UNRWA was established by the UN in December 1949, as an adjust to the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), with a short-term mandate to provide humanitarian relief for Palestinian refugees forced from their homes and villages in 1948. Today, UNRWA is the sole international body serving Palestinian refugees and is crucial to their well-being as well as to the realisation of their right to return and restitution. This paper focuses on the tensions stemming from the fact that UNRWA does not have an official mandate to protect refugee rights, and beyond its relief work, UNRWA does not recognise Palestine refugees as invested with rights. The paper examines this tension, its implications and its impact on a refugee community, by taking the case of UNRWA’s reconstruction of Jenin refugee camp. Relying on fieldwork I conducted on the reconstruction of the camp, the paper analyses UNRWA’s humanitarian intervention. The paper focuses on the impact that the lengthy process of negotiations with UNRWA over its humanitarian vision, its notion of “human development”, had on the camp committees and the cohesion of national forces in the camp, drawing attention to the forms of professionalization, depoliticisation that this introduced, fragmenting the representatives of the camp. While emphasising the benefits of UNRWA’s rehabilitation of the camp, the paper underscores the limits of its humanitarian perspective, arguing that its inability to see the actors as situated, and endowed with overlapping rights, means that while its humanitarian operations mitigate the displacement caused by the Israeli invasion of the camp, its operations, however, also end up re-embedding the community in the structures of the occupation and its modes of violence. The paper analyses the refugee committee’s demands and the pressure they exerted on UNRWA in this light.