Israel thought an opportunistic assault on UNRWA over unpaid taxes would put them in their place. It's not worked out well for them. Right, so Israel’s latest stunt - storming the UNRWA offices in East Jerusalem, cutting communications, and raising its own flag - isn’t about overdue bills or taxes. That’s the official line, but we’re not here for Israel’s script. This was a test of a much bigger lie: that Israel operates within the rules, that UN protections matter, and that international law is anything more than a nice idea for when it’s convenient. So let’s cut to the chase here. Israel doesn’t just want to control land. It wants to erase the people who’ve been living in limbo for decades, whose refugee status won’t quietly disappear, no matter how many flags you replace or how many schools you close. This isn’t about aid. This is about closing a legal file without ever having to face the music for what’s been taken. And as usual, the world watches, but it doesn't move. Welcome to the new normal. Right, so Israel has entered the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in East Jerusalem, cut communications, seized equipment, removed the UN flag, raised its own, and told the world this was a routine matter of municipal enforcement. That is the sequence of events as they occurred. A state has acted directly against a UN agency operating on occupied territory and has done so by asserting domestic authority over international protection. The insistence that nothing extraordinary has happened is the first warning sign, because power only works this hard to normalise an act when it knows it has crossed a boundary it would rather not name. This was not a clerical dispute that can be tidied away later, and it was not a misunderstanding between bureaucracies. It was a deliberate intervention, carried out openly, designed to test whether UN protection still has any force when it collides with a state determined to escape obligation. UNRWA is not a peripheral organisation that has wandered into controversy by accident. It exists at the core of the unresolved Palestinian refugee question, and it does so not through slogans or speeches but through administration. UNRWA registers refugees, maintains records, and sustains the legal fact that displacement has not been resolved simply because decades have passed. That function matters far more than any individual service it delivers. It anchors obligations that do not depend on Israel’s goodwill, donor sentiment, or the political fashions of the moment. As long as UNRWA exists, the refugee question remains legally unfinished, and that unfinished status is precisely what Israel has spent decades trying to eliminate without conceding return, restitution, or accountability.