Israel Seizes UNRWA's Last Jerusalem Facility Days After U.S. Watchdog Flags Over 100 Staffers for Hamas Ties

The Raid

On Tuesday, August 25, Israeli forces seized the Qalandia Vocational Training Centre in Kafr Aqab, East Jerusalem. Four armored vehicles and 50 security personnel entered the compound, according to The National. Palestinian official media said roughly 40 people were detained and questioned before Israeli forces began demolishing part of the site.

Israel raised its flag over the building. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir joined the raid personally, brought a camera crew from pro-government Channel 14, and filmed himself sitting in the director's chair. "Thank God, on my shift there is no Unrwa, there is no management, they will not be here," he said, according to the BBC.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said he gave the order to clear the compound. "The State of Israel will not allow an organisation whose employees were complicit in terrorism and the October 7 massacre to operate within its territory, and will act against it by all means at its disposal," Netanyahu said, per The National. UNRWA "strongly denies" the complicity claim, the BBC reported.

The Qalandia center, opened in 1952, was UNRWA's oldest vocational school in the West Bank. It trained about 340 refugees a year, ages 15 to 19, in carpentry, auto mechanics, plumbing and graphic design, according to Roland Friedrich, UNRWA's West Bank director, who spoke to Anadolu Agency. More than 90% of graduates found jobs, Friedrich said. Israel says it plans to remove the equipment and turn part of the site into a school of its own, per the BBC.

The Legal Backdrop

Israel's parliament passed a law in 2024, which took effect last year, banning UNRWA from operating in territory Israel controls, including East Jerusalem, and barring Israeli state authorities from any contact with the agency. Closure orders followed for six UNRWA schools and two health centers in East Jerusalem, ending in-person classes for roughly 800 children, Friedrich told Anadolu. Israel demolished UNRWA's East Jerusalem headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah in January and has approved plans to build an army museum and recruitment office on the site, The National reported.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the Qalandia seizure. His spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said UN premises "are inviolable and immune from any form of interference" under international law. UNRWA called the incursion "deeply concerning" and "unacceptable."

The Staffing Report

One day after the raid, on August 26, USAID's Office of Inspector General reported that more than 100 current and former UNRWA employees have been referred to the State Department over alleged involvement in the October 7, 2023, attack or ties to Hamas, according to the Epoch Times. The State Department will decide whether to suspend or debar them from federal contracts and aid.

Three individuals have already been proposed for debarment: a former teacher accused of participating in kidnappings during the attack, a second former teacher allegedly tied to Palestinian Islamic Jihad's Rafah Brigade, and a third teacher accused of holding hostages. A fourth proposal, against a former UNRWA social worker allegedly involved in a kidnapping from Kibbutz Be'eri, was dropped only because he had died, the Daily Wire reported.

One debarment is already final: Hafez Mousa Mohammed Mousa, a former school principal the OIG says coordinated communications for Hamas's East Jabaliya Battalion during the attack. The OIG called it "the first known debarment by the U.S. of a terrorist affiliated with a UN agency responsible for humanitarian assistance programming." The watchdog said more referrals, and possibly criminal referrals to the Justice Department, are coming as part of an investigation it calls Operation Stop the Carousel, per the Daily Wire.

What UNRWA Disputes

UNRWA has pushed back on the scale of these claims before. In July 2025, it rejected allegations that up to 1,400 Gaza staff had Hamas or Islamic Jihad links, saying Israel and other member states had not provided supporting evidence, according to the Epoch Times. The UN did terminate 70 Gaza staff in June 2025, but said the firings were not an admission the allegations were true.

UNRWA employs roughly 30,000 people across the region, and the agency argues that even a well-documented list of over 100 bad actors does not establish that UNRWA itself is a Hamas front. Friedrich told Anadolu that UNRWA remains the largest humanitarian provider left in the West Bank, running education for more than 4,500 displaced children and citing West Bank unemployment above 30%, and above 50% in some refugee camps, since October 7.

The Daily Wire, citing unnamed government watchdogs, reported that UNICEF and the World Health Organization have refused to turn over employee and payroll records to OIG investigators. That claim does not appear in the other sources reviewed here and has not been independently confirmed.

Coverage of these developments has split sharply. Al Jazeera's headline framed the closure as Israel shuttering a Palestinian "lifeline," without engaging the Hamas-tie allegations at all. The Epoch Times and Daily Wire covered the OIG report in detail but made no mention of the Qalandia raid happening the same week. The BBC and Anadolu gave fuller accounts of the raid itself, including Israel's stated legal justification, while spending little space on the specific individual debarment cases USAID just disclosed.

Israel now runs three other UNRWA vocational centers out of business in East Jerusalem while three more still operate elsewhere in the West Bank, per Friedrich. Whether the State Department expands its debarment list beyond the four names disclosed so far, and whether Congress revisits U.S. funding to UNRWA given both the terror findings and the ongoing closures, remains unresolved.