Work begins on turning the seized Qalandia centre into a school

The Israeli municipality of Jerusalem sent technical crews into the UN refugee agency's vocational training centre at Qalandia on Wednesday, where they started what was described as maintenance and renovation work, the Jerusalem Governorate said. The purpose, according to the governorate, is to ready the buildings to take in pupils under a plan to run a municipal educational complex on the site.

Israeli troops kept their hold on the compound, in Kafr Aqab north of occupied Jerusalem, for a second day. Soldiers were rotated through it in shifts and further units were brought in around midnight and again at dawn, so the workmen arrived at a site still under military control.

The centre opened in 1952, the first the agency built in Palestine. It takes in about 270 students at a time across 16 trades and turns out between 250 and 300 graduates a year, all of them refugees from camps across the occupied West Bank, and none of them charged for the training. Fitting a municipal school into the same grounds would mean pulling down most of what stands there, a warning the agency has been repeating for months as the plan took shape.

Soldiers emptied the compound of its staff on Tuesday, took possession of it and put up an Israeli flag in the courtyard. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, joined that operation and said the agency had "no place" in Jerusalem or in Israel.

The day between the two is the whole of it. On Tuesday the site was held by an army; on Wednesday it was being fitted out by a city government for a different set of children. The agency says the buildings are United Nations property and carry the privileges and immunities that go with that.