After destroying the Jerusalem headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Israel is now authorizing construction on UNRWA properties—made possible after it stripped the organization of privileged immunity in January 2025, a move a UN official calls “unprecedented.”

“This . . . sits at the heart of so many issues,” Roland Friedrich, UNRWA’s West Bank director—now located in Amman—told Jerusalem Story.1 While the constitutionality of steps to dismantle UNRWA was referred to Israel’s Supreme Court in January 2025 by rights organizations, the court has yet to rule.2 Meanwhile, $3 million of UNRWA funding has been frozen, Friedrich himself is unable to obtain a visa, and the confiscation of UNRWA properties continues amid attempts to erase and outlaw the United Nations (UN) agency.

On May 17, 2026, Israel’s cabinet approved plans to build a military museum, enlistment office, and office for the defense minister in Sheikh Jarrah, where UNRWA Jerusalem headquarters once stood.3

The decision came almost four months after the Israel Land Authority, the government agency responsible for managing state property, flattened the compound in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, over a year after the Israeli law prohibiting UNRWA activity on Israeli soil (Israel considers East Jerusalem part of its sovereign territory) came into effect.

Israel’s UNRWA ban forced the agency to evacuate its East Jerusalem headquarters in 2025 over fears surrounding employees’ safety as anti-UNRWA activists continuously harassed staff outside the headquarters and even set fire to the compound. Local staff relocated from East Jerusalem to offices elsewhere in the West Bank, and international staff moved to Amman after Israel refused to renew their visas.

Israel also shuttered two UNRWA clinics serving 70,000 people and six UNRWA schools in East Jerusalem serving about 800 students (see Palestinian Students Face Uncertainty as Israel Orders Closure of Six UNRWA Schools).

“The legal position is very clear. This remains a UN facility. It enjoys the privileges and immunities under international law. Israel is a member state to the UN and is thereby internationally bound to respect those privileges and immunities,” Friedrich told Jerusalem Story. “That is why Israel is requested by the United Nations to restore the premises to the status quo in line with international law.”

He says that the issue is being pursued by the UN Secretary-General’s office, because it relates to the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, sometimes called the New York Convention.

Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, stated during a May 18, 2026, press briefing, “We have raised concerns about exactly what’s happened to the site, the way it was invaded, the way it was taken over, and those concerns still apply. As a party to the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN, Israel is under obligation to honor and respect the inviolability of all UN premises, including for UNRWA.”4

According to Israeli media, the UN’s legal department sent a letter to Israel condemning its actions and warned it could invoke Article 30 of the 1946 Convention—allowing for a case to be presented at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) between the UN and the specific member state (in this case, Israel).5

Jerusalem Story requested confirmation of this letter from the UN but did not receive a response by publication.

“This provision is unique in that any advisory opinion issued by the Court would be ‘decisive,’ i.e., legally binding, between the UN and Israel,” Ardi Imseis, former legal counsel and public policy advisor to UNRWA and currently a member of the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University, told Jerusalem Story via email.6

Imseis explained what the outcome of a possible ICJ court case might be, referring to the ICJ’s October 22, 2025, opinion that determined that Israel must respect UN immunities and privileges, including those of UNRWA.7

If Article 30 was invoked, “especially in light of what the Court has already indicated in its earlier advisory opinion on UNRWA of 22 October 2025, it would likely result in the Court determining that Israel’s actions are indeed unlawful and that it has an obligation of cessation and reparation, with enforcement left to Member States and the Organization as a whole,” Imseis wrote.

Friedrich emphasized that Israel’s actions against UNRWA are not simply about the destruction of the agency’s offices.

“The bottom line is that the issue is much bigger than UNRWA. It has to do with how the UN system has been functioning for many decades globally. It might be today UNRWA, tomorrow . . . another UN agency elsewhere,” Friedrich said. “It sets a precedent.”

UN member states have expelled peacekeeper missions (Egypt from the Sinai in 1967), curtailed UN activities (Sudan after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir in 2009), or withdrawn from membership in a UN organization (the United States from the World Health Organization in 2026 or North Korea from the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1994). But no member state has ever formally banned a UN agency established by the General Assembly and declared it a terror organization.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to gradually create facts on the ground that increasingly erase UNRWA’s presence.

