At around 7 a.m. on Sunday morning, Israeli forces stormed the home of 72-year-old Asmahan Shweikeh and gave her one hour to gather her belongings before they would seize the house by force.
Located in a section of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan called Batan Al-Hawa, close to the Old City walls, the house is where Shweikeh has lived her entire life; where her son was shot dead at 16 by the Israeli army in 1990; and where her husband died after suffocating from tear gas fired during a police raid amid the Second Intifada.
When police charged back in at around 8:30 a.m. to force Shweikeh and her 11 relatives out onto the street and empty the house of its contents, she fainted from shock, requiring Israeli medics to carry her out of her home on a stretcher. Her grandson, Mohammed, was arrested on the spot (he was later released to three days’ house arrest and fined NIS 1,000, or $300).
Almost simultaneously, police descended on the home of Juma’a Odeh, in his 60s, located downstairs within the same building. A similar scene unfolded: After entering by force, police and municipal employees began tossing furniture, clothing, and kitchenware onto the street to be loaded onto trucks and hauled away to storage.
Within hours, Israeli settlers and municipal crews had erected a metal fence around the building’s roof, torn down the concrete barrier separating it from an adjacent settler property, and linked the two with iron stairs. By evening, four fresh Israeli flags waved from the rooftop as settlers blasted music and celebrated their latest acquisition.
The settler takeover of the Shweikeh and Odeh family homes comes almost five months after Israel’s Supreme Court rejected the families’ joint appeal against eviction. The court sided instead with Ateret Cohanim, a settler organization that has been working for decades to take over Palestinian homes in Silwan to “restore Jewish life in the heart of ancient Jerusalem.” In late September, the Israeli government issued final eviction orders for the two properties.
In the weeks leading up to her eviction, masked settlers and police repeatedly came to Shweikeh’s doorstep to photograph the house and its contents. “They told us, ‘Leave the key in the door,’” she recounted to +972 Magazine. But Sunday’s evictions still came as a surprise, as they took place two days before the official order was set to take effect — suggesting a deliberate effort to catch residents off guard.
Less than 24 hours earlier, residents of Batan Al-Hawa, old and young alike, had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Jewish-Israeli activists along the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare for the first time in two years to protest the looming evictions. For some 80 residents across six households belonging to the Shweikeh, Odeh, and Nasser Rajabi families (the eviction of the latter is expected in the coming weeks), the demonstration was a final stand after more than a decade of fighting their case in Israeli courts.
Each layer of Israel’s bureaucracy approved the evictions before they were sanctioned by the Supreme Court — often seen as a final check against Israel’s full-blown descent into authoritarianism. “The settlers have a presence in every ministry: education, interior, the municipality, they’re all working together from inside the system,” explained Zuheir Rajabi, who heads the Batan Al-Hawa neighborhood committee and faces eviction orders himself. “These institutions serve the settlers because, in part, the settlers run them.”
Sunday’s evictions, along with the imminent expulsion of the Nasser Rajabi family, will bring the number of Palestinian families forced out of their homes in Batan Al-Hawa this year alone to nine. They join at least 16 more families that have been displaced since the early 2000s. All of their homes are now occupied by Jewish settlers.
Some 700 residents of Batan Al-Hawa remain entangled in ongoing legal battles to avoid the same fate, with at least 11 additional lawsuits pending in various courts. Eviction dates are staggered between families, disrupting efforts to organize collectively and ensuring that public attention comes in smaller waves.
On the same day that police expelled the Shweikeh and Odeh families, they handed the family of Umm Nasser Rajabi, a woman in her 70s at the head of an 18-member household, a new eviction order set to take effect on Dec. 1. Unlike the previous notice her family received, which contained no eviction date and left the family in limbo, this one is final. Her neighbor and nephew, 50-year-old Kaid Rajabi, received an order to vacate his home by Jan. 6.
“Today it’s us. But tomorrow it’s him, and then it’s him,” Kaid Rajabi said, gesturing toward neighbors at the protest. “Everyone is a target.”
A gradual erasure of Palestinian life
After Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, it redrew the city’s municipal boundaries to include 28 Palestinian villages surrounding it from the south, east, and north. One of these was Silwan, where Batan Al-Hawa lies, whose population swelled with Palestinian refugees after the Nakba of 1948 and again after the 1967 War.
