In the shadow of Al-Aqsa, a Palestinian neighborhood faces mass evictions
Palestinians and Israelis protest against the demolition of homes by Israeli authorities in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, 8 November 2025
Dikla Taylor-Sheinman and Charlotte Ritz-Jack report in +972 on 11 November 2025:
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.
An aerial view of Batan al-Hawa’s dense, vertical homes. With no green space in the neighborhood, children play mostly on terraces and in the narrow streets, in Silwan, East Jerusalem, 28 October 2025.
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.