Remember that a person didn‘t have to be a Palestinian, or a refugee to be classified as a Palestinian refugee.

Accurately counting the number of refugees that there were in 1948 has become much more important, and relevant today, when the Palestinian refugees include the children of a male Palestinian refugee, or the children that such a male Palestinian refugee adopted. In the roughly 75 years of increase in the number of Palestinian refugees, from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, count of 750,000 in the beginning, to today’s count of 5.9 million, means getting an accurate number of people at the start, has something of an exponential effect on the number today if the count included many people who shouldn’t have been included. Any error in counting the number of refugees results in a significant increase when the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren etc of people who should not have have been counted as Palestinian refugees are included. And looking back at what happened in the beginning, there are good reasons to think that this has happened.

For example, on 1 November, 1950, UNRWA Director Howard Kennedy, reported to the United Nations Ad Hoc Political Committee, 5th Session that:

a large group of indigent people totalling over 100,000. .. could not be called refugees, but . . . have lost their means of livelihood because of the war and post-war conditions . . . The Agency felt their need was even more acute than that of the refugees who were fed and housed.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

In November 1950, Kennedy referred to 

the 600,000 [Muslim] refugees,

although he had reported in May 1950 that UNRWA had distributed 860,000 rations, citing the hundreds of thousands of "hungry Arabs" who were not bona fide refugees but who claimed need.

The count of Palestinian refugees, as you’ll soon hear, was inflated for all sorts of reasons which I’ll now discuss.

Tag words: Palestinian refugee; United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees; UNRWA; UNRWA Director Howard Kennedy; United Nations Ad Hoc Political Committee, 5thSession; 1948 Arab Israeli War; Statistical Abstract of Palestine in 1944-45; Walter Pinner; How Many Arab Refugees: A Critical Study of UNRWA's Statistics and Reports; Disaster Relief Organization; Rony Gabay; A Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conflict: The Arab Refugee Problem; The Arab League; Joan Peters; From Time Immemorial – the Origins of the Arab Jewish Conflict over Palestine; Director of Field Operations for the United Nations Disaster Relief Project, W de St. Aubin; US Senator Gale McGee; US Senator Albert Gore; President Eisenhower; Secretary of State Christian Herter; Mideast Mirror; Arab News Agency of Cairo; Palestinian Mandate; King Abdullah; Eliyahu Kanovsky; Jordan, People and Politics in the Middle East; Prime Minister Hazza al-Majali; Saddam Hussein; the Gulf War; UNHCR;