Israeli police re-enter Qalandia centre two days after withdrawal

Israeli police went into the UN refugee agency's vocational training centre at Qalandia, north of occupied Jerusalem, again on Sunday, the Jerusalem Governorate said. Its statement was brief and gave no account of what the police did once inside.

The re-entry followed a withdrawal only two days earlier. Israeli forces had emptied the compound of its staff on Tuesday and held it until Friday, and what they left behind, according to the governorate, includes cameras fitted inside the buildings and figures made to look like soldiers standing in some of the rooms. Municipal work on the site has continued through both phases.

Roland Friedrich, who directs the agency's affairs in the occupied West Bank, put the value of what is inside the gates at more than $5 million. The compound holds dozens of workshops for practical training, along with classrooms, dormitories, offices and the tools and machinery the trades are taught on, much of it paid for by the agency and by foreign donors over recent years. Some of that work was unfinished when the security forces, municipal staff and an elected Israeli official entered on 25 August, he said, in what he called a "forcibly and unlawfully" made entry, and when they appeared to leave on 28 August they left damage and indications that property had been taken.

What the calendar makes of this is the part the statements do not spell out. Friedrich said the centre was being got ready for the start of the academic year and was due to take in 340 students next week, drawn from camps across the occupied West Bank; the same figure is the number it puts through free vocational training every year.

Qalandia is the last substantial building the agency still runs in occupied East Jerusalem. Six of its schools there and two of its health centres have been closed by Israeli authorities, and its headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah was taken over and then largely demolished.

A withdrawal that is reversed after two days is not an ending, and the teaching year is the thing being measured against it. Term begins in a week in rooms that now have cameras in them and equipment that nobody has counted since the forces left. Every re-entry costs days that a school year does not give back, whatever is eventually settled about who holds the deed to the ground.