In a decision timed to coincide with Jerusalem Day, the Israeli national holiday marking its 1967 seizure of East Jerusalem, Israeli authorities have greenlit construction of a new government military complex on the plot that once held the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Jerusalem.
Under the approved plan, nearly 8.9 acres (36 dunams) of the cleared land will be repurposed to host three key Israeli defense installations: a national military museum, a centralized military recruitment center, and an official office for Israel’s defense minister.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz publicly confirmed the decision in a May 17, 2025 post to X, framing the move as a deliberate assertion of Israeli sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem. “We outlawed this terror-supporting UN organisation and took the land, and now on its ruins we are building and strengthening Jerusalem – the eternal capital of the Jewish people,” Katz wrote. The project was advanced under the current government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, per the Hebrew-language statement Katz shared alongside his announcement.
This development is the latest escalation in a years-long Israeli campaign to eliminate UNRWA’s presence in East Jerusalem. Israeli bulldozers already demolished the UNRWA compound in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem back in late January 2025, after months of increasing pressure on the agency.
Israel’s long-standing hostility toward UNRWA stems in large part from the agency’s core mandate: it maintains the official refugee status of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from their homes during the 1948 Nakba, along with their descendants, a status the Israeli government rejects outright. Tensions escalated further in early 2024, when Israeli officials leveled allegations that 12 UNRWA staff had participated in the October 7, 2023 attacks led by Hamas, claiming the workers helped distribute ammunition and abduct civilian hostages. A independent UN review of the accusations, published in April 2024, found no credible evidence of wrongdoing by any UNRWA employees. The report also noted that Israeli officials failed to provide requested identifying information or evidence to support their claims, and had not raised any specific, concrete concerns about UNRWA staff with the agency since 2011. This pattern of unsubstantiated accusations linking UNRWA to terrorist activity has been repeated by Israeli officials for years, with no verifiable evidence ever made public to back the claims.
The plan to relocate the military recruitment center from its current location in Jerusalem’s Romema neighborhood to the former UNRWA site is also directly tied to ongoing domestic political friction within Israel. For years, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community has held widespread protests against mandatory military conscription, creating persistent tension at the existing Romema induction facility that officials now seek to avoid by moving the center.
Human rights organizations and international policy experts have repeatedly warned that eliminating UNRWA’s operations would leave millions of vulnerable Palestinian refugees across the occupied territories without critical support. UNRWA currently serves as the primary humanitarian lifeline for an estimated 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and neighboring neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The agency provides core essential services including primary and secondary education, food assistance, primary medical care, and emergency fuel distributions during crises. Humanitarian groups warn that a full collapse of UNRWA would eliminate the main source of support for millions of Palestinians, triggering a widespread humanitarian catastrophe.
The Jerusalem Governorate, the administrative body governing the occupied Palestinian territory of East Jerusalem, condemned the new military complex plan as a “serious escalation and a blatant violation of international law.” The office added that the project violates both the Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs protections for populations under military occupation, and the 1946 UN Convention on Privileges and Immunities, which protects UN property and operations from unilateral seizure by member states. The governorate’s statement characterized the decision as part of an accelerating colonial campaign to impose new Judaizing demographic and territorial realities on occupied East Jerusalem, noting that the project advances Israel’s narrative of exclusive sovereignty over the city while effectively erasing documented Palestinian historical presence and claims to the land.
International law has long held that Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory captured in the 1967 war is unlawful, due to its permanent nature and the Israeli government’s de facto policy of annexing occupied Palestinian land, including East Jerusalem.