How Unrwa school closures could damage the education of hundreds of Palestinian children
Israeli officials, flanked by security forces, raided six schools run by the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (Unrwa) in occupied East Jerusalem last week and handed 30-day closure orders to staff.
The order was issued by the Israeli Ministry of Education, which claimed the schools were operating without licences.
This means around 800 children will receive no education, only weeks before the end of the school year. Instead, they will be set adrift in the East Jerusalem school system, which is already plagued by classroom shortages and funding cuts.
Since the 1950s, Unrwa has run schools and medical clinics in East Jerusalem, which Israel seized during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
The agency is now the second biggest provider of education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) after the Palestinian Authority (PA), operating 96 schools in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and serving nearly 50,000 students from the first to the ninth grades.
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In East Jerusalem itself, Unrwa runs seven educational institutions. Three schools in the neighbourhoods of Silwan, Sur Bahr and Wadi Joz fall inside Israel’s separation barrier and educate approximately 250 children. Three further schools, in the Shuafat refugee camp, are on the other side of the barrier and attended by around 550 children. The agency also runs the Kalandia Training Centre (KTC) in Kafr Aqab, providing technical and vocational training to 350 students.
Shuafat, which is Jerusalem’s only refugee camp, is home to around 35,000 Palestinians. It was set up by Unwra to the east of the city after families were displaced from a previous camp in the Old City in 1965. Intended originally as a temporary site, the issue is still unresolved 60 years later. The camp is fenced off by the barrier: checkpoints hinder residents from reaching Jerusalem.
Roland Friedrich, the Director of Unrwa Affairs in the occupied West Bank, said that last Tuesday Israeli officials and around 20 “heavily armed police” forcefully entered schools inside the Shuafat refugee camp, which sits outside Israel’s separation barrier that isolates the city from the West Bank.
“There are no adequate alternatives to education in that area,” Friedrich told Middle East Eye. “There are some private schools that are run with Israeli oversight by the municipality. But people do not want to send their children there because the infrastructure is decrepit and the quality of education is not good”.
Stretched facilities
East Jerusalem’s schools have long suffered from severe classroom shortages, high drop-out rates and funding gaps.
In 2024, East Jerusalem was short of 2,447 classrooms, according to a report by Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO which focuses on Jerusalem.
Despite the Supreme Court ordering the Israeli state and East Jerusalem municipality to submit a plan for addressing the shortage in 2023, just 1,210 classrooms remain under construction.
Now these existing schools are expected to absorb the Unrwa students affected by the closures.
Tal Hassin, a lawyer for the Israeli non-profit Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), told MEE: “Schools are often in rented homes, they’re not meant to be schools. They lack proper facilities”.
The Ir Amim report also noted that around 20,000 school-aged children in East Jerusalem are defined as “missing” in 2023-24 with no record as to where they are being educated. An estimated 3,000 students dropped out during 2023.
Budget cuts
East Jerusalem schools which teach the Palestinian curriculum, known as Tawjihi, have been hit by budget cuts since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The majority of funds in East Jerusalem are earmarked for students who are enrolled on the Israeli curriculum. According to Hassin, this is because the Israeli authorities want to shift Palestinian children from the Palestinian to the Israeli curriculum.
In 2023, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich froze funds for Palestinian towns and education programmes in East Jerusalem.
A five-year plan for East Jerusalem, intended to be implemented from 2024 to 2028, was supposed to see 800m shekels (around $217m) funnelled into education.
But the budget was cut amid Israel's war on Gaza: the actual amount earmarked for education for 2023-24 came to 60m shekels - a cut of tens of millions of shekels from the 2022-23 academic year, according to Ir Amim.
The effect of Israel's Unrwa ban
Unrwa has long faced attempts by the Israeli authorities to curtail its activities in East Jerusalem and bring all services, including education, under Israeli oversight.
In late October 2024, the Israeli parliament voted through legislation banning Unrwa from operating within Israeli territory and prohibiting state officials from cooperating with it. The law says the ban on the UN agency includes occupied East Jerusalem, although it is recognised internationally as occupied Palestinian territory.
According to Friedrich, the ban on contact is especially dangerous. Before, Unwra staff would coordinate with the Israeli military, particularly during operations, to ensure the safety of its workers and students.
As a result, since the start of the war on Gaza, there have been no casualties among Unrwa staff and students in 25 schools during military operations in the northern West Bank. “That is not possible any more,” said Friedrich.
He also highlighted that Israel has signed the Convention of Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, which states that the "premises of the United Nations is inviolable" and that they are "immune from search requistion, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of interference".
“Legally speaking, these are all UN facilities, they all enjoy immunity under international law,” he told MEE. “Any entry by Israeli authorities into those facilities is a violation of the UN's privileges and immunities and is considered an unauthorised possible entry.
“So here, Israel is acting in contravention of its own obligations and commitments as a party to the so-called general convention."
In December 2024, the UN General Assembly requested an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on “the obligations of Israel in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations, other international organisations and third States” in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
In January 2025, Unrwa was forced to close 10 schools amid the Israeli military operation “Iron Wall” in the West Bank which displaced some 45,000 people from Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps.
Friedrich said the agency had introduced an emergency online education programme to support the estimated 6,000 children affected. “I would say we're covering roughly half of them, but it’s a difficult situation, because families are displaced. The children are traumatised and not everybody has access to the internet”.
The agency’s facilities have also been hit, including its East Jerusalem headquarters, which were repeatedly targeted by arson attacks, forcing staff to move out.
Far-reaching implications
In the short term, Unrwa’s students will be left scrambling to finish their school year, which ends in June.
In a letter to the Jerusalem Municipality, ACRI highlighted that parents could not register their children at alternative schools for the next school year as the deadline had already passed.
In the longer term, Friedrich warned that the effects of the closures will be far reaching.
“This is going to have a psychological impact, and an economic impact on the families. It will create a host of humanitarian issues,” he said. “Lack of access to education means personal issues for the students and disruption of social networks,” he said.
He also warned that, more broadly, the closures have political implications, tightening Israeli control over areas that are internationally recognised as occupied.
“We at Unrwa are bound by international law, we’re also bound by the UN General Assembly Resolution last September on ending the occupation,” he said.
“It states very clearly that no UN agency or member state should undertake any steps that further reinforce the illegal occupation."
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