Palestinians in East Jerusalem Facing Record Levels of Displacement, Study Reveals

The year 2024 broke records in the displacement of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. One month into 2025 and Israel’s expulsion campaign continues unabated, both in terms of home demolitions and forcible expulsions from homes left standing, which involve two different legal processes.

According to recently published data from Israeli human rights groups Bimkom and Ir Amim, as shown on the graphic below, 255 demolitions were carried out in East Jerusalem in 2024—marking the highest number annually on record. The majority of these structures (181) were homes, and the most-affected Palestinian neighborhoods were Silwan, Beit Hanina, Jabal Mukabbir, al-Tur, and al-Walaja.1

“2024 has marked a devastating turning point for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, as planning and building restrictions reached unprecedented levels, particularly in the aftermath of the war in Gaza,” coauthors of the report Sari Kronish and Aviv Tatarsky found.2 “The message is unmistakable—Palestinians in East Jerusalem are being systematically stripped of their fundamental rights to shelter, security, and community stability.”

Forcible expulsions of Palestinians to expand Jewish settlement also spiked in 2024. Israeli courts ruled to expel 18 families—over 100 Palestinians across Batn al-Hawa, Sheikh Jarrah, and near Damascus Gate.3 Five families were forcibly expelled from their homes in Batn al-Hawa; their homes were subsequently occupied by Israeli settlers from Ateret Cohanim. Israel’s General Custodian expelled another family from the coffee shop they managed for decades in the Musrara neighborhood, next to Damascus Gate.

Residential development for Palestinians also lagged in 2024 with only 57 plans—totaling 1,000 housing units—approved that year. This number is the lowest yearly figure for East Jerusalem plans in a decade, and only five building plans created by Palestinians passed the initial stage of the planning process in 2024—a significant drop compared to the average of almost 100 plans approved annually from 2018 to 2022.4

This trend has been exacerbated by the recent elimination of the “Mukhtar Protocol,” which since 2018 had allowed a private plan to be filed if it had the consent of a local mukhtar. Instead, this protocol was replaced with a new regulation that requires full proof of land ownership through a full formal Settlement of Land Title (SOLT) process in order for plans to be submitted to planning authorities.

“The year 2024 is showing how the ongoing policies are closing in on Palestinians and working all together to limit the presence of Palestinians in the city,” Kronish, an architect with Israeli planning rights organization Bimkom, told Jerusalem Story.5

The registration of land in East Jerusalem within the SOLT process has also intensified in the last year, prompting concerns that the Israeli government or settlers are confiscating large tracts of Palestinian land under the radar. Once a bloc of private land has gone through SOLT and been registered in the tabu as belonging to a particular owner, that outcome is basically irreversible. In 2024, 11 blocs of Palestinian land were placed in the hands of Jewish settler groups and the government. Six of these plots are already dedicated to the construction of new Jewish settlements—with thousands of housing units—in Beit Safafa, Umm Lison, Jabal Mukabbir, Sheikh Jarrah, Umm Tuba, and Atarot.6

“The consequences of these measures go far beyond statistics. Families live in constant fear watching generations-old neighborhoods disintegrate under the weight of forced evictions and land confiscations disguised as legal procedures,” Kronish and Tatarsky said.7 “This is not simply a housing crisis; it is a deliberate policy of dispossession.”

Planning and legal experts note that Israel’s 15-month genocidal war on Gaza has had a dramatic impact on East Jerusalem—nearly 500 miles away.

“Under the cover of the genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, different institutions within the Israeli legal system started acting much more decisively wanting to expand their ability to demolish homes that maybe they had postponed before,” Munir Nusseibeh, director and cofounder of the Human Rights Clinic and Community Action Center at Al-Quds University, told Jerusalem Story.8 Nusseibeh added that this “war of revenge in the Gaza Strip” in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel emboldened Israeli right-wing politicians and settler-activists to crack down on Palestinian buildings under the guise of simply enforcing policy.

“This type of demolition that Israel expresses as law enforcement—housing that was built without a permit because Israel does not give a sufficient [number of] permits to Palestinians in Jerusalem—will increase during the next [year],” Nusseibeh said.

Palestinians in East Jerusalem have already experienced the continued escalation within the first month of 2025. According to data collected by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (UN-OCHA), 25 structures have been demolished in East Jerusalem from January 1 to February 7, 2025, including the al-Taqwa Mosque in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sur Bahir in the southern end of the city. This resulted in the displacement of 82 people.9

Additionally, Israeli forces, accompanied by Jerusalem Municipality employees, distributed demolition orders to 45 homes in the West Bank village of al-Nu‘man on January 26, 2025—with the aim of annexing the town into Jerusalem.10

Even with a fragile ceasefire in place, demolitions of Palestinian structures in East Jerusalem will continue to escalate with or without the cover of war.

“It became worse during the war, but now it’s the new normal. It’s the new standard. So, there’s no reason to think that it’ll somehow be reduced once the war is over, if the war is over,” Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim, told Jerusalem Story.11

With the war and a settler government combined, the expulsion of Palestinians is not only continuing but escalating in our current reality.

“The regime is becoming much more extremist, and the idea that [Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and other parties keep talking about displacing Palestinians . . . outside Palestine, then they will,” Nusseibeh told Jerusalem Story. “The displacement within Palestine is certainly something that we have observed in Jerusalem and will continue to observe, maybe even more densely.”