Israel to build military facilities at UN Compound

United Nations, New York City

Sphinx News: Ahmed Ali

Just this weekend, the Israeli government approved a plan for the defense ministry to build a military complex along the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s (UNRWA) compound in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.

UNRWA Deputy Commissioner-General Natalie Boucly denounced the move as a direct contravention of international law, calling it a “breach of the 1946 UN Convention on Privileges and Immunities.”

Israel has long devised a systematic campaign to undermine the UNRWA presence in East Jerusalem, justified along the lines of countless accusations made against the United Nations for harboring staff members affiliated with Hamas.

Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, said the plan to build a defense complex on the former UNRWA headquarters was “a decision of sovereignty, Zionism, and security.”

The decision was decreed on Jerusalem Day, a symbolic day for Israelis marking their capture of East Jerusalem, including the Old City and its holy sites sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, in the 1967 Mideast war.

UNRWA has been formally shut down since May 2025 after far-right protesters, including at least one member of parliament, overran its gate in the presence of the police.

UNRWA’s mandate is to provide aid and services to some 2.5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and East Jerusalem, as well as 3 million refugees in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Its operations were severely limited last year when Israel’s Knesset passed legislation severing ties and banning its function.

While the UN has repeatedly excoriated such developments as demeaning its mandate, sanctioned by international law, the latest developments have prompted some of the most severe condemnations, prompting a statement from the Spokesman’s office of the Secretary-General, António Guterres.

“The Secretary-General condemns in the strongest terms the Israeli authorities’ decision to establish military facilities at the UNRWA Sheikh Jarrah compound in East Jerusalem that they had seized in January,” said Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesman for the Secretary-General.

Dujarric added that “UNRWA is an integral part of the United Nations and the UNRWA Sheikh Jarrah compound remains United Nations premises. These unprecedented and escalatory measures against UNRWA are a breach of the inviolability of United Nations premises. They constitute an obstacle to the implementation of the clear mandate of the General Assembly for UNRWA’s continued operations in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”

With UNRWA’s directives “affirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ),” the statement called for “the Government of Israel to rescind its decision and immediately return to the United Nations the UNRWA Sheikh Jarrah compound.”