The Loop

This week a photo arrived. Three masked soldiers standing before a gate blackened by fire, rifles crossed over their chests, and above them the headline of a Turkish news agency: Israel raided a United Nations (UN) centre, fired tear gas at its staff and accelerated demolitions in the West Bank. The place is the Qalandia refugee camp, north of East Jerusalem, next to the busiest and most humiliating checkpoint of the entire occupation. The date, Monday 27 July 2026.

That photo hangs from a line. Follow the line in one direction and you reach last Monday. Follow it the other way and you do not reach a beginning: you reach 1948, the year in which the refugees this centre trains were made refugees. And here is what must be looked at squarely before going on: the two ends of the line are tied to each other. It is not a line with a start and a finish, it is a loop, a coil that turns and passes again through the same point. What keeps it turning — the only thing that stops it from being cut and closed — is the most prolonged and most brazen impunity in our contemporary history. To read this week’s photo you have to walk the whole loop. Each turn hangs its photos; and from each photo, held by a clothespin, dangles a broken law. Let us count them.

In the first image there are no soldiers and no bulldozers. There is a plenary session of the Knesset on the opening day of its winter term, and a vote: ninety-two to ten to bar the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating on Israeli territory, and eighty-seven to nine to forbid any state official from having contact with it. It is an administrative photo, almost dull, of hands raised under cold light. Outside that chamber, the world was looking elsewhere: in the United States, the presidential election that would return Donald Trump to the White House was a week away, and every spotlight was there.

Yet it is this bland photo that ties the line. By barring a UN body through domestic law, Israel severs at a stroke two threads of the Organisation’s own Charter: the second paragraph of its Article 2, which obliges member states to fulfil in good faith what they have signed, and the fifth paragraph of the same article, which obliges them to give the United Nations every assistance. The photo is already illegal before a single canister of gas is fired.

Here a character enters who will return several times: António Guterres. The Secretary-General sends Netanyahu a letter warning that he could take Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) if it does not repeal those laws and return the seized assets. In the same document he sets down the phrase he will repeat like a mantra all year: the UNRWA compound in Sheikh Jarrah remains United Nations premises, inviolable and immune from any interference.

As Guterres writes, on the other side of that same Near East, Iran is burning: around those days nationwide protests break out and the regime represses them harshly, amid an economic crisis that fills the streets. Guterres does not hang photos on the line. Guterres reads it aloud. That is his function: each time he speaks, he puts the law back inside the frame so the images are not read as natural facts, as weather, as landscape.

This photo is the one you expect when you hear the word “crime”. In the depth of a Jerusalem winter, with the rain and cold the season brings, Israeli bulldozers tear down the UNRWA headquarters in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. Hours later, on the outskirts, tear gas is fired at the Qalandia vocational school. Over the rubble an Israeli flag flies; beside it, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir celebrates what he calls “a historic day”.

That same 20 January, the world was on something else. In the Swiss Alps the World Economic Forum was in session, with Trump’s visit announced. In Catalonia, a commuter train derailed at Gelida, leaving one dead and thirty-seven injured. And closer to home, in Chile, wildfires were killing at least nineteen people while the press talked about all of that and not about a UN headquarters falling to pieces in Jerusalem.

The clothespins cut in this single image are several, and it is worth counting them one by one. The 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, whose second section declares the Organisation’s premises inviolable. Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids the occupying power from destroying property in occupied territory. The 1907 Hague Regulations, which specifically protect property devoted to education. And above them all, the ICJ advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, which declared the occupation of East Jerusalem unlawful and denied Israel any sovereign title there. Without sovereignty, this is not an urban-planning demolition: it is the destruction of a protected asset on occupied soil.

Let us pause a moment to look at the line at this point, because it is worth taking a breath before going on. In just three photos — a law, a letter, a demolition — the following already hang broken: two paragraphs of the UN Charter, the 1946 Convention on the Organisation’s immunities, Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the 1907 Hague Regulations and an opinion of the world’s highest court. Five instruments. No consequence. The loop keeps turning.

The fourth photo is the quietest and the most revealing. The compound Israel seized in January is not left empty: it is turned into a military facility. Guterres speaks again, this time to condemn the raising of barracks on UN premises.

The backdrop of May is an open war: Israel and the United States against Iran, with the Strait of Hormuz held hostage and Pakistan mediating to halt it. And something happens that gives this photo an almost unbearable irony: that same 20 May, the UN General Assembly adopts a resolution that celebrates and recognises an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on states’ climate obligations. In other words: the world gathers to honour one ruling of the Court on the very day another ruling of the same Court — the one that protects UNRWA — is trampled in Jerusalem. The law is obeyed when it suits and ignored when it gets in the way. Here the inviolability of the 1946 Convention is severed again, but something worse is also committed: turning a civilian, humanitarian asset into a military base, which the law of armed conflict forbids with particular severity.

