Afrasianet - With the support of the Israeli state and courts, Israeli settlers are seizing homes and buildings in the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood of East Jerusalem, targeting 700 Palestinians living in neighborhoods in the shadow of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Israeli magazine "+972" publishes a report documenting the forced eviction campaign carried out by the Israeli occupation authorities and settler groups in the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem, and the accompanying practices aimed at emptying the neighborhood of its Palestinian inhabitants and replacing them with Jewish settlers.
The text of the report is as follows in Arabic:
At around 7 a.m. on Sunday, Israeli forces raided the home of 72-year-old Asma Shweika, giving her one hour to collect her belongings before forcibly taking over the house in the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood of East Jerusalem's Silwan neighborhood near the Old City walls. It is the house where Shweika has lived all her life, where she watched the Israeli army shoot her son dead when he was 16 years old in 1990, and where her husband was also killed after he was suffocated by tear gas fired by Israeli police during the Second Intifada.
When the police returned home at around 8:30 a.m. to force Shweika and 11 of her relatives out into the street and empty the contents of the house, she fainted from the shock and was forced to be taken out of her home by Israeli medics on a stretcher. Her grandson, Muhammad, was arrested on the spot, later released on the condition of house arrest for three days, and fined (1,000 shekels – $300).
In the same building, Israeli police forcibly stormed the home of Juma Odeh, a 60-year-old man located on the ground floor, and began throwing furniture, clothes and kitchen utensils into the street to be loaded onto trucks and transported to the warehouse. Within hours, Israeli settlers and municipal staff erected a metal fence around the roof of the building, demolished the concrete barrier separating it from a nearby settler property, attached the two buildings with iron ladders, and hoisted four new Israeli flags on the roof as settlers celebrated the latest occupation.
The settlers' seizure of the homes of the Shweika and Odeh families comes about five months after the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the families' joint appeal against the eviction, in a decision biased by the Ateret Cohanim settler organization, which has been working for decades to seize Palestinian homes in Silwan, in order to "restore Jewish life in the heart of Old Jerusalem." In late September, the Israeli government issued final eviction orders for the two properties.
In the weeks leading up to the eviction, masked settlers and police repeatedly came to the doorstep of Shweika's house to photograph the house and its contents. "They told us, leave the key in the door," Shweika told 972 Plus magazine. But last Sunday's evictions are still a surprise, as they were carried out two days before the official order went into effect, suggesting a deliberate effort to surprise residents.
A day before the evictions, residents of Batn al-Hawa, together with Israeli Jewish activists, stood on the neighborhood's main street for the first time in two years, protesting the impending evictions. For the nearly 80 Palestinians living in six homes belonging to the families of Shweiki, Awad and Rajabi, whose homes are expected to be evicted in the coming weeks, the demonstration marked the last stop after more than a decade of their case being tried in Israeli courts.
Every layer of the Israeli bureaucracy approved the evictions before they were approved by the Supreme Court, which is often seen as the last barrier to Israel's full slide into authoritarianism. Zuhair al-Rajabi, head of the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood committee, who is also facing eviction orders, said, "The settlers are present in every education ministry, the interior, the municipality, they all work together from within the regime. These institutions serve the settlers and they are partly run by them.
The recent evictions, along with the imminent expulsion of Nasser Rajabi's family, have brought the number of Palestinian families forced to leave their homes in Batin al-Hawa this year alone to nine, in addition to at least 16 other families who have been evicted since the early 2000s. All of their homes are now occupied by Jewish settlers.
Some 700 residents of Batn al-Hawa are still engaged in ongoing legal battles to avoid the same fate, with at least 11 additional lawsuits pending in various courts. Eviction dates also vary between families, disrupting collective organizing efforts and ensuring that opposition and public interest come in smaller waves.
On the same day that the police evicted the Shweika and Odeh families, the family of Nasser Rajabi's mother, of 18 members, received a new eviction order that is due to come into effect on the first day of next month. Unlike the previous notice her family received, which did not include the date of the eviction and left the matter in limbo, this notice is final.
Her nephew, Kayed Rajabi, a 50-year-old neighbour, has also been ordered to vacate his home by January 6 next year. "Today we are, tomorrow they are, and everyone is a target," he says, referring to neighbours who were protesting together.
