UPDATE: 

Following the court-ordered eviction of the Basha family, with all avenues for appeal exhausted, Israeli authorities expelled the 13-member Palestinian family from their historic home on al-Wad Street in Jerusalem’s Old City and turned it over to settlers on July 22, 2026.1

Settlers from Yeshivat Ateret Yerushalayim, a Jewish seminary closely related to the Ateret Cohanim settler group, whose eviction lawsuits against residents in the Batn al-Hawa area of Silwan have displaced at least 50 Palestinian families to date, were seen reciting prayers and attaching a mezuzah, a Jewish ritual object placed on the doorstep of a home, to the Bashas’ house.2 The family has lived in the home since the 1930s, but Israel’s General Custodian launched legal proceedings against the family eight years ago, leading to their recent expulsion.

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“All that Mufid Basha wants for the rest of his life is to stay in his house where he was born and raised,” a family friend of the Bashas told Jerusalem Story. Mufid lives in the Basha building on al-Wad Street, the main road to al-Haram al-Sharif in the Old City of Jerusalem. At 76, he still visits al-Aqsa Mosque five times a day for prayer. “His situation is truly heartbreaking,” the family friend said.3

Mufid and other members of the Basha family are being forcibly expelled from their building by Israeli settlers. Now, family and friends are searching for a one-bedroom home in the Old City where Mufid can live out the rest of his days.

On December 18, 2025, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the 13-member Basha family’s right to appeal against the Jerusalem District Court’s ruling to forcibly evict them from their home, paving the way for their expulsion.4 The family has until April 26, 2026, to vacate their property, after which they can be forcibly expelled by Israeli police.5

The family was ordered to leave their home by February 16, 2026, but on February 5, the family’s lawyers managed to secure a postponement from the Supreme Court to April.

Lawyer Ziad Hammouri, head of the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Studies, told Jerusalem Story that activists are still attempting to freeze the expulsion. He explained that if settler groups succeed in permanently acquiring the Basha building, it would create a dangerous precedent for the whole historic area. “The situation in the Old City is extremely worrying,” Hammouri added. “Settlers and settler groups are ramping up efforts to seize Palestinian properties using a variety of methods,” including spurious ownership claims.6

Many properties in the Old City are waqf endowment properties, making them much more difficult to seize (see Settlers Fail at Brazen Attempt to Seize Historic Khalidi Home).

The Basha family have continuously lived in the home since before 1948, when they purchased the property from Jewish owners.

Mufid Basha was born in the house in 1950, and he has lived there all his life and raised his three children there. His father, Muhammad, guarded the Torat Chaim Yeshiva, which operated in two buildings in the Old City. According to Mufid, “My father did not allow anyone to enter the compound and loot the yeshiva. He locked all the books, furniture, and sacred items in one room and safeguarded them for years, even though he did not know if or when he would be able to return them. In 1967, when Israel captured the Old City, my father returned everything to the yeshiva. Newspapers even reported on it.”7

According to Peace Now, “Thanks to the Basha family, Torat Chaim is the only yeshiva among dozens of yeshivot and synagogues that operated in the Old City before 1948 whose equipment, books and sacred items were preserved.”8

For over 80 years, they did not face any issues regarding their ownership. But in 2017, settler Hananel Gurfinkel began overseeing East Jerusalem holdings in the office of the General Custodian, a unit within the Israeli Ministry of Justice responsible for handling assets that allegedly belonged to Jews before 1948. In 2018, the General Custodian sued the Bashas for allegedly failing to pay rent to the Custodian since 1967, when the Custodian took over management of the property. The Bashas contest the allegations.9

The Custodian claims Jews purchased the building in the early 20th century and that it was registered in 1908 to Torat Chaim, a Jewish endowment associated with Torat Chaim Yeshiva, a Jewish seminary.10 Torat Chaim Yeshiva dissolved into Yeshivat Ateret Cohanim, a right-wing institute backed by Israeli settler group Ateret Cohanim, which is responsible for the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign of Palestinians from the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood in Silwan (see Jerusalem Court Sides with Settlers, Ruling to Displace 66 Palestinians from Batn al-Hawa, Silwan; Israeli Settlers Are Seizing Home after Home in Silwan; and Silwan, the Bleeding Wound).11

Attorney Avi Segal, who has represented Ateret Cohanim in other expulsion cases against Palestinians, filed the lawsuit on the General Custodian’s behalf, but Jerusalem Story has not been able to verify to date if Ateret Cohanim is involved in the Basha family’s expulsion.12 After the Jerusalem District Court ruled to expel the Basha family, the Custodian released the property to Torat Chaim in 2020.13

“The General Custodian has become such a central entity behind both the facilitation of evictions of Palestinians, but then also enabling the settler takeover,” Amy Cohen, international relations director at Ir Amim, an Israeli nonprofit monitoring Jerusalem policy, told Jerusalem Story.14

In recent years, the General Custodian has initiated expulsion lawsuits (see Musrara Café across from Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate Faces Closure) against longtime East Jerusalem residents, as well as several settlement plans (see Israel Aiming to Supplant Umm Haroun Area of Sheikh Jarrah with Settler Skyscrapers) on East Jerusalem land it manages, where the ownership was registered to either the state or Israelis. But while the Custodian is playing a major part in expediting the Basha family’s expulsion, the role of Israel’s Supreme Court cannot be overlooked.