In this photo, too, there is no violence: there is a blueprint. Around those June days, with the Iran war still ablaze and a lethal heatwave beginning to suffocate Europe, the Jerusalem Governorate — the local Palestinian authority — warns of an Israeli plan to remove the Qalandia training centre and build in its place a “new educational complex”. The euphemism is the trap, and that is why it must be dismantled. The centre serves some three hundred and fifty students aged between fifteen and nineteen, on land granted to the agency by Jordan before the 1967 occupation. Replacing it with another school, under Israeli control, is not town planning: it is transfer. Here two things are cut: Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids the occupying power from altering the occupied population and territory, and the right to education enshrined in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration, in Article 13 of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and in Article 28 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. A blueprint is also a photo. It too hangs from the loop.

Israeli forces break into the Qalandia centre for the first time, seal the entrances, fire gas. It is a dress rehearsal. And it is impossible to ignore the clothespin that is cut, because it had only just been hung: barely eight months earlier, on 22 October 2025, the ICJ had handed down a new advisory opinion establishing that Israel may not unilaterally decide on the presence of UN entities in the occupied territory, and that it has the obligation to facilitate — not obstruct — UNRWA’s services, including health and education. Storming a UNRWA school is, point for point, the conduct the Court had just prohibited.

On that last day of June, Europe was counting its heat dead — more than one thousand three hundred, close to a thousand in France alone and more than three hundred in Spain — in Doha the US envoys were negotiating in secret with Iran, and the price of oil was collapsing. The assault on the school made almost no front page.

And so, having come full circle, we reach the photo we began with. Second assault on Qalandia in less than a month, this time in the dry heat of the Palestinian summer. According to the Jerusalem Governorate, the troops broke in, fired gas, held the teaching and administrative staff in one hall and occupied the roof of the camp’s popular committee building. The director of UNRWA for the West Bank, Roland Friedrich, gave the detail no photo shows but the line records: there were some eighty students and forty-five employees confined, unable to leave, without water or food for the children. That same day the army entered more than twenty West Bank localities, while settler attacks multiplied.

The rest of the world, that week, was celebrating and distracting itself: Spain had just won the 2026 football World Cup, the United Kingdom was breaking in a new prime minister, and the Booker Prize longlist was announced. And in Gaza, on that same 27 July, Israeli aircraft killed a senior Hamas commander in a bombing that violated the ceasefire in force, while returning sixty Gazan detainees. That image of the burnt gate is, in legal terms, one of the most loaded frames in the whole series: in it, several things break at once — the inviolability of UN premises and the immunity of its staff (1946 Convention), Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids collective punishment, and Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which forbids the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of minors and requires that they be treated humanely. Confining adolescents without water is precisely its reverse.

The last photo is not an action but a response: the Arab League and Egypt formally condemn the assault. The Egyptian foreign ministry calls it a flagrant violation of the inviolability of UN facilities; the Arab League’s ambassador, Faed Mustafa, invokes the 1946 Convention once more and recalls that the ICJ had already established Israel’s obligation to facilitate UNRWA’s work. The echo matters because it shows the line is still being read: the community of states again names the same norms. But an echo does not stop a bulldozer. The cord has not been cut; it is each clothespin that has been cut, one by one. And the loop, once again, begins to turn.

Here lies the meaning of the thread, and it must be said without adornment. Israel can demolish the headquarters, occupy it with soldiers, gas the students, expel the staff and replace the school with another under its control. What it cannot do — what no bulldozer can reach — is to tear down the norm that turns each of those acts into a crime. That is why Guterres repeats the same phrase, why the ICJ hands down one opinion after another, why the Arab League cites the 1946 Convention: not because the law stops the machines, but because the law is the only thing that keeps the series from being read as a succession of nameless events. The line is what holds the photos up as accusation and not as landscape.

And there is a second line, more uncomfortable, that must be put on the table for the sake of rigour. Almost everything we know of these events comes from a single Palestinian institutional source — the Jerusalem Governorate — relayed by the Anadolu agency and confirmed in essence by UNRWA. The chain of custody of these images is as narrow as the very corridor down which the students were taken. Not because the facts are doubtful, but because access to the place is militarised and independent verification is, deliberately, impossible. Israel cuts the clothespins of the law and, at the same time, stretches to the limit the thread by which the evidence can get out. The two cords hang in parallel, and both are under tension.

In the background, out of frame but holding it all up, is the larger case: South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the ICJ, the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister, the reports of the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. The dismantling of UNRWA is not a separate chapter of that file: it is its engineering. First you take apart whoever feeds, educates and counts the refugees, so that afterwards nothing is left — not the food, not the school, not the record that this population existed, held rights and had them torn away one by one.

And so we return to the end where we began, which turned out to be the same end as the other. The loop does not break because no one cuts it: impunity is precisely that, the guarantee that the coil will make another turn, and another, and hang another photo, and another. Our task, that of those of us who look at the photo on the phone, is the most modest and the most stubborn: to keep counting the clothespins out loud, until counting is no longer the only thing that can be done.

Al Jazeera. (2026, January 20). Israel bulldozes UNRWA buildings in occupied East Jerusalem. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/20/israel-bulldozes-unrwa-buildings-in-occupied-east-jerusalem

Al Jazeera. (2026, July 27). Israeli forces storm multiple West Bank towns, settler violence worsens. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/27/israeli-forces-storm-multiple-west-bank-towns-settler-violence-worsens

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