Another East Jerusalem neighbourhood is demolished as the world fails to act
Peter Oborne reports in Middle East Eye on 23 October 2026:
Down a track and past a pile of debris, 20 or so well-dressed people are waiting, all diplomats. I am joining them on a trip around al-Bustan, a Palestinian neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem that has been scheduled for demolition. Many homes have been destroyed already. Bustan (“the Orchard”) is to be turned into a car park and recreation ground for settlers – but not for Palestinian residents, who will by then be absent.
We stumble past the ruins of what used to be a house. In the garden is a caravan, where we are met by the owner, Fakhri Abu Diab. His wife Ameena, mother of their five children, stands nearby.
“They arrived at three in the morning, armed soldiers with black masks putting a gun to my head,” Fakhri recalls of a recent visit. “They took me to interrogation.” On another occasion, they broke Ameena’s glasses. Terrified, she “clenched her jaw so hard that she broke her teeth”.
The diplomats shuffle their feet. Fakhri and Ameena, now in their sixties, have lived in Bustan all their lives. Fakhri is chairman of the local residents’ committee, but he won’t be a resident much longer.
Their temporary home is scheduled for demolition within 21 days of 4 October, when a new demolition order was pasted on his gate. They don’t know where to go next. “Whenever I hear bulldozers or any machinery, my automatic reaction is that they are coming for us,” Fakhri tells Middle East Eye.
Reshaping demography
Suitcases stand packed just outside the door. Fakhri explains that bulldozers sometimes arrive without notice, and often leave no time to gather belongings.
The Jerusalem municipality gives Palestinians the opportunity to “self-demolish”. Fakhri warns that “if you don’t do that, the municipality does it for you and sends you the bill”. Fakhri says he paid 43,000 shekels ($13,800) when they destroyed his home. A couple of the diplomats examine their mobile phones.
Some 1,500 Palestinians lived in Bustan, located at the bottom of a valley half a mile southwest of Al-Aqsa Mosque. It is being destroyed as part of a massive project to reshape the demography of occupied East Jerusalem.
According to a statement from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, these demolitions are “a clear manifestation of an Israeli policy aimed at engineering the demographic balance and ‘Judaizing’ the neighborhood by exploiting discriminatory laws”.
The group adds: “These measures are designed to expand Israeli presence and control over one of the most politically and religiously sensitive areas in the region, serving as a crucial component of the broader ethnic cleansing currently unfolding across the West Bank.”