UNRWA employs 30,000 people and receives an annual operating budget of $500 million, 17 percent of which comes directly from the United States. It maintains its own schools, health clinics and welfare/social services departments and microfinance and microenterprise assistance. Although more than half of UNRWA's funding goes toward the maintenance of its Education Programme, there is every reason to believe that a self-perpetuating economy has sprung up in other sectors of the refugee society. Lindsay identifies as a key trend, "The conflict between UNRWA and its donors over the politicization of relief, namely, the insistence (by host governments and refugees) on the provision of relief rations to all refugees, including those sufficiently well-off to buy their own food supplies. Such demands conveyed a sense of entitlement to relief based on status rather than need."

Fewer than 200 of UNRWA's staff are ‘internationals', the overwhelming majority being Palestinian refugees who in effect maintain their own bureaucracy. And despite strict guidelines that govern the conduct of an aid organisation, the agency has often involved itself tendentiously in the Arab-Israeli conflict, for instance, allowing its staff to attend the Palestine National Congress in Jerusalem in 1964, where the PLO was founded.  The agency's Siblin Vocational Training Centre outside Sidon, Lebanon, was for years during the Lebanese civil war operated by the PLO. And following Hamas's violent coup in Gaza in 2007, UNRWA openly protested standing US and EU policy, which considered Hamas as a terrorist organisation, and insisted that the Islamist party be "encourage[d]" and "engage[d] with."  As late as May 2009, the agency's current Commissioner-General Karen AbuZayd went on the Iranian state-controlled Press TV to declare that Hamas was "free from corruption" and "more popular than ever."

Given these conditions, UNRWA's self-justifying mandate seems inevitable. Its singular definition of refugee as a status-based rather than needs-based individual has exacerbated the broader Palestinian refugee crisis in two ways; first, by failing to rescind status upon resettlement; and second, by allowing refugee status to pass from one generation to the next, ad infinitum.

Given the primacy in aid provision and development in Palestinian population centres enjoyed by UNRWA for nearly 60 years, it has to some extent played a role in the refusal of host countries - particularly Lebanon - to admit their Palestinian contingents into wider society and grant them full rights. 

So long as the relevant United Nations agency remains ideologically driven to maintain Palestinian refugee status in order to keep the ‘right of return' to what is now Israel on the table, progress for third and fourth generation Palestinians living in Lebanon will continue at a snail's pace for the foreseeable future.