The World’s Largest Palestinian Population

Jordan is home to 2.4 million registered Palestinian refugees. This represents roughly 40 percent of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’s (UNRWA) entire global caseload, and by some distance the largest concentration anywhere in the world. UNRWA is the UN agency responsible for providing education, health care, social services, and camp infrastructure to registered Palestine refugees.

Many have been in Jordan for three generations. Their grandparents arrived after the Nakba and the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948 or the Six-Day War of 1967. The generations born in Jordan since then hold Jordanian citizenship while carrying Palestinian identity documents. The question of where this population should permanently reside has never been formally resolved.

No Permanence

Jordan’s policy has been to provide enough to prevent a humanitarian crisis while stopping well short of permitting permanent settlement. That position appears to be driven less by cost than by politics, namely a fear carried by the Jordanian state since 1948 that permanent housing for Palestinians would amount to building a substitute homeland for a Palestinian state that was never created.

The Specter of the Alternative Homeland

East Bank Jordanians are the monarchy’s traditional support base. Many of them fear that permanently absorbing Palestinians into Jordanian society would reduce them to a demographic minority. They have also long held that building permanent housing for Palestinian refugees would, in effect, complete what 1948 started: turning Jordan into a substitute for the Palestinian state that was never created. This idea is not new. It originated among segments of the American and Israeli right in the 1980s, on the logic that if Israel will not make room for a Palestinian state, Jordan can. This is known as the watan badil anxiety: the fear that Jordan will become the Palestinians’ alternative homeland. It is not a fringe position. It has sat at the center of how Jordan has been approaching Palestinian settlement since 1948. To this day it shapes decisions at every level of government. In 2015, halted all urban shelter programs for refugees. Aid workers at the time attributed the move not to budget constraints but to political considerations, as improving housing in cities could create the impression that refugees were settling permanently. No official statement explained the decision in those terms.

What the Government will and will not build

Jordan spends an estimated $1 billion a year maintaining the infrastructure of refugee housing, with UNRWA coordinating upgrades across ten official sites. The terms of that arrangement, however, are carefully bounded. For example, refugees cannot build vertically, and the land cannot be purchased by them but belongs to the state. A resident can repaint a room. Adding one is not permitted. The same restraint runs through Jordan’s broader housing policy. A 2018 World Bank housing-sector analysis of Jordan recommended approaches that would avoid increasing public expenditure on refugee accommodation. A separate UN-Habitat proposal to subsidize mortgages for landlords willing to house refugee families was developed but never implemented at scale.

The Organizations Filling the Gap

UNRWA’s core budget for its operations in Jordan is $145 million, which sustains ten sites, 169 schools, and 25 health clinics. That figure is separate from – and much smaller than – UNRWA’s global emergency appeals. After donor countries suspended a combined $450 million from UNRWA’s total budget in the wake of the war in Gaza, some of which has since been restored, the agency was forced to cut services in Jordan by around 20 percent by early 2026.

Aside from UNRWA, much of Jordan’s NGO-driven housing capacity is built for the host community rather than for Palestinian refugees specifically. UN-Habitat’s Jordan Affordable Housing Programme, for example, was designed to expand affordable housing for lower-middle-income Jordanian families. It was financed largely through private developers and local banks rather than government subsidy. Roughly 27 percent of Jordanians report lacking access to affordable housing, a shortage that refugee arrivals have worsened by competing for the same limited stock. Units built under the program can ultimately be rented to refugee tenants as well as Jordanian ones, but its design target is the host population, not Palestinian residents. For Palestinian refugees specifically, NGO assistance runs mostly through cash grants directly provided to families. These help cover rent in the informal market rather than through the kind of construction or renovation programs that operate elsewhere in Jordan’s housing sector.

October 2023 and what Followed

Watan badil fear did not begin in October 2023, but the terrorist attacks of October 7th and the ensuing war in Gaza have amplified it considerably. Within days of the Hamas-led attack on Israel, Jordan’s King Abdullah II declared publicly that admitting Palestinian refugees from Gaza was a “red line” for Jordan. When President Donald Trump proposed in February 2025 that Jordan and Egypt absorb Palestinians en masse, with American aid equivalent to roughly 10 percent of the Jordanian state budget, Amman still refused.

Financial Challenges

For the Palestinian refugees already in Jordan, the financial situation has deteriorated sharply. Around 61,900 depend on UNRWA cash transfers to cover rent each month. Without those payments, UNRWA projects that poverty rates among Palestinian refugees in Jordan would climb from 80 to 93 percent. By early 2025, some 29,000 had already returned to Syria , a striking reversal, since these are Palestinian refugees rather than Syrian nationals. Syria had itself been producing refugees rather than receiving them until the fall of the Assad government in December 2024.

Al-Mahatta: A 2019 Pledge, a 2024 Demolition

In late 2024, Jordanian authorities demolished 25 homes in al-Mahatta, an informal Palestinian settlement in the historic heart of the city, to clear ground for a road project. Around 101 residents were displaced with minimal notice and compensation insufficient for covering alternative accommodation in the area. This was despite a 2019 government commitment that residents had understood to be a guarantee for their tenure. Human Rights Watch’s April 2025 report on the episode found that the gap between what was offered and what alternative housing costs was substantial. For the residents of al-Mahatta, the 2019 pledge proved to be worth little when a road development project came along.

No Guarantees

Jordan has accommodated 2.4 million Palestinians for decades now without appearing to fully integrate them. The watan badil anxiety that drove that approach did not begin in October 2023 and has not eased since. What has shifted is the cost of maintaining that position. UNRWA’s budget is shrinking. The cash transfers that kept tens of thousands of families in their rented homes are no longer guaranteed. Informal settlements, illustrated by the case of al-Mahatta, are not protected in light of other priorities of the state. The question of where people are meant to live has not gone away.