Fourteen states and the EU call the Qalandia seizure unlawful
The refugee agency says the training centre was damaged while Israeli forces held it, and that it has had reports of people getting in and trying to carry off its contents.
Fourteen governments and the European Union have condemned Israel's takeover of the UN refugee agency's vocational training centre at Qalandia, north of occupied Jerusalem, calling the entry of Israeli forces into the compound unlawful. Their joint statement was put out through Belgium's consulate-general in Jerusalem.
Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Switzerland signed it, along with the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and Brazil, and the European Union itself. All of them sit on the advisory commission that oversees the agency's work.
The protection that UN buildings carry, the statement said, comes from the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, a treaty Israel is bound by. It asked Israel for "immediate and full compliance" with the UN decisions that allow the agency to carry out the work it was mandated to do, and to end every disruption of that work without delay.
The agency said on Saturday that the site remains a United Nations facility and is owed protection under international law. It had been damaged while the Israeli forces were on it, the agency said, and reports had since reached it of people getting into the premises and trying to take things out of them. Israel is obliged to reverse the measures at once and to keep them from happening again, it said, and it intends to resume teaching at the centre in full. The compound covers more than 80 dunams.
The law around the argument has moved in both directions. Israel's parliament passed legislation in 2024 restricting the agency's operations, including a bar on any work inside Israel, and it came into force at the start of last year. In November, over Israeli objections, the General Assembly extended the agency's mandate by three years, to June 2029 — which keeps it in existence for longer than the dispute over its buildings is likely to last.
What the agency reported on Saturday moves the argument off the question of who is holding the building. Damaged workshops and contents carried out of the gate bear on whether the centre can teach anyone again, whichever way the question of the site is settled. Fourteen governments naming a treaty is not an enforcement mechanism, but it does put the states that fund the agency on the record about a specific address, at a point when what is at stake there is turning from possession into condition.