On June 4, 2025, the Jerusalem Local Planning Committee, part of the Jerusalem Municipality, discussed a plan to build a new Israeli settlement along the northern edge of the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem.1

The plan aims to build 1,500 housing units across approximately 30 acres of land in what’s known as the Menachem Begin Government Complex, where Israel’s National Police headquarters and Ministry of National Security, including several other government offices, are located.2

Historically, under the British Mandate, Sheikh Jarrah formed the northern gateway to the city of Jerusalem, through which Palestinians from outside the city could enter. Building a huge Israeli settlement at its northern edge will also sever the Palestinian neighborhood from access to the city of Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank, disrupting any potential future contiguity.

The new settlement was proposed by the Jerusalem Development Authority and the Israeli Ministry of Finance’s Government Construction Administration without any input from the Palestinian residents of the area, Jerusalem city council member Laura Wharton explained to Jerusalem Story. “They were not consulted in any way . . . This whole plan is being thrown on top of them without giving them any input or even warning,” Wharton, who spoke with residents about the plan, added.3

Many of these residents are internally displaced Palestinians from lands that were occupied in 1948. They were resettled in Sheikh Jarrah as part of a housing agreement between Jordan and the UN when East Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule. “To move them out now means they’re being made refugees a second time,” Wharton said.

The plan calls to demolish the existing government offices and replace them with 17 skyscrapers, as well as commercial and educational facilities, including 25 classrooms.4 These classrooms are designated for Israeli Jewish students while Palestinian children are facing a dire shortage of an estimated 2,477 classrooms in East Jerusalem (see Ir Amim Issues New Report on Education in East Jerusalem, Tracking Severe Challenges Facing Schools There).

The new settlement plan follows a spate of decisions this year set to transform the historic Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah into a Jewish settler enclave.

On May 21, 2025, the Jerusalem Local Planning Committee advanced a plan to demolish some 40 Palestinian homes in the Umm Haroun section of Sheikh Jarrah and replace them with dozens of high-rise apartment towers (see Israel Planning to Supplant Umm Haroun Area with Settler Skyscrapers). Plans are also moving forward to build a yeshiva (see Israel Expanding Settler Footprint in Sheikh Jarrah with Yeshiva) at the neighborhood’s southern entrance, across from the expanded Israeli war memorial next to the Sheikh Jarrah Mosque. This renovation is part of the “Northern Trail” settler tourism project, developing a walking route from Damascus Gate to Sheikh Jarrah that highlights its Jewish heritage while erasing its historic and present Palestinian identity. Additionally, settlers have long sought to expel another 28 Palestinian families from the Kerem al-Juni area of the neighborhood (see New Digital Mapping Platform Shares Sheikh Jarrah’s Story with the World).

“Sheikh Jarrah has been the focus of settlement efforts for decades,” Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at the Israeli Jerusalem-focused NGO Ir Amim, told Jerusalem Story, adding that despite settler attempts to take over the neighborhood, these efforts have largely failed.5

“We’re 57 years after 1967 and have maybe 10 settler families in Sheikh Jarrah,” Tatarsky said, referring to Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967.

“So, Israel is now devising new methods to Judaize the area. If this settlement is built and you have 1,500 Israeli families living adjacent to Sheikh Jarrah, suddenly those 10 settler families . . . will be part of a much bigger and stronger Israeli space,” Tatarsky said. “This really signifies a new stage and new tactics . . . that will very much help the takeover projects inside [Sheikh Jarrah], which show how it is a state project.”

Wharton cautioned that while the new proposed settlements target Sheikh Jarrah, “all of East Jerusalem is in one way or another under attack in terms of planning.” While this has been the case since the occupation of the city in 1967, the new efforts to build within and erase whole Palestinian neighborhoods is an escalation.

Munir Nusseibeh, director and cofounder of Al-Quds Human Rights Clinic, explained that Israel’s policy with regards to Jerusalem is to settle Jews in “the hearts of Palestinian neighborhoods.” This is a change, he added, from the early period of settlement following the occupation of East Jerusalem, when Israeli policy was to construct settlements around inhabited Palestinian areas of the city “in order to disconnect Jerusalem from different spaces and create totally new residential areas for Israeli settlers.”

