Israeli forces raided six United Nations schools in East Jerusalem, ordering them to close within 30 days, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for the Palestinian refugees, and the Israeli Ministry of Education.
Approximately 800 students will be directly impacted by the closure orders and may not be able to finish the school year, UNRWA’s Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said on social media. Schools run by the agency serve Palestinians in areas occupied by Israel, including East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
“UNRWA schools are protected by the privileges and immunities of the United Nations,” Lazzarini said. “Today’s unauthorized entries and issuance of closure orders are a violation of these protections.”
Israel’s Ministry of Education said in a statement that parents were directed to register their students at other schools. “The professional staff at the Ministry of Education continue to support the educational framework for each student.”
In October, Israel’s parliament passed a law banning UNRWA from activity within Israel and revoking the 1967 treaty that allowed the agency to carry out its mission.
Yulia Malinovsky, a member of the Israeli parliament who sponsored the bill to ban UNRWA, confirmed the closure orders. The schools will have until May 8, she said.
“We’re also working very hard to close the water and electricity to all of UNRWA’s facilities (in areas occupied by Israel),” Malinovsky said. “We’re doing everything we can to implement the UNRWA bills fully in all institutions and in all aspects.”
Israel has long sought to dismantle the UN agency, arguing that some of its employees are members of Hamas and that UNRWA’s education system teaches students to hate Israel.
A UN-commissioned inquiry found that examples in textbooks of anti-Israel bias were “marginal” but nonetheless constituted “a grave violation of neutrality.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have alleged that a handful of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 massacre. UNRWA has repeatedly denied these accusations, saying there is “absolutely no ground for a blanket description of ‘the institution as a whole’ being ‘totally infiltrated.’”
UNRWA was founded by the United Nations a year after the 1948 creation of Israel that led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in an event known by Palestinians as the “Nakba” (catastrophe).
The agency, which began by assisting about 750,000 Palestinian refugees in 1950, now serves some 5.9 million across the Middle East, many of whom live in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria.
In the Gaza Strip, which has been ravaged by a devastating Israeli war for more than a year, UNRWA serves some 1.7 million Palestinian refugees. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it assists around 871,500 refugees.