Israel orders closure of 6 UNRWA schools in East Jerusalem, threatening education
Six East Jerusalem schools were raided by Israeli forces and were directed to shut down within 30 days by UNRWA, the United Nations refugee agency for Palestinian refugees, and the Israeli Education Ministry.
Around 800 students will be directly affected by the shutdown orders and might not complete the school year, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini tweeted. The agency’s schools educate Palestinians living in Israeli-occupied territory, such as East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
“UNRWA schools are safeguarded by the privileges and immunities of the United Nations,” Lazzarini stated. “Today’s unauthorized intrusions and issuance of closure orders constitute a breach of these protections.”
Israel’s Ministry of Education declared in a statement that parents were instructed to enroll their children in other schools. “The professional team at the Ministry of Education continues to assist in providing the educational structure for each student.”
In October, Israel’s parliament passed a law prohibiting UNRWA from operating within Israel and annulling the 1967 agreement that allowed the agency to carry out its mission. Yulia Malinovsky, a member of the Israeli parliament who sponsored the bill to ban UNRWA, verified the closure orders. The schools will have until May 8, she stated.
“We’re also working diligently to cut off the water and electricity to all of UNRWA’s facilities (in areas controlled by Israel),” Malinovsky said. “We’re doing everything we can to fully enforce the UNRWA legislation in all institutions and in all areas.”
Israel has consistently sought to dismantle the UN agency, claiming that some of its employees are members of Hamas and that UNRWA’s educational system fosters hostility toward Israel. A UN-commissioned investigation found that instances of anti-Israel bias in textbooks were “marginal” but still represented “a serious violation of neutrality.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have asserted that a small number of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gaza employees participated in the October 7 massacre. UNRWA has consistently denied those claims. It stated that there is “absolutely no ground for a blanket description of ‘the institution as a whole’ being ‘totally infiltrated.’
The United Nations established UNRWA a year following the 1948 establishment of Israel. The development forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in what Palestinians refer to as the “Nakba.”
The agency started in 1950 to assist some 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Today, it assists an estimated 5.9 million throughout the Middle East. Most of whom reside in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
In the Gaza Strip, where more than a year of ruinous Israeli war has left the territory in ruins, UNRWA provides for approximately 1.7 million Palestinian refugees. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it provides for approximately 871,500 refugees.
