A Palestinian neighborhood’s last stand against Israeli settler takeover in Jerusalem
Silwan in East Jerusalem on 21 June 2010
Qassam Muaddi reports in Mondoweiss on 26 January 2026 :
An entire Palestinian neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem is being erased.
Some 40 Palestinian families in the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood of Silwan, a Palestinian town at the foot of Jerusalem’s Old City, have received orders to leave their homes. The order came after an Israeli court gave its final ruling on a decades-long case, giving the land where their homes stand to an Israeli settler organization. Several families have already been expelled from their homes in the past weeks.
The town of Silwan is part of East Jerusalem and is located in the Wadi Hilweh valley, just south of Jerusalem’s Old City walls, with an estimated population of 55,000. Over the years, Silwan has been targeted by Israeli settlement projects, and has seen some 65 locations in the town taken over by Israeli settlers, and a biblical park called ‘the city of David’, run by religious settlers, built in the place of Palestinian homes.
But since December, a particular part of Silwan has been at the center of news in Palestine: the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood, where dozens of Palestinian homes have been the target of Israeli settlers for years. Since 2015, the land in question, where the homes stand, has been claimed in Israeli courts by Ateret Cohanim, an Israeli settler organization dedicated to seizing Palestinian property in Jerusalem. The group is able to claim the property of the land, which is home to Palestinian families, thanks to an Israeli law passed in 1970, which allows Israelis to claim property owned by Jews in Jerusalem any time before 1948. Israeli law does not give Palestinians the same right to claim their homes and property, which they lost in the Nakba in 1948.