Palestinian residents of a flashpoint east Jerusalem neighborhood held a tense standoff with Israeli authorities on Monday as police came to evict them from a disputed property.
Several residents of a home in Sheikh Jarrah climbed onto the roof of the building with gas tanks and threatened to set them alight should the Jerusalem municipality follow through with the eviction.
Dozens of Palestinian families in east Jerusalem are at risk of eviction by Jewish settler organizations, and thousands face the threat of demolition because of discriminatory policies that make it extremely difficult for Palestinians to build new homes or expand existing ones.
Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 war and annexed it in a move not recognized by most of the international community. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state, and the city's fate is one of the most divisive issues in the decades-old conflict.
Residents involved in Monday's standoff say they purchased the property before 1967, while the state has argued in court that the family does not have rights to it. The Jerusalem Municipality formally seized the property in 2017 for the purpose of building a special needs school, but the family continued to operate a plant nursery there.
A Jerusalem court ruled last year in favor of the city and authorized the eviction. The family has appealed and is awaiting a ruling, but the judge did not freeze the eviction order.
City Hall and the police issued a joint statement saying the court ordered the family to vacate the property a year ago. The municipality said the property is to be used to build the school to serve Palestinian children in the neighborhood.
Other threatened evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and other neighborhoods, which are tied up in decades-old legal battles between Palestinian residents and Jewish settlers, set off protests and clashes last year that eventually helped ignite the 11-day Gaza war.
Israel considers the entire city its capital and the municipality says it is developing Jerusalem for all its residents. But the Palestinians and Israeli rights groups say the discriminatory policies and the settlements are aimed at driving them out and remaking the city.
Most Palestinians live in crowded, underserved neighborhoods and say it's virtually impossible to get building permits from the municipality, forcing many of them to relocate to the occupied West Bank
Omer Barlev, the Israeli Cabinet minister in charge of police, said the government faced a no-win situation.
“You can't have it both ways — to demand that the municipality act for the welfare of the Arab residents, and also to oppose the construction of educational institutions for their welfare,” he wrote on Twitter.
But Ir Amim, an Israeli rights group that follows developments in Jerusalem, said that in recent years the city gave up a different plot of land in Sheikh Jarrah originally designated for a Palestinian school and instead authorized construction of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary.
“The municipality appears to perceive it as reasonable and fit to dispossess a Palestinian family for the sake of a school rather than utilizing open land initially allocated for such purposes,” it said.
In an unrelated incident, the Israeli military said a Palestinian man attempted to stab a soldier at a major intersection on a West Bank highway south of Jerusalem and was shot. The Palestinian Health Ministry said Falih Jaradat, from the southern West Bank, died after being shot by Israeli forces at a junction south of Bethlehem.
