Al Jazeera :
An Israeli court has postponed its decision on an appeal lodged by Palestinian families facing forced displacement from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem’s Silwan district.
The appeal was against an Israeli court verdict in 2020, which okayed the expulsion of seven Palestinian families in order for Jewish settlers to move into the predominantly Arab district – part of the Israeli policy to build settler homes in occupied East Jerusalem, which is seen by Palestinians as their future capital.
“This policy of forcible expulsion has been going on for decades to push out the Palestinians in neighbourhoods in occupied East Jerusalem [to make way for] settlers…” said Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel-Hamid, speaking outside the Israeli magistrate court in Salahadin Street in East Jerusalem, where dozens of Palestinians had gathered to protest.
Heavily armed Israeli forces were also present in front of the court. At least one Palestinian, Qutaiba Odeh, was arrested at the protest. Odeh, a father of three who lives in the al-Bustan area in Silwan, has a demolishing order on his house.
“The Israel magistrate court decided to expel us for the interest of the settlers who are supported by Ateret Cohanim, a settlement organisation whose main job is to replace Palestinians with Jews,” Kayed al-Rajabi, head of one of the affected families, told Al Jazeera. “We were displaced from our houses in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1965 and now they want to displace us again.”
Al-Rajabi said the settlers claim his neighbourhood was owned by Yemeni Jews.
“If that’s true and they want to take their houses back, then we also want to get our houses in the Old City back,” he said.
More than 700,000 Palestinians were driven out or expelled from their homes by Jewish militias in 1948, when Israel was declared as an independent state. Thousands of Palestinians were further displaced in the Six-Day War in 1967 when Israel captured East Jerusalem.
Silwan, home to about 33,000 Palestinians, is located outside the walls of the Old City and barely 5km (2.4 miles) from Sheikh Jarrah neighourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, where protests against planned expulsions led to Israeli violence against Palestinians and the 11-day war on Gaza.
Since the 1980s, Israel has been moving Jewish settlers to the neighbourhood, and currently several hundred settlers live there in heavily protected settlement compounds, at the expense of Palestinian families who were forcibly displaced.
According to Amnesty International, Ateret Cohanim has been seeking – with the support of Israeli authorities – to expel some 100 Palestinian families from the Batn al-Hawa area in Silwan, claiming the land is rightfully owned by a Jewish trust active in the area more than 100 years ago.
