Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"This was not true for those 1 million Palestinian Arabs who had fled or been driven across the boundaries of the newly established state of Israel in 1948, chiefly into Jordan. So dire was their plight—they were virtually destitute, their presence dragged down local living standards, and diseases were easily transmitted—that within another year the General Assembly felt compelled to set up what would soon be the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. . . . the planners thought they were dealing with a temporary problem; . . . But the obstructionism of the host governments toward UNRWA workers and their resistance to domestic integration programs for the refugees (preferring to keep the Palestinians in camps) has been matched only by the intransigence of successive Israeli governments against the idea of the Arabs returning to their family lands. With the numbers increased by the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, and with the demographic explosion in the refugee camps—by 1994 the UNRWA was providing essential services to more than three million people . . . " [Kennedy: Parliament of Man, Kindle Edition, Location 2500-08]