On May 8, 2025, Israeli authorities distributed closure orders for all six United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools in occupied East Jerusalem, disrupting the education of approximately 800 Palestinian students.

At around 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, armed Israeli border police with officials from Israel’s Ministry of Education and the Jerusalem Municipality forcibly entered UNRWA’s three schools in Shu‘fat refugee camp.

“The border police were taking positions around the school. And then they basically went in, harassed some staff, photographed the IDs of some staff, and then put up these closure notices on the doors, and asked the staff to immediately send the kids home,” Roland Friedrich, UNRWA Affairs Director for the West Bank, told Jerusalem Story.1 “So children all left crying.”

The raid occurred while more than 550 students aged 6 to 15 were in class.2

Police also briefly detained an UNRWA staff member in charge of community relations in Shu‘fat refugee camp.

Following the morning raid in the camp, UNRWA moved to evacuate students and faculty from its three other schools in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Silwan, Sur Bahir, and Wadi al-Joz, which together serve 250 students. Israeli security forces subsequently arrived at the schools later on the same morning and attached closure orders to the schools’ gates.

The move follows the initial order to close the six schools, issued by the Israeli Ministry of Education on April 8, 2025 and set to go into final effect 30 days later (see Palestinian Students Face Uncertainty as Israel Orders Closure of Six UNRWA Schools).3 The notices stem from two Israeli laws passed in October 2024 banning UNRWA from operating  in Israel and Israeli authorities from having any contact with UNRWA or its representatives, laws which went into effect on January 30, 2025 (see Despite Israel’s Ban, UNRWA Hangs On in East Jerusalem).

“Now the kids do not have access to school,” Friedrich said. “Given all the steps taken and the legal threats made against UNRWA staff, it’ll be very difficult to keep these schools open.”

The Israeli Ministry of Education told the Associated Press it will place the students in other Jerusalem schools to complete their education.4 The legislation outlawing UNRWA also prohibits contact with the agency, so UNRWA says it is not aware of what will happen to students for the remainder of the school year, which ends on June 20, 2025.5 But placements in alternative schools, should they even be forthcoming, have serious drawbacks from the families’ perspective: They would be located outside the checkpoint that controls access to the camp, requiring children to endure long waits both ways just to get to school; they would likely be municipality-run, meaning the curriculum is an Israeli one that many parents don’t wish their children to use; for some families, they might stir up issues related to their legal status, because transfers to such schools require extensive proof that the child’s “center of life” is in Jerusalem; and they might be extremely overcrowded.

The day before the closure, May 8, 2025, the human rights organization Adalah sent a letter to Israel’s Ministry of Education demanding that it cancel the closure orders. Adalah asserts that the orders are illegal under Israeli law, because Israel’s 1969 School Supervision Law, which requires all schools to have a license to operate, does not apply to UNRWA schools, which existed before the law was written. According to the Ministry of Education’s closure orders, UNRWA schools are being shut down because they lack a license.6

“The schools in question were established and managed by UNRWA since the 1950s, and continued to operate in the same format even after the [Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem] in 1967,” Adalah wrote in its letter. “In practice, since their establishment until today, these schools have not been required to obtain a license under the law, and therefore they cannot be considered educational institutions to which the authority to close under the Supervision Law would apply.”7

While Adalah argues that the shutdown is illegal under Israeli domestic law, experts also attest that the schools’ closure is illegal under international law.

“UNRWA schools are operationally independent and inviolable under international law,” says Jonathan Fowler, UNRWA’s Communications Director. “Israel is obliged to protect them, just as it is obliged to protect all other UN staff and facilities at all times.”

On January 16, 2025, Adalah filed a petition to Israel’s Supreme Court, on behalf of Palestinian refugees, demanding the cancellation of legislations banning UNRWA because they violate refugees’ rights (see Palestinian Refugees Petition Israeli Supreme Court against Laws Banning UNRWA). The court, on January 29, rejected their request to freeze the laws’ implementation. When Israel issued closure notices to UNRWA schools in April, the petitioners filed another motion to the Supreme Court requesting that their enforcement be paused, again for humanitarian reasons. The Supreme Court rejected this motion on April 23, 2025, after the government responded that the children will have alternative schooling through the Jerusalem Municipality.8

Yet, according to human rights groups, Palestinians in East Jerusalem face a severe classroom shortage, putting claims of a viable alternative education in question. Ir Amim, an Israeli nonprofit monitoring Jerusalem, estimates that East Jerusalem has a shortage of 2,477 classrooms.9 One of the reasons for this shortage is due to the lack of land allotted for school construction in Jerusalem.

“There is no alternative in these locations,” Friedrich said. “What happened . . . is a grave violation of Israel’s obligations as a UN member state. It’s an attack on the right to education.”

“The way things stand now, these children will lose the rest of the school year,” Friedrich added. “And then will not have a school to go back to in September.”