Jerusalem Pulse: Recent Research Roundup

In several recently published press releases, the Israeli nonprofit Ir Amim warned about the expansion of two settlements in East Jerusalem: Ramat Shlomo,1 located on the northern border of East Jerusalem, and Givat Hamatos,2 also referred to as the Hebron Road Strip.

The nonprofit organization reported that on October 14, 2024, the Israel Lands Authority (ILA) issued a tender for the construction of 286 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo, extending the settlement northward toward the edge of the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina. Similarly, the Jerusalem District Planning Committee (DPC) convened in early November to advance the Givat Hamatos expansion plan toward final approval. This plan includes the construction of 3,500 housing units and 1,300 hotel rooms on Givat Hamatos’s eastern slopes.

Givat Hamatos, currently under construction, is the first new settlement to be built in East Jerusalem in over 20 years.

According to Ir Amim, these two projects, along with other settlement expansions, are collectively sealing off East Jerusalem’s southern border from Bethlehem and the southern West Bank.

On August 19, 2024, the Israeli human rights organization Peace Now published a new comprehensive settlements map. They wrote, “This essential tool provides detailed information on the location and size of settlements and illegal outposts, enabling a clear understanding of the extent of settlement expansion.”3 The map, available as a downloadable PDF file, also includes basic demographic data on the number of Palestinians versus settlers as well as settlements and outposts in the West Bank as a whole and East Jerusalem in particular. It also notes that of the state land allocated in the West Bank to date, 99.7 percent went to Jews.4

Law for Palestine, a nonprofit human rights organization, launched a comprehensive database of United Nations (UN) resolutions on sanctions and embargoes against states that violate international legal norms.5 This initiative aims to provide states, civil society organizations, and researchers with a comprehensive record of relevant UN General Assembly (UNGA) and UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. The database includes several resolutions concerning illegal Israeli actions in East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied Palestinian Territories (oPT).

Law for Palestine, in partnership with Visualizing Palestine, launched a data portal for tracking genocidal incitement against Palestinians. The database compiles hundreds of statements of genocidal intent, categorized to highlight the intentionality fueling specific acts that constitute genocide, committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians. Those acts include civilian harm, forced displacement, collective punishment, dehumanization, destruction of infrastructure, starvation, torture, and so on.6

According to Law for Palestine, “these statements highlight the broader context of Israel’s clear intention with their current military actions against the Palestinian people.” While those statements focus on genocidal incitement against Palestinians in Gaza, some of them call for the displacement, expulsion, and even killing of Palestinians in Jerusalem and across the oPT.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) published a report titled “Israel’s Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law in the West Bank in October 2024.” The article documents several crimes committed by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, including Jerusalem. These crimes include killings, destruction of public and private property, land confiscation, raids, arrests, and threats. The report also includes details on settler violence and Israeli military attacks on Jerusalem, specifically the demolition of a medical facility, and the seizure of the land that housed the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Sheikh Jarrah.

In “Roadblocks to Cancer Care in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” a recent perspective published in Harvard’s Health and Human Rights journal, coauthors Ru’a Rimawi, Bram Wispelwey, and Navid Madani describe the “landscape of cancer care in Palestine.” The article focuses on factors that perpetuated violations of Palestinian cancer patients’ fundamental right to health and care both before and even more so after October 7, 2023.7

With the scarcity of specialized cancer care facilities in the West Bank and Gaza, Jerusalem stands even more so than before as a main destination for Palestinians seeking cancer treatment and the only destination for certain fundamental types of cancer treatment. Before October 2023, according to the authors, “100 cancer patients traveled daily from Gaza to the West Bank and Jerusalem for radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or surgery.” However, as the article explains, access to this treatment was often hindered by systemic obstacles such as the need to receive medical permits and cross checkpoints.

After October 7, 2023, this channel effectively closed, and even patients who were on lists approved to leave often were unable to do so, according to the article.

The Israeli nonprofit Ir Amim published a report detailing the state of education in East Jerusalem over the past year. Using information obtained through a Freedom of Information request to the Jerusalem Municipality, the report, titled “East Jerusalem Education Report, Academic Year 2023–24 (5784)” (available in Hebrew), highlights key challenges faced by schools in East Jerusalem. These issues include an acute classroom shortage, efforts by the Israeli government to encourage Palestinian schools to adopt the Israeli curriculum, and the ongoing uncertainty regarding the schooling of tens of thousands of “invisible” Palestinian children in the area.8

In “Constructing Jerusalem in English-Language News Media,” published recently in the International Journal of Communication, Abeer al-Najjar examines the asymmetric nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, reflected in the unequal ability and infrastructure of both sides to shape political discourse and global media narratives.9

This quantitative study looks at how English-language news media linguistically identify and label Jerusalem, using word frequency and concordance analysis via Google News up to September 2022. Findings reveal that Jerusalem is predominantly framed in English-language news media as a Jewish city, marginalizing the Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Christian communities and their claims. This bias, according to al-Najjar, obscures the city’s historically diverse identity, legal status, and the complexities of the conflict.

In an article published in “Food and Foodways (Part 1),” a special edition of Jerusalem Quarterly (issue no. 98) titled “Culinary Traditions in the Jerusalem Countryside: Communities Displaced by the 1948 Nakba and Those Who Remained,” Samar Awaad, a researcher in Palestinian food culture, explored the food culture of Jerusalem’s rural villages, comparing the culinary traditions of those communities displaced during the 1948 War with those who remained rooted in their land.

The author approached food culture as living evidence of the complex and continuing relationship between people and their lands, and as a marker of identity and memory in the face of settler-colonial displacement. Using recipe analysis, focus group discussions, and interviews, Awaad examined the disruption of the Palestinian agricultural model by displacement and colonization, and how this has impacted Palestinian food culture. The study finds that