(8 May 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jerusalem – 29 April 2025
1. Various of students leaving school
2. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Fahed Qatousa, Deputy Director of Shuafat Basic Boys School: ++SOUNDBITE STARTS ON PREVIOUS SHOT AND IS OVERLAID BY SHOT3++
"We hope, and we really hope, that the decision to close (the schools) will be overturned because this is an unfair decision for us, for the students and their parents, the teachers and everyone who works at this school."
3. Close of sign reading (English): “Shuafat Basic Boys School”
4. Various of students in the street after leaving school
5. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Duaa Zourba, teacher at Shuafat Basic Boys School: ++SOUNDBITE STARTS ON PREVIOUS SHOT AND IS OVERLAID BY SHOT6-7++
“It will made a big effect, because it is located in the center of (Shuafat refugee) camp, so it is very comfortable for the parents and close to the students’ residence. Secondly, we are not the kind of a school who is taking only good students, we accept any student who is a refugee or living in the area here, they can be enrolled in the school here. This helps the parents who their children maybe rejected in private schools or others, we are not, we take the students and go with them according to their level.”
6. Various of student, inside classroom
7. Various of security cameras at separation barrier
STORYLINE:
The school is one of six across East Jerusalem run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees called UNRWA.
Last month, Israeli soldiers in riot gear showed up at the schools and ordered them to shut down within 30 days.
Parents are worried that their children will lose precious opportunities to learn and fret for their children’s safety if they are made to enroll in Israeli schools.
The closure orders come after Israel banned UNRWA from operating on Israeli soil earlier this year, the culmination of a long campaign against the agency that intensified following the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 Oct. 2023.
UNRWA is the main provider of education and health care to Palestinian refugees across East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
While UNRWA schools in the Israeli-occupied West Bank have not received closing orders, the closures have left in limbo the nearly 800 Palestinian students in first through ninth grade in East Jerusalem.
Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and considers the entire city its unified capital.
The Israeli Ministry of Education said it will place the students into other Jerusalem schools, but parents, teachers and administrators warned that closing the main schools for the children of Palestinian refugees in East Jerusalem would cause a surge in absenteeism.
For students in the Shuafat refugee camp, switching to Israeli schools means crossing the barrier that separates their homes from the rest of Jerusalem every day.
Some students aren’t even eligible to use the crossing, said Fahed Qatousa, the deputy principal of the UNRWA boys’ school in Shuafat.
About 100 students in UNRWA schools in Shuafat have West Bank identifications, which will complicate their entry past the barrier, according to Qatousa.
"We hope, and we really hope, that the decision to close (the schools) will be overturned because this is an unfair decision for us, for the students and their parents, the teachers and everyone who works at this school," Shweikeh said.
In a statement to The Associated Press, the Israeli Ministry of Education said it was closing the schools because they were operating without a license.
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