As Iranian missiles land, Israeli judges order new round of West Bank evictions

Most Israelis associate the recent Iranian war with terrifying missile barrages that caused damage across the country. In occupied East Jerusalem, low-income Palestinian residents of the Silwan neighbourhood suffered a different but familiar type of trauma during the conflict — an onslaught inflicted not by a distant enemy, but rather by the justices of Israel’s Supreme Court.

Drawing on a legal system that favours Jews rather than treating all residents as equal, the Court issued two separate rulings that enabled the immediate eviction of six Palestinian families in Silwan’s Batin al-Hawa area so that settlers of the Ateret Cohanim organisation could take their place.

Meanwhile, in the Masafer Yatta area of the West Bank, destitute Palestinians also faced a heightened threat of eviction during the war, this time from the IDF. At the same time, settler violence surged, expanding from Bedouin encampments to established villages, and even boiling over into an army base.

Video of street confrontation between settlers and Palestinians (Supplied by Zuheir Rajabi):

In the deadliest incident last Wednesday, three Palestinians were killed by troops in Kufr Malik near Ramallah after rioting by settlers, according to Haaretz. The army said troops had come under fire from inside the village, but Palestinian residents denied this.

All in all, there was no letup in Israel’s project of dispossessing Palestinians whether through the courts, the army or the settlers whose very presence in occupied territory violates the Fourth Geneva Convention. Meanwhile, the nearly two-year-old war in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7, is now punctuated by the IDF’s alleged killings of starving Palestinian civilians at aid collection sites.

In Silwan, eviction victim Hani Shuweiki sat in his house, situated at the bottom of steep flights of uneven steps, on Sunday and pondered a future blown to bits by Israel’s judges. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where to go. The future is destroyed. It doesn’t exist,” he told The Jewish Independent.

A garbage collector for the Jerusalem municipality, Shuweiki, 42, said he does not have money for another house and has no one to help him. Seventeen relatives live in the house, including his four children.

Everyone in the family goes to sleep in fear that a knock on the door to remove them will come in the middle of the night, said Hani’s 87-year-old mother, Ismihan. “The children are afraid. I tell them, ‘don’t worry, we’ll stay’.

“I’ve lived in this house for 55 years. All my children’s memories are here,” she added.

Ateret Cohanim director Daniel Luria told TJI that he hopes there will be further such supreme court eviction rulings, which are based on a law allowing Jews to “reclaim” property in East Jerusalem that was in Jewish hands before 1948 – regardless of Palestinians having lived there subsequently.

“It’s clear to me that the Jews, who are the Indigenous people of this land, have a natural, historic, legal and moral right to live in safety in any place in Israel and especially in the historic heart of Jerusalem,” Luria said.

In what human rights groups regard as blatant discrimination, another Israeli law prohibits Palestinians from similarly recovering properties they owned that became part of Jewish neighbourhoods of West Jerusalem after 1948.

The settler penetration has more than personal implications. Attenuating the Palestinian hold on sensitive areas of East Jerusalem harms already dim prospects for Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution that Israel’s far-right government has ruled out.

Zuheir Rajabi, a Palestinian activist fighting to stave off settler gains in Silwan, said it was no accident that the eviction rulings were issued during the war with Iran.

“They think that war is the time to inflict strong blows against us. They know that during a time of emergency, we aren’t able to bring Europeans and [Israeli] leftists here. They feel that they can throw people out of their homes while the journalists’ eyes are on the war.

“I think we will see the evictions in the next few days while people are still thinking about the war,” he said.

It is easy to understand why Israel would want the evictions to pass under the radar. They are simply too cruel to be explained away, even by the best public relations.

In one of the homes facing eviction lives a paralysed man, Awad Rajabi, 29, a relative of Zuheir, who is dependent on elaborate support equipment, and his sister Manal, 24, who has been physically impaired since she was a girl. “Their father needs to find a suitable place for them and this is hard in Jerusalem,” Zuheir Rajabi said.

Meanwhile in Masafer Yatta’s 14 communities in southern West Bank, the war also ratcheted up fears of eviction. The communities, home to more than a thousand people, are situated in what the army declared during the 1980s as “Firing Zone 918”, to be used for troop training.

After a protracted legal battle, the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the Palestinians have no tie to the area and can be expelled.

On June 18, Israeli authorities announced they were rejecting all Palestinian planning requests for the area because of what they described as a “security need” to train troops there. The army then specified in a brief to the Court that the buildings of the Palestinians, deemed illegal by Israel, have to be removed so that the area becomes “sterilised,” Haaretz reported. Settler outposts that have been established in the firing zone were not mentioned in the army statement.                                                         

As fears rose in the communities, human rights group B’tselem alleged that Israel was using “the cover of war to finalise the ethnic cleansing of all 14 Palestinian communities”. It called for emergency intervention by European Union countries, local council leader Nidal Younes told TJI.

“The extremist government is breaking all norms and laws. They don’t consider the Palestinians as people but rather as animals. They say the area is for training, so why do they keep the settler outposts there?”

There are other signs of human rights deterioration during the war. Rabbi Arik Ascherman, head of the Torat Tzedek (Torah of Justice) NGO, who travels frequently to the West Bank as a protective presence for Palestinians, told TJI that in recent weeks, settler violence has been spreading from attacks on shepherds and Bedouin areas to incursions against established villages.

He named Kufr Malik, Taibe and Mukhmas villages as recent targets of violent settlers. But he added: “I have no way of showing that this was linked to the war.”  

Ascherman said he and two volunteers were attacked by masked settlers adjacent to Mukhmas on June 11. He was clubbed and hit by a rifle butt, resulting in wounds to his back and a large gash on his head. The IDF said in a statement that a report had been received that Palestinians had thrown stones at an Israeli shepherd.

The army added that “violent friction developed” between Palestinians escorted by Israeli citizens and other Israelis, and that an Israeli citizen accompanying the Palestinians was “lightly injured” and treated on the spot.

However, Ascherman alleged that “the army and police did nothing when I was bleeding profusely. At first, they didn’t help.” His wounds required hospitalisation.