But as time went by, the focus of settlement became the inhabited Palestinian neighborhoods themselves, the most significant of which being Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, and the Old City.

“Sheikh Jarrah is very important,” Nusseibeh went on. Given its close proximity to the Old City, it has become one of Israel’s primary targets for Jewish settlement. “By colonizing in Sheikh Jarrah . . . Israel is making sure that this space is becoming more and more Judaized and less and less Palestinian for the vision of Judaizing the areas that they believe are most important in the city of Jerusalem,” he added.6 “The closer you are to the Old City, the more significant the space becomes for the Judaization industry.” Sheikh Jarrah is also a core area within the areas of formerly Arab East Jerusalem that might have been given to the Palestinians as their capital, in case of a final settlement that divided the city, an outcome that Israel is adamant on preventing at all costs (see With Eyes on Gaza, City Fast Tracks New Settlement That Will Foreclose Future Palestinian Capital in Abu Dis).

Tatarsky emphasized that Israel’s settlement campaign in Jerusalem is primarily focused on creating a ring of Jewish colonies around the Old City (see The Three Israeli Settlement Rings in and around East Jerusalem: Supplanting Palestinian Jerusalem).

“The heart of Jerusalem—all these places with religious and national significance—[is] basically Palestinian. You have more than 100,000 Palestinians living in and around the Old City and very few Israelis, so it’s really a state project to change that,” Tatarsky told Jerusalem Story. “[Israelis] don’t accept this reality that these places are Palestinian and remain Palestinian after so many decades of occupation.”

And part of changing that reality is disrupting Palestinian territorial contiguity while presenting a seamlessly continuous Israeli space from West Jerusalem to East Jerusalem.

“This is a place that settlers are very interested in,” Wharton explained. The settlement project is “a way to expand the neighborhoods on the west side of the Green Line and to begin a creeping takeover of Sheikh Jarrah,” she added, referring to the 1949 Armistice Agreement Line, which demarcated the line between Jewish West Jerusalem and Arab East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank until 1967.

“It involves the destruction of houses that should be preserved, houses that were built by Jordan and the UN” to house internally displaced Palestinians in 1948, Wharton averred. The planned settlement “is huge and ugly,” she went on, “and completely out of proportion and inappropriate” for the neighborhood that features mostly one- or two-story buildings. The planned towers “are an incredible eyesore.”

The boundaries of this new settlement in Sheikh Jarrah further blur the lines between east and west as its northern tip reaches the Israeli settlement of French Hill; its western edge abuts the Ma’alot Dafna settlement; and the southeastern boundary lies next to Israel’s planned “Silicon Wadi” settlement in Wadi al-Joz. The approved Silicon Wadi settlement includes a road linking the Kerem al-Juni section of Sheikh Jarrah to the Silicon Wadi area (see Israel Demolishing Palestinian Neighborhood to Build Jerusalem’s “Silicon Valley”).7

Developments in Sheikh Jarrah reflect a wider and ongoing trend in East Jerusalem: to change the demography from majority Palestinian to solely Jewish Israeli. But this is not just about maintaining a Jewish majority; it is also about inflicting a sense of supremacy over Palestinians, as Tatarsky explained.

“A contiguous Palestinian space is something that [Israel] cannot control,” Tatarsky said. “[So, it wants] to break up East Jerusalem into smaller parts that are easier to control and easier to oppress.” This would serve the state’s ultimate purpose of the “Judaization of the Old City [Holy] Basin.”

Settlement expansion in East Jerusalem has been on the agendas of successive Israeli governments. “The idea has been there for a long time,” Nusseibeh said, and has been implemented “sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly.” Despite the illegality of these settlements, “the international environment is allowing this to happen” by giving Israel the “green light to do whatever it wants.”

Nusseibeh explained that the ongoing genocide in Gaza is another reason for the recent push in settlement expansion in Jerusalem. With the international community’s attention on the besieged enclave, “colonization activity is probably less significant at the moment,” so “Israel is able to do it with less international attention.” But, Nusseibeh added, even in the absence of war, Israel would still be “very active in these plans.”