Land and Space
Forcible Home Expulsions
Palestinians living in East Jerusalem face a surreal threat: their city authorities want them gone, and they’re willing to resort to extreme and blatantly illegal means to expel them forcibly from their own homes, one by one. This dystopian phenomenon is examined here.
Featured in This Topic
Israeli authorities are forcing thousands of Palestinian residents in Jerusalem to demolish their own homes, leaving them homeless.
Khalidi family wins rare court decision against settlers, but what does it portend?
Israeli Supreme Court orders expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan.
The Shehadeh family in Silwan has been fighting an Israeli Supreme Court eviction order, and the outcome affects dozens of families.
We speak with one of the lawyers for three Sheikh Jarrah families whose expulsion cases were just overturned.
Three more Sheikh Jarrah families get a reprieve and a modicum of hope.
The story of Palestinian displacement and dispossession passed down from one generation to the next.
When settlers expel Palestinians from their Jerusalem homes and move in to Palestinian neighborhoods, what ensues? One resident installed CCTV cameras to capture the dystopia.
The al-Qasem family home in Sheikh Jarrah, home to three generations, is a target for Jewish settlers.
A twin brother and sister offer the viewer a glimpse of life in Sheikh Jarrah, where Jewish settlers are aggressively targeting Palestinian homes for forcible expulsions.
The Story in Numbers
233,700
Jewish settlers live in East Jerusalem alongside 361,700 Palestinians [1]
2,500
Jewish settlers live in Palestinian buildings across East Jerusalem [2]
6,000
Approximate number of Palestinian property owners and tenants inside the Old City alone who have been forcibly expelled and displaced from their homes since 1967 [3]
78
Palestinian homes and properties in the Old City have been expropriated by settler organizations, in conjunction with the Israeli government, since the 1970s [4]
13,000
Palestinians across East Jerusalem are at high risk of being forcibly expelled from their homes by Israeli occupation authorities [5]
218
A minimum estimate of the number of Palestinian households across East Jerusalem that have expulsion cases filed against them, the majority of which were filed by settler organizations (data from 2021) [6]
14
Number of Palestinian families who were forcibly expelled from their homes in Batn al-Hawa, an area in the neighborhood of Silwan, south of the Old City (to date) [7]
12
Number of Palestinian families who were forcibly expelled from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in the north of Jerusalem, since 2009 [8]
Notes
[1] Omer Yaniv, Ytta Haddad, and Yair Assaf Shapira, Jerusalem Facts and Trends 2022 (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, 2022), 18. The 2020 statistics presented here are official Israeli extrapolations based on the most recent (2008) Israeli census and should be understood within the prevailing political context: Israel seeks to diminish the numbers of Palestinians in the city, specifically to keep their proportion versus the Jewish population below a certain threshold.
[2] Najla Shahwan, “Palestinians of East Jerusalem: A Silent Eviction,” Daily Sabah, March 2, 2021.
[3] “Ruling Palestine: A History of the Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine,” Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions and BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, May 2005.
[4] “The Palestinian Population Density in the Old City: The Protective Shield against Family Plans” [in Arabic], al-Hadath, July 1, 2021.
[5] “Al-Ruwaidi: Nearly 13,000 Jerusalemites Are Threatened with Forcible Expulsion from the Old City” [in Arabic], Quds Net News Agency, January 11, 2023.
[6] “’No Longer Afraid’: Palestinians Vow to Fight Jerusalem evictions,” Al Jazeera, May 29, 2021.
[7] Jerusalem Story database.
[8] Jerusalem Story database.
A long-awaited verdict brings a feared but not surprising outcome.
A survey of the myriad array of mechanisms of displacement aimed at Silwan and its residents