On June 11, the Jerusalem Governorate, part of the Palestinian Authority (PA), warned of Israeli plans to build an “educational complex” on the grounds of UNRWA’s Kalandia Training Centre in northern Jerusalem beyond the Separation Wall but within the municipal boundaries, near the Qalandia refugee camp. The proposed plan on 82 dunams (21.25 acres) will apparently supplant the UNRWA training grounds where the center is located, which has continued to operate despite the Israeli government’s order (see Israel Advances Plan to Demolish UNRWA Vo-Tech School).

UNRWA is currently operating the training center, which serves 350 young men with PA IDs, with a generator, Friedrich says. Israel made it illegal for electricity and water companies to deal with UNRWA directly and cut power to the site in January.

The training center has been in place since 1953, established on land donated by Jordan, which controlled the area from 1948 to 1967. Today the center trains Palestinian youth in 16 specializations that are critical for the Palestinian economy, in which too many college graduates are unable to find white-collar work and a dire need for technical expertise exists.

This is “exactly the group—from a humanitarian perspective, from a development perspective, but also from a security perspective—these are the people you want to have a future,” says Friedrich.

Israel seeks to capitalize on this humanitarian objective to establish a large settlement base in what has become a Palestinian urban center, close to the Qalandiya checkpoint, and bounded by the Separation Wall, say Palestinian officials.

Even before Israel’s UNRWA ban, the agency drew the ire of Israel and its advocates, simply because it recognizes the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

“UNRWA has been all along the embodiment of the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland, because UNRWA was established in 1949 on the basis that it would look after the refugees until they returned home,” Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian Jerusalemite and author who was forced to flee with her family in 1948 when the State of Israel was established, told Jerusalem Story.8 “Israel has worked very hard to not only expel Palestinians but keep them out. The last thing it wanted was an international body that made an assumption that they’d be going home.”

UNRWA has preserved Palestinian history by maintaining the records of six million registered Palestinian refugees since 1948—again a blow to Israel’s expertly crafted narrative of the state’s history and founding.9

“Through its archive . . . [UNRWA] is the repository of the history of the whole issue from the beginning of Israel’s establishment. And so, of course, by chronicling the refugees’ lives, education, activities, etcetera, it’s kept a living record of what Israel caused when it was established in 1948. And Israel is in the business of erasing Palestinian history. So the last thing Israel needed was an organization like UNRWA, and it was awaiting its opportunity to destroy it,” Karmi said.

In the US, a federal investigation is underway by the inspector general for the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—whose job is oversight despite the dismantling of most of USAID’s work under the Trump administration. On June 5, 2026, the office announced the finding that 101 current and former UN staff either participated in the attacks of October 7, 2023, on Israeli bases and communities lining the Gaza Strip or have ties to the military wing of Hamas. It has referred these Palestinians to be excluded from receiving US funds in the future.10

After October 7, UNRWA conducted an internal investigation and terminated nine Gaza staff members whom Israel alleged were involved in the Hamas attack of October 7. Israeli forces have killed 391 UNRWA employees in Gaza since October 2023.

Israel and its supporters, however, are angling for the US to declare UNRWA itself a terror entity, or for its immunity to be stripped. No US persons would be allowed to materially support the organization, or it would be exposed to lawsuits in US courts. A right-wing US publication, The Washington Free Beacon, cites several US and State Department officials advocating for UNRWA to face “consequences.”11

Representative Mike Lawler (R, NY) sent a May 26, 2026, letter signed by more than 90 congressmen, most of them Republicans, calling on Donald Trump “to take decisive action to fully dismantle UNRWA and transition its functions to more credible and trusted partners that are demonstrably free of ties to terrorism and committed to transparency, accountability, and peace. This could include shifting direct assistance for Palestinian refugee programming to host countries or other legitimate nongovernmental organizations.”12

While the US was once UNRWA’s largest donor, government funding for the organization is currently frozen, limited to private US contributions.

Israel’s long vendetta against UNRWA is, at its core, about the destruction of Palestinian history and claims to reparation and return. Transforming the UNRWA compound into an ode to its own military history is just another step in that ongoing process of erasure.

“The Palestinians are fighting not just, very often, for their lives—they’re also fighting for their history,” Karmi said.