When they come for the homes – Silwan evictions
Scenes from the Israeli demolition of two Palestinian homes in the al-Bustan neighbourhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem on 4 June 2025
The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network writes in Mondoweiss on 4 April 2026 :
On the morning of March 25, 2026, forces of the settler Zionist entity stormed the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood of Silwan and forcibly emptied eleven Palestinian homes. Mattresses, clothing, and children’s toys were thrown out of windows onto the road. Approximately sixty-five people were made homeless in a single morning. They have sought shelter in the homes of relatives and friends, homes that are themselves, in many cases, under demolition orders.
Forces of the settler Zionist entity also seized two apartments belonging to the Basbous family. Rafat Basbous was abducted during the operation. That same dawn in Jabal al-Mukaber, 21-year-old Qassem Amjad Shuqairat was shot by special units during a raid on his home, sustaining fatal injuries. His family stated that their son was shot in cold blood inside his home and in front of his family. Palestinian prisoner rights organizations described what happened as an execution carried out during detention. His body was seized, adding to the 776 Palestinian bodies already detained by the occupiers.
This was one day. One day in Jerusalem, amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza, strikes on Lebanon and Iran, and accelerating settler violence across the West Bank. And the news of it, the evictions, the killing, the arrest of Anas Basbous, the confiscation of a body, scrolled past, absorbed into the feed, swallowed up by the volume of catastrophe. This is not accidental.
Palestinian feminist scholar and criminologist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has theorized what she calls ihaala, a deliberate swarming, an overwhelming of the senses engineered to produce paralysis. The architecture of colonial violence is not only physical. It is epistemic and psychological. It works by exceeding the human capacity to process loss, so that each new atrocity renders the last one invisible. So that grief has no time to settle. So that resistance is swamped before it can gather form. The evictions in Silwan are happening within this design, and that design extends to those of us witnessing from outside. Attacks on other countries, such as Iran and Lebanon, provide a distracting cover for a massive escalation of violent pogroms and forcible displacement and for ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The eviction orders in Batn al-Hawa are based on a 1970 law that allows Jews who lost property in East Jerusalem before 1948 to reclaim it. No parallel right exists for Palestinians who lost property in West Jerusalem in the same year. This is not a legal dispute. It is a system of dispossession formalized as law. The lawsuits are filed by settlers affiliated with the Ateret Cohanim organization. The law is the weapon. The courts are the mechanism of transfer. And B’Tselem has stated plainly that these evictions embody a policy aimed at engineering the demographic balance and Judaizing the neighborhood through the exploitation of discriminatory laws.
B’Tselem warns that the evictions of March 25 mark the beginning of a large wave of displacement threatening around 2,200 people in Silwan, including 90 families, approximately 700 individuals, in Batn al-Hawa alone.