On November 9, 2025, at 7:00 a.m., throngs of Israeli police stormed the Batn al-Hawa area of East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood and forcibly expelled 14 people from their homes.1

“Police told [Asmahan Shweiki] that she had one hour to get out. Of course, she didn’t have enough time. She’s elderly. So, they themselves started moving everything she had in the house and put it outside,” Zuheir Rajabi, who lives just above the Shweiki family, told Jerusalem Story.2 “They basically emptied the house out and put it in the streets.”

Zuheir noted that while the police executed the expulsion on November 9, 2025, the family had until November 12 to vacate their property. However, police claimed they received a court order to evict on November 9 instead.

Asmahan’s son, Mohammad Shweiki, was arrested during the expulsion, and she was hospitalized after fainting due to the distress of being forcibly expelled from her home of decades.3

This dramatic scene isn’t unfamiliar to Batn al-Hawa, which has experienced waves of expulsions since 2016 when Ateret Cohanim began suing Palestinian families in the neighborhood, claiming ownership of their homes. The expulsions have accelerated in recent years as Israeli courts deliver fateful rulings to Palestinian residents, which has led to the displacement of 19 families thus far.4 With 85 families, totaling 700 residents, fighting expulsions at various stages in the courts, what happened in November 2025 is likely to be repeated in the coming months.^[2]

On November 6, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected the appeal request that the Abd al-Fatah Rajabi family filed on their expulsion and gave them 60 days to leave their home. If they don’t vacate their property by January 5, 2026, the police can forcibly expel them.5 During the November 9 expulsions of the Shweiki and Odeh families, following the Supreme Court’s rejection of their appeal request, police also delivered an expulsion order to the family of Nasser Rajabi, demanding the household of 26 residents leave within 21 days.6 At the time of writing, Israeli police haven’t yet carried out the expulsion.

Seven families, including Zuheir’s, have appeals pending in the Israeli Supreme Court—after the Jerusalem District Court sweepingly rejected their appeals in September 2025—while hundreds of residents are battling expulsion lawsuits in Jerusalem’s Magistrate’s Court.7 For the Basbus family, their appeal request to the Supreme Court wasn’t accepted, so, according to Zuheir, Israeli settlers went to the police to push them to send an expulsion notice to the family.

“The eyes of the police are constantly here,” Zuheir said, describing how the police visit the neighborhood daily, teasing and warning residents about upcoming evictions.

The lawsuits stem from Israel’s 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law, which Ateret Cohanim has employed to sue families in Batn al-Hawa, claiming that the property belongs to the Benvenisti Trust, which the settler group took over in 2001. The Benvenisti Trust was established in 1899 primarily to house Yemenite 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 the 1948 partition of Palestine. This legislation is one of the main tools Israeli settlers use to displace Palestinians from East Jerusalem.

“Over the past number of years, you’ve had a major transformation of the Israeli Supreme Court where they have successfully been able to appoint more . . . conservative justices in the terms of those that are much more supportive of settler projects and the settler cause,” Amy Cohen, Ir Amim’s international relations director, told Jerusalem Story.10

Without the international community watching, settlers have become more emboldened in Batn al-Hawa. The same day that the Odeh and Shweiki families were expelled, Israeli settlers entered their homes and raised Israeli flags.12 While the settlers haven’t officially moved in yet and instead are renovating the buildings, they have held rooftop gatherings of 30 to 40 settlers accompanied by police.

“It’s hard to adjust and to live on a daily basis like this, where we’re just next door to these settlers and not friendly to each other,” Zuheir said. “There is no dialogue or way to speak with them.”

And as settlers rejoice, Palestinians in Batn al-Hawa are on edge as expulsion ripples through the community.

“The general mood [here] is desperation. It’s hopelessness. We feel that the places where we grew up and have lived most of our lives are no longer going to be our neighborhood,” Zuheir revealed.

“We fear that if our neighbors have already been expelled, when is our turn?”