Persons displaced as result of June 1967 and subsequent hostilities – Secretary-General report

Persons displaced as a result of the June 1967 and subsequent hostilities

Report of the Secretary-General

1. In its resolution 69/87 on persons displaced as a result of the June 1967 and subsequent hostilities, the General Assembly requested the Secretary-General, after consulting the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), to report on the progress made with regard to the implementation of the resolution. The present report is submitted to the Assembly pursuant to that request.

2. On 14 May 2015, the Secretary-General addressed notes verbales to the Permanent Representatives of Member States to the United Nations, including the Permanent Representative of Israel, in which he drew attention to his reporting responsibility under resolutions 69/87 and 69/89 and requested them to inform him of any action that their Governments had taken or envisaged taking in the implementation of the relevant provisions of the resolutions.

3. In connection with paragraph 5 of General Assembly resolution 69/87, the Secretary-General has obtained from the Commissioner-General of UNRWA the information available to him on the return of refugees registered with the Agency. As indicated in previous reports on the subject, the Agency is not involved in any arrangements for the return of refugees, nor is it involved in any arrangements for the return of displaced persons who are not registered as refugees. Its information is based on requests by returning registered refugees for the transfer of their UNRWA registration records from Jordan, Lebanon or the Syrian Arab Republic to the areas to which they have returned. The Agency would not necessarily be aware of the return of any registered refugees who did not request the transfer of their registration records. So far as is known to the Agency, from 1 July 2014 to 30 June 2015, 300 refugees registered with UNRWA returned to the West Bank and 182 to the Gaza Strip from places outside the occupied Palestinian territory. It should be noted that some of those may not have been displaced in 1967, but may have been displaced in earlier or later years or may be members of the family of a displaced registered refugee. Thus, taking into account the estimate given in paragraph 4 of the previous report (A/69/345), the number of displaced registered refugees who are known by the Agency to have returned to the occupied territories since June 1967 is about 36,110. The Agency is unable to estimate the total number of displaced inhabitants who have returned. It keeps records only of registered refugees and, as noted above, even those records, in particular with regard to the location of registered refugees, may be incomplete.

4. In connection with paragraph 3 of General Assembly resolution 69/87, the Secretary-General refers to the report of the Commissioner-General of UNRWA for the period from 1 January to 31 December 2014 (A/70/13) and to the previous reports of the Commissioner-General for accounts of the ongoing assistance provided by UNRWA to persons displaced and in need of continued assistance.

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