The formal annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980 was followed by an aggressive settlement drive, with most of the land within the municipal borders allocated for Jewish construction, while Palestinian neighborhoods were systematically constrained. Today, these communities are surrounded by 16 Jewish settlements home to roughly 222,000 settlers; a further 10 settlements located just outside the city limits house around 80,000 more Israeli Jews. Together, these localities — all illegal under international law — account for nearly half of all settlers in the occupied West Bank.
For the 350,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, meanwhile, building permits are nearly impossible to obtain and the municipality has consistently neglected their infrastructure and social needs, imposed unduly heavy taxes, and weaponized the so-called “center of life” policy to revoke residency rights. Taken together, these policies have all contributed to the gradual erasure of the city’s Palestinian presence.
But even after decades of aggressive Judaization and a soaring settler population, the area surrounding Jerusalem’s Old City to the north, south, and east has remained overwhelmingly Palestinian. Beginning in the early 2000s, settler groups like Ateret Cohanim have led the charge to shift this demographic balance.
Located just 300 meters from the southern wall of the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Batan Al-Hawa is an incredibly dense hillside of narrow corridors and stacked houses, with few roads and no sidewalks. The passages twist into a maze of stairs and alleyways, and residents treasure their proximity to the Old City. “In the morning, I hear the muezzin from Al-Aqsa,” Umm Nasser Rajabi told +972 with a smile.
Yet most households live below the poverty line, and have historically been deprived of municipal services like water and electricity. There is not a single playground or green space for children, and a significant number of men in the neighborhood have served prison sentences or had loved ones murdered by Israeli forces. And unlike Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Jewish settlers live right next door to Palestinian families.
The neighborhood’s deprivation has been exploited by settlers. When Zuheir Rajabi was approached by settlers wanting to buy his house, they asked why he would choose to live in such conditions of neglect. “I am happy in this neighborhood you call garbage,” he replied. “I was born here. I don’t suffer from viruses in the water; I am immune to that bacteria.”
Kaid Rajabi was also approached by interested buyers over the years. “They tried to cut me a check and told me to name my price, in Jordanian dinars, in Israeli currency — whatever I wanted,” he told +972. They offered to cover the cost of moving and settling him and his family in East Jerusalem’s more upscale Palestinian neighborhoods like Beit Hanina and Beit Safafa. “But Batan Al-Hawa is where I live,” he affirmed.
‘From the first day the settlers entered the neighborhood, we began to suffer’
Ateret Cohanim first turned to the courts in 2001, when three of its employees assumed control of the Benvenisti Trust — a fund established in 1899 to house Yemeni Jewish immigrants in Silwan, who later fled to other areas during the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-39 against British rule.
In 2002, the state granted the trust ownership of 5.2 dunams of land in Batan Al-Hawa, and Ateret Cohanim immediately started filing lawsuits against dozens of Palestinian families living on these plots, despite never proving a connection to the original endowment. Through the trust, Ateret Cohanim subsequently gained control of an additional three dunams of land in the area.
Under Israel’s 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law, Jews are permitted to reclaim property in East Jerusalem that was owned by Jews prior to the 1948 War and then fell under Jordanian control until Israel’s occupation in 1967, even though the state already compensated those residents for the loss of their property. The same right does not extend to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were dispossessed of their properties inside what became the State of Israel during the Nakba.
By 2004, Ateret Cohanim had transferred 11 Jewish families into Silwan through pressuring Palestinian residents to sell. The settlers brought with them an entire security apparatus: the neighborhood was transformed overnight into a heavily militarized zone, guarded around the clock by private security contractors funded by Israel’s Housing Ministry, alongside Border Police officers and soldiers.
“From the first day the settlers entered the neighborhood, we began to suffer — our children especially,” Kaid Rajabi told +972 last week.
In those early years, residents were routinely subjected to night raids, arrests of minors, live fire, physical assaults, and harassment by settlers and Israeli security forces. Much of the daily intimidation has been captured on video by Zuheir Rajabi, who installed 10 security cameras with the help of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem in 2003. From his living room, Rajabi keeps constant watch over the feeds projected on a flatscreen TV, forced to turn his own home into a mirror of the machinery of surveillance surrounding him.
