Amid Ongoing Campaign Against UNRWA, Israel Advances School Construction Plan in Place of Qalandiya Vocational Center
On Tuesday, Israeli forces accompanied by Hanamel Dorfman, chief of staff for National Security Minister Ben Gvir, raided UNRWA’s Qalandiya Vocational Training Center. The forces conducted a tour of the site, photographed the premises and stated that the center must close. The roads leading to the complex were likewise sealed-off, severely disrupting residents’ movement in the area. Tuesday’s raid follows another recent raid in May where a Palestinian man was killed near the compound after police claimed he had fired at the officers.
These incidents come against the backdrop of Israeli plans to shutter UNRWA’s decades-old vocational center and replace it with a new municipal educational campus. The Jerusalem Municipality is advancing a new zoning plan (TPS 1421205), which would lead to the closure and demolition of UNRWA’s Qalandiya Vocational Training Facility. See location in map below.
This should be understood within Israel’s longstanding campaign against UNRWA and efforts to force its institutions out of East Jerusalem and the OPT as a whole. For years, right-wing organizations, echoed by Israeli politicians, have called to ban its operations and shutter the agency due to its alleged strengthening of the Palestinian “refugee question,” and its harm to the appearance of Israeli control and sovereignty over East Jerusalem. These efforts culminated in the passage of several laws in 2024, including one that bans UNRWA operations in territory Israel considers under its sovereignty.
As a result, six schools in East Jerusalem, serving some 800 Palestinian students, alongside other institutions were forced to close. Toward the end of 2025, an amendment to this law was passed, mandating the disconnection of UNRWA facilities from electricity, water, telecommunications, and gas. The amendment likewise empowered the Jerusalem Municipality and Israel Land Authority to seize land and buildings registered in UNRWA’s name in two compounds in East Jerusalem – namely its headquarters in Ammunition Hill and the Qalandiya training center. This led to the seizure and demolition of the former UNRWA headquarters in early 2026.
The Qalandiya training center, situated between Kufr Aqab and the Qalandiya Refugee camp, has been administered by UNRWA since before Israel occupied and annexed East Jerusalem in 1967. Located on the northern edge of East Jerusalem, Kufr Aqab is one of the eight Palestinian neighborhoods physically cut off from the rest of the city by the Separation Barrier and has faced decades of municipal neglect.
The municipality’s plan covering approximately 82 dunams (20 acres), designates most of the center’s existing buildings for demolition and will ultimately lead to the closure of one of the last remaining Palestinian vocational institutions in Jerusalem. The center provides vocational training in fields such as electrical work, plumbing, and mechanics and serves hundreds of Palestinian students each year.
The municipality presents the project as a response to the severe shortage of classrooms and educational facilities in Kufr Aqab, an East Jerusalem neighborhood home to tens of thousands of Palestinian residents that has long suffered from inadequate municipal services and chronic neglect.
While Ir Amim’s data confirms that East Jerusalem has faced an acute classroom shortage for at least two decades, serious questions remain about whether the educational complex will ever be built and rather serves as a pretext to remove UNRWA from the site. As noted in Ir Amim’s 2025 Annual Report, the current classroom shortage in East Jerusalem stands at 1,461, according to the municipality’s assessment. This is despite the fact that the Supreme Court ordered the state and municipality over three years ago to develop a plan to construct the missing classrooms. While the municipality claims that some 1224 classrooms are in the planning and construction process, only 20 new classrooms were opened in the 2024-2025 school year.
Moreover, over the past decade, there have been multiple cases where Palestinian land was expropriated and/or residents were displaced for the construction of planned educational facilities that were either delayed for years or never built at all.
One such case is a large educational complex in Jabal al-Mukaber for which more than 76 dunams (19 hectars) of private Palestinian land were expropriated. The plan was approved in 2017. Although the project was presented as a response to the neighborhood’s acute classroom shortage, the first building permits were only issued at the end of 2025—eight years after the plan was approved—and most of the project remains unbuilt.
In another case, the municipality forcibly evicted the Salhiya family from their home in Sheikh Jarrah in 2022 and demolished both the family residence and a successful plant nursery, arguing that the land was needed for special education institutions. Municipal signs promised completion of the schools by 2024. Yet construction has not begun while permitting process still remains incomplete.
Against this backdrop, the municipality’s plan to establish an educational campus in place of UNRWA’s vocation center appears to be less about expanding educational opportunities than about removing another Palestinian institution associated with UNRWA from Jerusalem.
The plan (TPS 1421205) was officially filed at the Jerusalem Municipality’s Planning Office on April 29, 2026. No dates have yet to be published for hearings at the respective planning committees.
The boundaries of the UNRWA training center compound is marked in light green.
For larger resolution map, click here
For larger resolution map, click here