The Basbus family in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan had until January 5, 2026, to vacate their property. The order came after Israel’s Supreme Court rejected their request to appeal a Jerusalem District Court ruling that permitted their expulsion from their home in favor of settlers.1

Israeli police and border patrol harassed the two-household family outside their home in the Batn al-Hawa section of Silwan on January 4, 2026, Zuheir Rajabi, a neighbor of the Basbus family, recalled.2 At 10 p.m. that night, the police called the family and told them they have two hours to vacate their home or face a fine of at least NIS 60,000 (about $19,000) for not leaving by the January 5 deadline.

Under intensified police pressure, the Basbus family left their home of five decades before midnight on January 5. The family is now crammed into a storage unit in Silwan.

By the beginning of 2026, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected appeal requests from 20 families in Batn al-Hawa, after already rejecting appeals from six families in November 2025 (see Israeli Settlers Are Seizing Home after Home in Silwan). Roughly 150 Palestinians living in at least 28 households now face displacement in the coming weeks.3 As of January 12, 2026, they were given 21 days to vacate their homes following dismissals of their requests to appeal to the Supreme Court over the past month.

Another 570 residents have expulsion cases at different stages in Israeli courts, due to lawsuits brought by the Israeli settler group Ateret Cohanim. The lawsuits stem from Israel’s 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law, which Ateret Cohanim has employed to sue Palestinian families in Batn al-Hawa, claiming that their properties belong originally to the Benvenisti Trust, which the settler group took over in 2001.

The Benvenisti Trust was established in 1899 primarily to house Yemeni Jewish immigrants in Silwan, who then abandoned the area during the 1936–39 Great Palestinian Revolt. The 1970 law allows Jews—but not Palestinians—to claim ownership of land and property lost after 1948. This legislation is one of the main tools Israeli settlers use to displace Palestinians from East Jerusalem.

Most of the families in Batn al-Hawa purchased the plots of land and built their homes on them before 1967, when East Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule. This means that title deeds to the land are Jordanian. While Israeli courts agree that the land was legally purchased, they ruled that Israel’s 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law endows the properties to Jews, which is why they must be handed over to them.

While settlers often initiate the expulsion proceedings against Palestinians in different parts of Jerusalem, Israel’s legal system plays a prominent role in the ongoing expulsion. In September 2023, an audit (see Israeli Justice Ministry Finds Trust a Front for Settler Group Expelling Palestinians) carried out by Israel’s Ministry of Justice found that the Benvenisti Trust operates as a front for Ateret Cohanim, and that the endowment is riddled with conflicts of interest, working in direct violation of the trust’s mission to house lower-income Jews. Despite the misconduct found, Israel’s Registrar of Trusts ruled not to revoke Ateret Cohanim’s status as trustee.

The rapid new wave of forcible home expulsions in Batn al-Hawa is a direct result of Israeli Supreme Court decisions. Since April 2024, the increasingly conservative Supreme Court has consistently rejected Batn al-Hawa’s families’ requests to appeal the expulsion rulings from lower courts, thereby denying Palestinians further legal recourse.

“The judiciary is complicit in this mass expulsion and is allowing and enabling this to happen,” Amy Cohen, international relations director at Ir Amim, an Israeli rights group tracking political developments in Jerusalem, told Jerusalem Story.4 “But at the end of the day, the Israeli government and the Jerusalem Municipality have the administrative means to prevent this from happening.”

Noting the stark double standard in how Israel treats Jews versus Palestinians, Cohen said, “If we were speaking about a situation where 700 Jewish Israelis were facing mass expulsion, the Jerusalem Municipality, hands down, would get involved and do everything within its means to come to an equitable and sustainable solution.”

Israeli authorities lack the political will to come to the Palestinians’ aid, Cohen explains. As Israel continues to ignore its obligations under international law to prevent the forcible transfer of an occupied population, Cohen goes on, it is the responsibility of the international community to pressure Israel as an occupying power.

“Yet you see the inaction of the international community to hold Israel accountable to international law,” Cohen said. “In the absence of accountability, Israel’s actions are only going to get even more brazen.”

In fact, they already have. Cohen explains that since the so-called ceasefire came into effect in October 2025, “there has been an explosion in violence, what I call Jewish terrorism, within the West Bank,” alongside a massive escalation in the displacement of Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem. “It is an ongoing era of impunity,” she adds.

As 2026 is an election year in Israel, Cohen argues, “we are going to likely see even more violence and displacement as a means to score political points. Palestinians bear the brunt of this, as we have seen many times in the past.”

As more and more Palestinians are pushed out, the demographic composition of Silwan is changing. Settlers with assault rifles wrapped around their shoulders regularly walk the neighborhood’s streets alongside Israeli police. A group of border patrol officers hovered around Rajabi’s home in Batn al-Hawa when Jerusalem Story visited him on January 10, 2026.

While the Supreme Court rejected his family’s appeal on January 1, 2026, the police have yet to deliver him an expulsion order. While he and his family wait, dread looms over their home like the officers outside their door.

“I’m afraid, I won’t hide this from you,” Rajabi began. “I’m worried about my children who are in their 20s. I don’t want them to confront the security services; they can be arrested, they can be shot at, they can be taken away,” he explained. “No matter what, whether you agree to vacate or not, they will get you out, with or without arrest, dead or alive.”

Rajabi has six brothers, each with his own family and 21 days to vacate their respective homes. “Each of my brothers can make his own decision, but for me,” Rajabi clarified, “if it is a dead end, and there is no other solution, I’ll leave.”

Rajabi hasn’t found a place to rent yet, noting housing costs are high in Jerusalem. While his family owns a home in al-Ram, north of East Jerusalem, the building is located beyond the Israeli-built Separation Wall, which snakes through Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem (see The Separation Wall). Moving there would mean losing his Jerusalem residency, and with that, vital services like health insurance (see Precarious Status).

Rents within Jerusalem are also largely unaffordable to Palestinians. “We’ve been looking for a while,” Rajabi explains. “We would have to pay NIS 5,000 to 7,000 a month. People like my brothers and me make no more than NIS 6,000 a month, and we have to pay bills and taxes like the arnona.”

“In the end, I’ll have to leave,” Rajabi sighed. “I hope I find a home within Jerusalem that we can live in.”

For Rajabi, this is all part of an Israeli strategy of removing as many Palestinians from Jerusalem as possible. “The main idea of the Israeli government today is to decrease the number of East Jerusalemites living within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem,” Rajabi said. “The state wants less and less Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and to repopulate it with Jewish settlers.”

Batn al-Hawa is just one area of Silwan under threat by settlers and settler organizations. Below the hills of Batn al-Hawa, in al-Bustan, more than 100 Palestinian homes are at risk of demolition so Israel can build a biblical theme park.5 And on the eastern edge of Silwan, in Wadi Qaddum, the Jerusalem Municipality demolished a residential building housing approximately 100 people on December 22, 2025.6

These developments are transforming Silwan in particular, and East Jerusalem as a whole, into a Judaized space, endangering the very character of this ancient city and foreclosing the possibility of a future Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem.

“The beauty of the multicultural and multireligious identity of Jerusalem is under attack,” Cohen warned, but she remains hopeful. “At the end of the day, we’re not going to go down without a fight. We are going to do whatever we can to raise our voices about what is taking place in Silwan, about the amount of oppression and injustice exacted on this community. We will not go down in silence.”