Progressive erasure of Palestinian life
After Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, the city's municipal boundaries were drawn to include 28 Palestinian villages to the south, east, and north, including the Silwan neighborhood and the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood, whose population of Palestinian refugees increased after the 1948 Nakba, and again after the 1967 war. After the formal annexation of Jerusalem in 1980, Israel carried out a fierce settlement campaign, allocating most of the land within the municipal boundaries for the construction of Jewish settlements, while systematically restricting Palestinian neighborhoods to surrounding it.16 A Jewish settlement of about 222,000 settlers, and 10 other settlements are located just outside the city limits and are home to an additional 80,000 Israeli Jews. Taken together, these areas, all illegal under international law, make up nearly half of all settlers in the occupied West Bank.
East Jerusalem is home to 350,000 Palestinians, none of whom are nearly impossible to obtain a building permit, while the municipality has consistently neglected the infrastructure of Palestinian neighborhoods, as well as their social needs, and imposed unjustifiably high taxes on them, using the so-called "center of life" policy as a weapon to revoke Palestinians' residency rights on their land. Together, these policies have contributed to the gradual erasure of the Palestinian presence in the city. But even after decades of aggressive Judaization and a rise in the number of settlers, the area around the Old City has remained In Jerusalem, from the north, south and east, Palestinians overwhelmingly participated. Beginning in the early 2000s, settler groups such as Ateret Cohanim led the way in changing this demographic balance.
Just 300 meters from the southern wall of the Temple Mount compound and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood is a hillside overflowing with narrow corridors and overcrowded houses, with few roads without sidewalks, where the labyrinth of the Wazarib, stairs and alleys do not diminish the pride of Palestinians living in the outskirts of the Old City, "In the morning I hear the voice of the muezzin from Al-Aqsa," Nasser Rajabi's mother said while smiling.
However, most Palestinian families live below the poverty line, have historically been denied municipal services such as water and electricity, so there is no green space or for children to play, and a large number of men in the neighborhood have served prison sentences, or their loved ones have been killed by Israeli forces. Unlike Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Jewish settlers live next to Palestinian families.
The settlers took advantage of the deprivation of Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem to persuade Palestinians to sell their homes. Zuhair al-Rajabi says that the settlers have repeatedly offered him to buy his house, and they asked him why he chooses to live in such conditions of neglect, to which he replied, "I am happy in this neighborhood that you call garbage, I was born here, I don't suffer from viruses in the water, I am immune to them.
Over the years, he has also offered to buy his house, he says, "They tried to write me a check and asked me to set the price, in Jordanian dinars, or in Israeli currency or whatever currency I want," and they also offered to cover the costs of moving and settling him and his family in more upscale Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem such as Beit Hanina and Beit Safafa, "but Batn al-Hawa is where I live.
The Ateret Cohanim group first resorted to the courts in 2001, when three of its employees took control of the Benefnesti Fund, which was established in 1899 to house Yemeni Jewish immigrants in the Silwan neighborhood, allegedly leaving it and fleeing to other areas during the Great Palestinian Revolt between 1936 and 1939, against the British Mandate. In 2002, the state granted ownership of 5.2 dunams of land in Batn al-Hawa, and considered it a Waqf land against this background, and Ateret Cohanim immediately began filing lawsuits against dozens of Palestinian families living on these lands, although it did not prove its connection to the original Waqf. Through the Trust Fund, the group subsequently took control of an additional 3 dunams of Palestinian land in the area.
Under Israel's 1970 Law on Legal and Administrative Affairs, Jews are allowed to reclaim property in East Jerusalem that belonged to Jews before the 1948 war, and then fell under Jordanian control until the Israeli occupation in 1967, even though the state has already compensated these residents for the loss of their property. But the same right does not extend to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were stripped of their property within what became the state of Israel after the Nakba.
By 2004, Ateret Cohanim had moved 11 Jewish families to Silwan by lobbying Palestinian residents to sell. The settlers brought a full security apparatus with them, and turned the neighborhood overnight into a high-security zone, guarded by private security companies funded by the Israeli Housing Ministry, along with Border Police officers and soldiers, and "from the first day the settlers entered the neighborhood, we all started to suffer, especially our children," says a Rajabi commander.
