RAMALLAH, May 8 (Xinhua) -- The UN agency for Palestine refugees said on Thursday that it has been forced to evacuate all children across the six schools it runs in East Jerusalem, after heavily armed Israeli forces entered three schools among them this morning.
"Now, nearly 800 girls and boys -- some as young as six years old -- are left in shock and trauma," Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, said on social media platform X.
"Storming schools and forcing them shut is a blatant disregard of international law," he said, reiterating that "these schools are inviolable premises of the United Nations."
The Israeli move took place as Israeli police issued a school closure order early last month, demanding that three schools in the Shufat refugee camp and three others in the town of Silwan and the neighborhoods of Sur Baher and Wadi al-Joz in East Jerusalem shut down within 30 days, which ended on Wednesday.
Lazzarini rejected the Israeli enforcement of the closure order, which he said is "denying Palestinian children their basic right to learn."
The Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education also condemned the Israeli move in a press statement, describing it as "a crime inconsistent with international norms and laws."
