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Thursday should have been the day that UNRWA, the UN agency that plays a critical role in providing for Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, came crashing down in Jerusalem, after a presence of 75 years.
Despite concerns from many in the international community, Israel went ahead with laws passed on October 28 to halt the organisation’s activities within Israeli-controlled territory and ban the country’s officials and institutions from interacting with it. The visas of the agency’s international staff expired on Wednesday.
Staff were supposed to vacate its property in the city, a major disruption that plunges the organisation into chaos at a tense moment in East Jerusalem, economic crisis and massive violence in the occupied West Bank, and, most critically, when the aid operation in Gaza is supposed to be stepping up, efforts in which UNRWA is central.
On Thursday morning, the organisation’s large and heavily guarded headquarters on Ammunition Hill, much of it plastered in the blue and white paint of UN properties, did appear empty. A Palestinian man appeared briefly behind a metal fence strewn with barbed wire but he was the only sign of life inside.
Outside the gates, a small number of Israelis, most of them members of ultranationalist groups long-opposed to the organisation, set up a modest table with small glasses of kosher wine and pastries to celebrate the apparent end of UNRWA in the region.
One briefly climbed up the thick metal gate blocking the main entrance to stick an Israel flag in its middle, which blended in well with the UN colours.
“UNRWA took a clean population, like clean water, and put in one drop of poison,” Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Arieh King told a crowd of reporters. “This is enough to poison the entire population. This is UNRWA. It is time that this source of poison is kicked out of Jerusalem. This is what we’re celebrating.”
Although there were few people at Mr King’s celebration, which he was promoting on X earlier this week, the opinions he expressed are shared widely in Israel. UNRWA has long faced accusations of tolerating anti-Semitic content in school curriculums, being closely linked to Hamas and perpetuating the refugee status of Palestinians, which many Israelis say makes ending the Israel-Palestine conflict more difficult.
There has been even more hostility since October 7, 2023, with Israel accusing staff members of UNRWA of taking part in the Hamas-led attacks, and the Israeli army saying it has uncovered Hamas weapons and tunnel entrances at UNRWA centres, including schools.
Benayahu Ben Shabbat, of the ultranationalist group Im Tirtzu, had been to the compound many times previously. His organisation was part of the campaign to close UNRWA, organising protests, spreading the group's message on social media and lobbying members of Israel’s parliament.
“People outside Israel have concerns about subjects they just don’t know anything about, especially when it comes to UNRWA,” Mr Ben Shabbat told The National.
“It is a terror organisation. We have proof of hundreds, thousands of UNRWA employees all over Israel and outside who support terrorism and don’t even hide it."
“We know about teachers, schoolbooks – everything is about fighting Israel and having no peace with Israel.”
Many of Israel’s allies have engaged with the country’s concerns, with a number of key national donors to the organisation suspending funding after Israel said some UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 attacks, although the donations returned over the course of some months and UNRWA investigated the claims, suspending some of the accused.
Separate from the years-long, tit-for-tat accusations between Israel and the agency, much of the international worry over Israel’s blanket ban is about the logistical difficulties it causes. In the run-up to the introduction of the laws, officials of the agency said they had received no information from Israeli authorities about how to continue their services, which include running schools, medical complexes, utilities and many other aspects of daily life throughout the many Palestinian refugee camps in the region.
Mr King was certain these logistical challenges could be overcome in Jerusalem. “We have enough schools. We can accommodate all the students. It’s about 800-900 Arab students that are in UNRWA kindergartens and schools. Their new places are ready, there’s no problem with it,” he told The National.
“About medics, you’re from Britain, believe me our medical system is among the best, maybe even better than Britain’s. And it doesn’t even compare to UNRWA’s. We are welcoming them to get their treatment in the best hospitals in the world, here in Jerusalem.”
Half an hour down the road, senior staff nurse Manal Khayyat bustled around one such UNRWA clinic, under the shade of trees surrounding the Indian Hospice just inside Herod’s Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City.
The doors of the clinic were open. A few patients walked in, with young mothers carrying children and a single man asking if the pharmacy was open. The URNWA flag waved high above the street, which is often patrolled by Israel’s heavily armed border police.
“Nothing has happened today,” Ms Khayyat said. "We came at 7am to open the centre and everything’s been fine since. Senior UNRWA staff told us yesterday that we should come to work as normal.
“There’s been no army or police. We’re ready to carry out or work as usual. We’re not afraid, thank God. We have our sick to take care of – and we have justice.”
The silence at the massive Ammunition Hill compound versus the defiant business of the Herod’s Gate clinic shows the scale of Israel’s task at hand, as it proceeds with the ban. UNRWA might be detested and a symbol for Israelis of how many in the international system are biased and prejudiced against their state, particularly after October 7, but rooting it out from Palestinian society is extremely complex and another burden for a country exhausted by war.
The international staff and senior management might be gone, mostly to Amman, and their headquarters about to be seized, but the Palestinians who fill the ranks of its many institutions, and the hundreds of thousands more who use them, are not going anywhere.
“Of course we’ve been a bit afraid over the past couple of days when they told us the centre would be closed but thank God we are still here and continuing our work. Hopefully we’ll keep this up in the coming days,” Ms Khayyat said, as she excused herself to answer the call of a colleague in the back of the office.