In those early years, Palestinians in Jerusalem were routinely subjected to night raids, arrests of minors, live fire, physical assaults, and harassment by settlers and Israeli security forces. Much of this daily intimidation was documented by video by Zuhair al-Rajabi, who installed 10 surveillance cameras with the help of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem in 2003. From his living room, Rajabi is constantly watching camera footage projected on a flat-screen TV, having to turn his house into a reflection of the surveillance machine that surrounds him.
"I put these cameras here because the settlers and the police beat me, and my father died of suffocation with tear gas," he said."There was no evidence or proof that we could use to go to the police and file a case," he said. He noted that many of his recordings were confiscated by the police and never returned to him.
A decade of legal warfare for settlers
In 2015, evictions began in the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood, and the Abu Nab family was the first to be evicted in June of that year, as a result of the 2002 lawsuits. The courts also ruled that they live on land owned by the Benefit Fund, and that they must vacate their homes or face forced deportation. By 2016, Ateret Cohanim had filed cases against 81 families in the neighborhood, covering 87 homes and about 700 people.
The families have tried to file a single lawsuit to challenge the evictions together, but the Israeli authorities have rejected them, forcing them to file applications individually or in smaller groups. By fragmenting legal challenges, the authorities are mitigating collective resistance and preventing the formation of a united front. There is also a legal merit to this fragmentation strategy, explained by Zuhair Rajabi, "Whatever decision the court makes in an individual case, it will rely on this precedent in subsequent decisions as each unfavorable ruling strengthens the ability of the courts to reject future family appeals.
However, the Rajabi family immediately filed an appeal in 2015 challenging the legitimacy of Ateret Cohanim's claims to their property. The Shweiki and Odeh families resumed together in the same period. But even while the lawsuits were pending, Israeli settlers and officials intensified their mistreatment of the Palestinian population. For years, Israeli soldiers prevented Palestinians from entering and descending the narrow street leading to and from the neighborhood as they escorted settler children to school every morning, where soldiers also provoked locals and stole soccer balls from their children, arrested parents and pointed their guns at groups of Teenagers.
After 7 October 2023, court decisions on eviction orders against Palestinian families accelerated, and harassment intensified as settlers and security forces alike became increasingly emboldened to use their weapons. Settler children often wave guns, bullets, and bombs at Palestinians, plus tear gas, and the guards and army accompanying them, "all together," explained a Rajabi commander.
The Jerusalem District Court ruled against the Rajabi and Shweiki and Odeh families in the summer of 2024, ruling that Ateret Cohanim had legal rights in their homes, and that the families had the last option available, to appeal to the Supreme Court. On June 16, the court rejected the families' appeal, six days after the Rajabi family filed the request. On 29 September, police appeared at the homes of the Rajabi, Odeh and Shweika families, informing them of eviction notices.
Soon you will not see an Arab here
Inside um Nasser al-Rajabi's house, the ground floor is filled with tangled wires, sterilization equipment and the sound of beeping devices, this is no ordinary living room, over the years, she and her family have built this room to fit her paralyzed grandson, Awad, who had a stroke 5 years ago and needs round-the-clock care, lives in a hospital bed, and is fed intravenously. Except for the hospital, where care is expensive and difficult to access when settlers, police or soldiers block roads, no He can survive anywhere else, says Nasser's mother, "If the electricity goes out, my grandson dies.
When the authorities arrive to evict her, Nasser's mother does not know where she will go, how she will move her children, or whether she will be able to afford to rebuild the room equipped to care for Awad. She has lived in the 4-storey house in Batn al-Hawa for more than 50 years, married as a teenager, had 11 children, and continues to raise her large family within its walls, and its façade painted with colorful flowers, birds and water eyes as part of the "I am a Witness to Silwan" project.
The house used to be a place to gather her entire family during the holidays, but now she can only host her daughters. "The settlers, their guards and the police see our children as a threat, they stop them on the street," she said. "My sons and grandchildren used to come here all the time to eat, drink and celebrate, but now "none of them can come."
After years of long and costly legal battles, families are left with few options. A rugby captain says he spent more than 120,000 shekels ($37,000) in legal fees on court proceedings, while he is likely to receive no compensation for his property after he vacated his home.
Source: Israeli magazine +972