“I put these here because the settlers and the police beat me, and my father was martyred from suffocation by tear gas,” he said. “There was no proof or evidence we could use to go to the police and file a case.” Many of his recordings, he added, were confiscated by police and never returned.
A decade of settler lawfare
In 2015, the evictions in Batan Al-Hawa began. The Abu Nab family was the first to be expelled, in June of that year, as a result of the 2002 lawsuits; the courts ruled that they were living on land that belonged to Benvenisti Trust, and that they must vacate their homes or face forced removal. By 2016, Ateret Cohanim had filed claims against 81 families in the neighborhood — affecting 87 homes and nearly 700 people.
The families tried to file a single case to appeal the evictions together, but Israeli authorities refused, forcing them to file individually or in smaller clusters. By fragmenting legal challenges, the authorities dilute collective resistance and prevent the formation of a unified front.
There is also a legal advantage to this fragmentation strategy. “Whichever decision the court comes to in an individual case, it will rely on this precedent in subsequent decisions,” Zuheir Rajabi explained. “So what do they do? They splinter the rulings.” In effect, each unfavorable ruling strengthens the courts’ ability to deny future families’ appeals.
Nonetheless, the Rajabi family immediately filed an appeal in 2015 challenging the legality of Ateret Cohanim’s claims to their property. The Shweiki and Odeh families filed a joint appeal in the same period.
But even while the claims were pending, settlers and Israeli officials ramped up their abuse of Palestinian residents. For years, a cadre of soldiers blocked Palestinians from coming and going down the narrow street leading in and out of the neighborhood as they accompanied settler children to school each morning. Residents reported that soldiers would also provoke locals — stealing soccer balls, arresting parents rushing to work, and pointing their guns at groups of teens.
After October 7, court decisions on evacuation orders against Palestinian families were fast-tracked, and harassment intensified as settlers and security forces alike grew emboldened with their weapons. Settler children often brandish guns at Palestinians. “The settler is armed with an M16 and tear gas, and the guards and the army that accompany them are the same story,” Kaid Rajabi explained. “They are together.”
The Jerusalem District Court ruled against the Rajabi and Shweiki and Odeh families’ cases in the summer of 2024, deciding Ateret Cohanim did have legal rights to their homes, and the families pursued the last available option: appealing to the Supreme Court.
On June 16 of this year, the court rejected the families’ appeal. Six days later, it rejected the Rajabi family’s appeal. On Sept. 29, the police showed up at the Rajabi, Odeh, and Shweikeh family homes and served them all with eviction notices.
‘Soon you won’t see an Arab here’
Inside Umm Nasser Rajabi’s home, the ground floor hums with the sound of beeping machines, tangled wires, and sterilized equipment. It is not a regular living room: Over the years, she and her family built the room to accommodate her immobile grandson, Awad, who had a stroke five years ago and requires 24/7 care, lives in a hospital-style bed, and consumes intravenous food.
With the exception of a hospital — where care is expensive and which can be hard to access when settlers, police, or soldiers block the roads — he cannot survive anywhere else. “If the electricity goes out, my grandson dies,” she said.
When the authorities arrive to evict her, Umm Nasser does not know where she will go, how she will transport her children, or if she will be able to afford re-building the room equipped to care for Awad. “We have no alternative,” she said. “Houses cost an arm and a leg today.”
She has lived in the four-story house in Batan Al-Hawa for over 50 years. Within its walls — the facade painted with colorful flowers, birds, and eyes as part of the I Witness Silwan project — she was married as a teenager, gave birth to 11 children, and continues to raise her large family.
The home used to be the gathering place for her entire family during the holidays, but now can only host her daughters. “The settlers, their guards, and the police see our boys as a threat,” she said. “They stop them in the streets. My sons and grandsons used to come here all the time to eat, drink, and celebrate. Now not one of them comes.”
After years of long and costly legal battles, the families are left with few options. Kaid Rajabi told +972 that he spent over NIS 120,000 (over $37,000) in legal fees throughout the proceedings, and will likely receive no compensation for his property once he is evicted.
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But the significance of the evictions transcends the economic devastation. “It’s not just that they are taking my house,” he said. “They are trying to take all of my memories. My whole childhood is here; my laughter, my sadness, my tears, my friends, my school.
“Where will we go? I have eight children,” he continued. “Soon you won’t see an Arab here. This is their plan.”
