ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the shortcomings of the international refugee regime and the application of human rights to the Middle East crisis. It focuses on the significance of withholding even the limited levels of available refugee protection from the Palestinian refugees. At least one in every four refugees in the world is a Palestinian, but they are the only group of refugees excluded from the Refugee Convention and the protection mandate of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). In removing Palestinian refugees from its central instrument, international refugee law has configured itself to sustain the marginalisation of the Palestinians through a combination of myths, conditionalities and strategies. The chapter argues that the Palestinian refugees have been singled out by the Refugee Convention, the Refugee Protocol and the Statelessness Convention for exclusion on the fiction that they are receiving protection elsewhere. The Refugee Convention was seen as possessing sufficient inbuilt provisions to exclude terrorists from the benefits of the Convention.
