The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, is following with concern the reports from the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon regarding attempts to search United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) schools, by higher UNRWA international directors and officers, in order to remove Palestinian national symbols and slogans from them, including the map of Palestine and the Palestinian flag. We consider this to be a blatant and dangerous violation of Palestinian national identity, and a continuation of a rejected political course aimed at eroding consciousness, erasing memory, and breaking the will of refugees in the camps of the shatat.

These measures are neither administrative nor educational; rather, they are a clearly hostile political act that aligns with U.S.–Zionist pressures seeking to strip the Palestinian refugees’ cause of its national liberation content, and to transform UNRWA schools into identity-stripped spaces that raise generations without memory and without belonging, in preparation for the liquidation of the right of return.

The Palestinian flag and all forms of expression of Palestinian national identity are not decorations on walls, but a living expression of the history of a people, memories of an ongoing Nakba, and promises of a right that does not expire with time. Any attempt to remove them constitutes a direct assault on the dignity of the refugees and on their right to express their national belonging within the camps, which were originally established as a result of the crime of their uprooting from their homeland.

We hold the UNRWA administration in Lebanon fully responsible for the consequences of these provocative policies, and warn of the danger of continuing along a path that intersects with normalization and liquidation projects and undermines what remains of trust between the refugees and the agency.

We call upon our organizations and supporters in Europe, North America, and South America to support and stand by the struggle of our people in the camps of Lebanon. We also call upon the masses of our people in the camps of Lebanon, the national forces, popular committees, and educational frameworks to confront these attempts firmly and in an organized manner, and to defend Palestinian national identity in schools and camps, considering this an inseparable part of the battle for return and liberation.

Our people, who have stood steadfast in the face of the Nakba, displacement, siege, and aggression, will not allow their schools to be transformed into tools for erasing their identity, nor will they accept any political guardianship over the consciousness of their children.

Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement