JERUSALEM, Israel – Israeli police on Wednesday evicted a Palestinian family and demolished their home in the flashpoint Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah following a days-long standoff over the disputed property.
The demolition happened in the early morning hours before dawn. Police said they arrested 18 Palestinians and Israeli activists at the scene for public disorder.
The Jerusalem municipality has plans to build a school for special needs Arab residents there.
Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum says the home, owned by the Salihiya family, was on property that Israeli authorities designated for public use decades ago.
“The illegal commandeering of public spaces harms first of all the residents of the neighborhood. In this area, we will be building 6 kindergartens and a school with 18 classrooms all designed for children with special needs and are intended to serve East Jerusalem residents,” she says.
According to Hassan-Nahoum, the Salihiya home was built illegally in the 1990s. The family disputes this, saying they legally purchased the property before 1967, when Israel recaptured eastern Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six-Day War.
The family says it did not register the home with Jordanian authorities before the war, and it was impossible to do so after Israel reclaimed eastern Jerusalem.
In 2017, the Jerusalem municipality announced it would use the property to build a school, sparking a contentious legal battle with the Salihiya family. A Jerusalem court ruled in favor of the city in 2021, but the family continued to fight the impending eviction.
When the police came to demolish the home on Monday, the Salihiya family barricaded themselves inside and the patriarch, Mahmoud Salihiya, threatened to set himself on fire.
“We won’t leave. We’ll either live or die. I’ll burn myself with fuel,” Salihiya said in a video that has circulated on social media.
The police bulldozed a plant nursery belonging to the family and then left. They returned at 3 a.m. on Wednesday and successfully evicted the family and demolished the home.
The police and Jerusalem municipality issued a statement saying: “The evacuation of the area has been approved by all the courts, including the Jerusalem District Court. Since the evacuation order was issued in 2017, members of the family living in the illegal buildings were given countless opportunities to hand over the land with consent, but unfortunately they refused to do so, even after meetings and repeated dialog attempts by the Jerusalem municipality.”
Right-wing Religious Zionist MK Itamar Ben-Gvir applauded the demolition.
“There are many buildings in the area that need to be evacuated and many invaders that need to be made clear that Israel is a state of law. The state must demonstrate governance first and foremost in Jerusalem and not allow lawbreakers to threaten the State of Israel.” he said.
Palestinians and left-wing Israeli leaders denounced the eviction.
“As thieves in the night, officers arrived to evict the Salihiya family into the freezing street. These are the lives of Palestinians in East Jerusalem,” said Israeli parliament member Mossi Raz.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called it a “war crime.”
Two left-wing groups, Ir Amin and Peace Now, challenge the Jerusalem municipality’s claims that the demolition was necessary to build a school, arguing that there was enough room on the property for both a home and an educational facility.
To emphasize this point, they said Jerusalem authorities had already found space and designated a large public plot for public use just around the corner. But that plot was reserved for an ultra-orthodox religious school in 2007, even though the neighborhood is mostly Palestinian, according to Ir Amin researcher Aviv Tatarsky.
Peace Now researcher Hagit Ofran told AP the Salihiya house could have been left intact since the new school is to be built on a nearby plot.
“This expropriation could have been done without evicting them,” she said. “It's in Sheikh Jarrah, it's in this very sensitive time, all the world is looking and the government didn't find the sense to stop it.”
Sheikh Jarrah is one of the most contested neighborhoods in Jerusalem and the center of international scrutiny. Many Palestinian residents there are embroiled in complex eviction battles against mostly right-wing Jewish groups who also claim the property belongs to them.
Hassan-Nahoum on Monday sought to distinguish the Salihiya eviction from the other Sheikh Jarrah legal battles, saying “it was not carried out in order to take land and give it to Jewish residents.”
Israel's Ambassador to the United States Gilad Erdan responded to international condemnation by saying the family "stole public lands for their own private use. This is a municipal issue that has gone through all the respective channels of the independent Israeli legal system."
Still, Palestinians, European leaders, and human rights groups view the ongoing eviction battles as part of a larger war over Jerusalem’s demographic future and a coordinated attempt to push Palestinian residents out of the holy city. Meanwhile, Israel characterizes them as private real-estate disputes.
The conflict over Sheikh Jarrah was one of the main drivers of nightly protests that erupted in Jerusalem in April and May last year. They were a major factor in tensions that led to the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists, who threatened violence if Palestinians were removed from their homes.
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