East Jerusalem is days away from its largest forced displacement since 1967.
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — East Jerusalem is days away from its largest forced displacement since 1967. Eight Palestinian homes are set to be demolished by the end of May — the highest number in a single month, according to the Israeli nonprofit Ir Amim since it began tracking such demolitions.
“Soon, these will all be gone,” said Fakhri Abu Diab, a longtime East Jerusalem activist whose own home was demolished in 2024, gesturing at the homes lining the valley walls. “They will be taken by settlers or destroyed, and then we will have nowhere to go.”
The eight families had engaged in a protracted legal struggle to fight the orders, but as Ir Amim international outreach coordinator Tess Miller confirmed, “there is no longer any legal process underway that could stop the demolitions. All potential legal remedies have been exhausted.”
The legal framework driving the demolitions relies on two laws. The first is the Legal and Administrative Matters Law, which came into force in 1970. The law holds that Jewish families or property owners who lost property, often due to anti-Jewish pogroms in Jerusalem before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, are entitled to petition the state to reclaim title to such property.
Palestinians forcibly expelled during the 1948 war have no equivalent right under Israeli law to return or reclaim lost property.
Ateret Cohanim and Elad, two settler nonprofits, rely on this law and a defunct land trust to assert their claim. They have waged a decades-long legal campaign to displace families from homes and land that the families, in most cases, legally purchased under Israeli law.
The settler nonprofits “don’t care what the world says. For them, the world is against us; we are strong enough,” said Hagit Ofran. Ofran directs Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project and, according to Haaretz, may know more about the scope of settlement construction than any person alive.
The second legal mechanism is Jerusalem’s planning and zoning commission, which urban planners and legal advocates say has made it almost impossible for Palestinian families to build legally on land they own.
According to Bimkom, an Israeli planning-rights nonprofit, Israeli authorities approved only around 600 housing units for Palestinians in East Jerusalem in 2025, compared to approximately 9,000 units allocated to Jewish residents.
Many families priced out of the Jerusalem housing market by the severe shortage caused by these zoning restrictions and unable to build on their family land are forced to relocate to Kafr Aqab, a neighborhood located on the other side of the separation barrier, which the International Court of Justice ruled illegal in 2004. Palestinians who relocate maintain hopes of retaining their Jerusalem residency permits.
Ofran recounted visiting one Palestinian family in East Jerusalem and noticing a stack of mattresses piled to the ceiling. The hostess explained that at night they are all laid on the floor so that the more than 14 residents of the apartment have space to sleep.
Palestinian residents face a yearslong approval process and documentation requirements that are, in practice, nearly impossible to meet. Applications are routinely denied by the planning and zoning commission without explanation, and appeals can drag on for decades.
“So many choose to build like it’s a gamble,” Ofran said. “There are thousands of structures that Israeli authorities consider illegal in East Jerusalem, so they take the chance, and then they hope that their family’s name stays at the bottom of the pile.”
And without permits, even if their homes are not demolished, Palestinian families face fines from the Jerusalem Municipality for building illegally, sometimes reaching tens of thousands of shekels. When the municipality finally issues an official demolition order, they are also forced to pay for the demolition itself, leaving many families in financial ruin.
The Jerusalem Municipality stated that Al-Bustan is zoned “for a public park” and was “never designated for residential use,” and that “for years the municipality attempted to find a solution for the residents.”
Behind the displacement in Al-Bustan is Elad’s ambition to complete the City of David archaeological park, which the organization and some controversial Israeli researchers claim sits on the historic City of David. Approximately 1,500 Palestinians currently live on the land Elad would need to finish the expansion.
“The City of David, we see it as a model for what’s now happening in the West Bank,” said Talya Ezrahi of Emek Shaveh, an Israeli nonprofit that works to prevent the politicization of archaeology for the purpose of justifying displacement. “We’re seeing a lot of things being replicated there.”
What has since been used to justify settler claims over sites in Sebastia, for example, which was the capital of the ancient northern kingdom of Israel, was pioneered in East Jerusalem starting in the late 1980s, according to Ezrahi.
This ideological archaeology is backed by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which Ezrahi says has eschewed scientific standards in favor of its own narrative of Israel’s history. The IAA’s own director is being pushed out, a move observers link to pressure from the far right coalition to install leadership aligned with its settler agenda.
Elad has worked to build a connection between Israeli youth and what it argues is a historical site to which the Jewish people are entitled, one way of changing the “facts on the ground,” as Ezrahi put it, in anticipation of any future peace settlement over Jerusalem.
“Almost every single Israeli kid who finishes high school will have been to the City of David, will have heard the story as told by the settler organization,” she said. “So it’s almost like, well, this site has always existed as it has. It’s always been there, and it’s ours.”
Tunnels have been dug by Elad — in cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority — beneath Palestinian homes in Al-Bustan and Wadi Hilweh, the two neighborhoods most frequently targeted for evictions and demolitions in East Jerusalem. Ezrahi said the tunnels constitute a direct violation of archaeological science, disrupting the soil layers above and below the dig site and making it impossible to accurately date artifacts found in the area. The work, she argued, serves not authentic discovery but territorial claim and dispossession.
After the demolition of Abu Diab’s home, former U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, who has earned widespread criticism for his handling of Gaza press briefings, issued a rare rebuke: “These acts obstruct efforts to advance a durable and lasting peace and security that would benefit not just Palestinians, but Israelis,” he said.
Abu Diab had hosted President Jimmy Carter at his home in 2010, as well as countless diplomats and American officials, before it was demolished. “Their words were all worthless,” Abu Diab said. “Now, we will all deal with the consequences.”
That sense of impunity, according to Ofran, is what paved the way for the current wave of demolitions.
With Israeli elections slated for this fall, a bloc within Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, led by far right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, is working to create as many permanent shifts in the architecture of the occupied Palestinian territory as possible before a new government could potentially reverse course, Ofran emphasized.
“The atmosphere is: Go ahead and do it,” Ofran said. Those driving the displacement know it. “They feel they have impunity, that no one is going to stop them. They have Trump, and he has their back.” And so the international community’s condemnation lands without weight.
Abu Diab and his wife have been living in a caravan container — the same kind that settlers use during the initial stages of settlement construction in the West Bank — on his family’s plot of land since the demolition.
“If they come back to demolish it again, I will have to pitch a tent,” he said. “But I will not be leaving.”
C. Truthout.org