“Even though there should be a degree of independence within the judiciary, at the same time, we know that they’re very impacted by everything else that is going on around them,” Cohen said. “When there’s all of this distraction, when everyone’s concentrating on what’s going on in Gaza and in the rest of the West Bank, there’s no attention on East Jerusalem. It makes it a lot easier for Supreme Court justices to take decisions that will ultimately be in favor of settlers and lead to the displacement of Palestinians without the fear of generating major backlash.”

While the judicial process with these expulsions, Cohen elaborated, is incremental, “it’s all coming to a head now” because it is an election year. “The decisions that are being made are indicative of the general climate right now: complete impunity.”

Several neighbors of the Bashas indicated that if the three-story family building is completely seized, the entire neighborhood will become a large settlement outpost, potentially the largest in the Old City. This is especially concerning given that the neighbors already suffer almost daily harassment from students of the Jewish religious school located directly on al-Wad Street. One neighbor added that rumors circulating in the Old City suggest that several Jewish families affiliated with the extremist party of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir will move into the Basha building after many of its residents, mostly elderly, are displaced, further exacerbating the already difficult living conditions for Palestinians there.

Despite most people’s reluctance to speak publicly about the Basha family’s case for fear of Israeli reprisals and at the request of their lawyers, the issue is the talk of the town among the Palestinian community in the Old City, mostly due to the building’s location. Al-Wad Street is the most crowded street in the area, serving as a lifeline for residents and visitors due to its proximity to al-Aqsa Mosque and the Via Dolorosa.

The Basha case is complex, because it pertains to multiple owners and their descendants, some dating back to the 19th century, a source requesting anonymity explained.15 He added that Israeli authorities, who support settlement associations, have disregarded all laws to enable settlers to seize the property, given its crucial importance in altering the character of al-Wad Street in particular.

Marouf al-Rifai, advisor to the Palestinian governor of Jerusalem, explained: “The expansion of settlements in Jerusalem’s Old City imposes a new reality of restrictions on movement, housing, and work, leading to the disintegration of the social fabric and the weakening of community ties within the historic neighborhoods.”16

Economically, settlement expansion is causing a decline in Palestinian commercial activity due to checkpoints, closures, and constant harassment in and around the Old City, forcing many merchants to close their shops or leave. The cost of living and housing is also rising beyond the means of residents, while restrictive policies are being implemented to force them to emigrate.

This reality is eroding the sense of security and stability socially, limiting families’ ability to remain and expand within their city, and negatively impacting the lives and futures of children and youth. Ultimately, settlement activity in the Old City is not merely a housing project but a systematic and aggressive policy to forcibly reshape the identity of the Old City. It aims to impose new realities that transform the very essence of Jerusalem and impinge on the rights of its inhabitants.

The Basha building ultimately reflects Israel’s intensifying and systematic policy of Judaization in Jerusalem. It is an assault that aims to alter the city’s social, cultural, and economic character, and to shatter the balance that has sustained Jerusalem for centuries.

“This is an attempt to decrease and minimize the Palestinian presence within the area, but then also to really transform the character of—particularly—the Old City and its surrounding Palestinian neighborhoods,” Cohen said. “What we’re seeing now is an acceleration, an escalation of these moves, and they’re all taking place in tandem.”

“Just within the past month alone, the first month of 2026, you see the mass demolition of the UNRWA compound, these major, brazen raids in Kufr ‘Aqab, and the mass demolitions happening literally right now,” Cohen told Jerusalem Story. “You cannot separate what’s going on, including in Silwan and the Muslim Quarter [in the Old City]. It’s all interconnected.”

Cohen concluded with an ominous prediction of what is likely to come: “The current Israeli government, comprised of mostly far-right politicians, is trying to create as many irreversible facts on the ground as possible before the upcoming elections . . . We are liable to see an explosion of more of these types of moves concentrating on the mass displacement and expulsion of Palestinians utilizing all these different types of legal and bureaucratic means,” on the one hand, “and the massive Israeli takeover of the space through settlements, demolitions, and transforming the space for Israeli interests,” on the other.