Israel Is Condemned for Closing an UNRWA School at Jerusalem

A rift is growing between Turtle Bay and Israel following a Tuesday shutdown of a Jerusalem school operated by UNRWA, an agency dedicated exclusively to Palestinian affairs.Israel started the process of replacing an education facility run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency with a new campus for Jerusalem Arabs. The Knesset passed a law last December, severing all ties with the agency that was created by the UN General Assembly in 1949 to treat Palestinian Arabs separately from the world’s other refugees. While Israel sees Jerusalem as its united capital, its critics claim that parts of the city are an “occupied territory.” The UNRWA school Israel started dismantling on Tuesday at Kafr Aqab, is part of Kalandia, an UNRWA-run “refugee camp” where the agency has maintained schools for 70 years. Jerusalem is planning to build a new campus for Kafr Aqab’s Arab residents. It is “expected to include six schools, approximately 140 classrooms, and additional facilities for the local community,” the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, says.As for UNRWA, “Israel will not allow an organization whose employees were complicit in terrorism and the October 7 massacre to operate within its territory,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X, announcing the evacuation of UNRWA school officials from the premises. UNRWA employees actively participated in the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023 and several of them held Israeli hostages in their homes in the aftermath of that attack. Israeli troops found anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda inside UNRWA schools. The legislation to ban the agency from Israel was initiated by an opposition Knesset member, Yulia Malinowski. “There is consensus in Israel on UNRWA,” the Israeli consul general at New York, Ofir Akunis, tells The New York Sun. Severing ties, he adds, “should have been done years ago. We already knew about UNRWA’s malign activities when we left Gaza” in 2005. “UNRWA is attached to Hamas,” he said, a fact that the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, “should have been first to acknowledge.”Far from it, Mr. Guterres has long defended UNRWA from criticism. A UN source told the Sun recently that advisers asked Mr. Guterres to more actively confront UNRWA’s anti-Israel agenda head on, and, specifically, acknowledge the agency’s Hamas ties. Mr. Guterres, instead, has escalated condemnations of Israel, while claiming all allegations against UNRWA are examined. “I think there’s been a lot of disinformation about what UNRWA is,” Mr. Guterres’ spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told the Sun when asked to explain why so many Israelis are irate with the agency. There have been “many, many studies,” he said, that refute allegations of incitement in UNRWA schools. Then again, he added, “a number of other studies have been done, and misinterpreted, and been used to bludgeon UNRWA in very unfair ways.”In 2018 President Trump cut all American funding of UNRWA, citing systemic anti-Israel bias. President Biden renewed funding, but later froze payments after Israel produced evidence that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 massacre. In one of Mr. Trump’s first second term acts, he withdrew America from UNRWA activities, and ordered a review of all UN funding. Like America, Germany, Britain, Japan, Canada, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden suspended funding of UNRWA in the immediate aftermath of the 2023 Hamas attack. Several of them eventually resumed funding, following a study that was conducted for the UN by a former French foreign minister, Catherine Solana.The Solana report found that UNRWA has “robust mechanisms to ensure neutrality, but it faces serious gaps in implementation during operations in Gaza and the region.” Detractors say that it was mostly designed as a fig leaf for countries to resume funding.Ms. Solana provided “a ladder on which the Swedes, the Canadians, and the EU have been able to climb down and reverse their decision to defund” UNRWA, a former spokesman for the agency, Chris Gunness, said.The report also allowed Mr. Guterres to further defend UNRWA, despite the fact that funds for the agency dwindled, while America, the UN’s largest benefactor, started seeking ways to slash funding for the entire system.Mr. Guterres, whose term as UN chief ends on January 31, “condemns in the strongest terms” the Israeli school closure on Tuesday and “other unacceptable breaches of inviolability and of interference with UNRWA premises in occupied East Jerusalem,” Mr. Dujarric said.

Israel Is Condemned for Closing an UNRWA School at Jerusalem

Israel Is Condemned for Closing an UNRWA School at Jerusalem

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