Israel Police and municipal officials on Monday raided the shuttered Jerusalem offices of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which the Jewish state officially banned in January.
Police confirmed in a statement to JNS that the raid in the Ma’alot Dafna neighborhood was carried out by the municipality “as part of a debt-collection procedure” after the lease agreement ended.
Police were only present to secure municipal officials, according to the statement.
On Oct. 28, the Israeli Knesset passed laws banning UNRWA following the exposure of its complicity in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, and despite pressure from the United States and other countries against the move.
The legislation formally came into effect on Jan. 30, prompting the immediate closure of the agency’s main offices in northeastern Jerusalem’s Ma’alot Dafna and Kafr Aqab neighborhoods.
A U.N. spokesperson told JNS on Jan. 30 that UNRWA staff emptied the facilities of documents, computers and vehicles, while international staff members, now without valid Israeli visas, were evacuated to Jordan.
However, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres claimed on Monday that the Ma’alot Dafna compound “remains United Nations premises and is inviolable and immune from any other form of interference.”
“I urge Israel to immediately take all necessary steps to restore, preserve and uphold the inviolability of UNRWA premises and to refrain from taking any further action with regard to UNRWA premises, in line with its obligations under the Charter of the United Nations and its other obligations under international law,” the secretary-general added.
According to the U.N. statement, trucks and forklifts were brought in to force entry into the building. All communications were cut, while furniture, IT equipment and “other property” were seized, it said.
A U.N. flag flying over the building was taken down by the municipality and replaced with the Israeli flag, according to the statement. Video posted on social media appeared to confirm the U.N. claim.
Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Arieh King, who has led several rallies against UNRWA’s presence in the capital, praised the Israel Police for assisting in the raid on what he called the offices of a “Nazi terror organization.”
“Many thanks ... for the important and historic move,” King tweeted.
Dozens of UNRWA workers have engaged in terrorism in recent years, including the killers of Yonatan Samerano, an Israeli soldier slain on Oct. 7, 2023, whose body was taken to the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem identified one of the terrorists as UNRWA social worker Faisal Ali Mussalem al Naami.
UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO that monitors the anti-Israel agenda at the United Nations, earlier this year revealed that top UNRWA officials “routinely” meet with Lebanese and Gazan terror organizations, “mutually praise each other for ‘cooperation’ and describe each other as ‘partners.’”
In January, U.S. President Donald Trump temporarily suspended foreign aid to UNRWA, pending reviews of existing development programs. U.S. funding for the agency has yet to be reinstated.
