the trauma of displacement, from their place of residence, their home, their work”, having already had to leave the occupied Palestinian territories. “They don't know what tomorrow will bring. In the history of Palestinian refugees, when you abandon a home, you never return”, he added.
Although UNRWA has yet to develop psychological support services, it has developed many services for refugees since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict. Before the war, it mainly provided education services, as the refugees were self-supporting, but now UNRWA and its 3,800 local employees have to respond to the food and health needs of these Palestinian refugees. “95% of these 440,000 people are dependent on aid” from the office, in the form of cash, food or primary health care needs, he explained. “Whatever emergency work you can imagine, we do”, he added. UNRWA has launched an emergency appeal to raise $411 million for Syria this year, to pay for this emergency aid.
The agency is doing its best to continue its education actions, even though, of the 90 schools it run before the war, “70% of them are now unusable”, as they have been destroyed, damaged, made inaccessible by fighting or are now being used as shelters, Krähenbühl explained. However, pupils who are still able to attend school outperform students in other UNRWA schools throughout the region. And whereas there were just 20,000 pupils on the schools' books, after a year of conflict, there are now 66,000 of them.
Additionally, UNRWA on 30 March announced additional aid of €10 million from the EU for its programmes in Syria, including education, health, technical and vocational training, micro-finance and emergency cash assistance. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)