The Mission of the State of Palestine would like to draw your attention to the threat of eviction faced by several Palestinian families in Jerusalem neighbourhoods.

15 Jerusalemite families totalling 37 households of around 195 Palestinians, residing in Karm Al-Ja’ouni area in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood and Batn Al-Hawa neighbourhood in Silwan, are currently at imminent risk of forced eviction. The families have been persecuted for years in attempts by Israeli settler organisations, backed by the Israeli courts system, to evict these families and install illegal settlers in their homes.

On 10 March 2021, the Palestinian Human Rights Organization Council submitted a plea to the UN on behalf of the families.  They highlighted forced evictions as a tool of Israel’s coercive environment in East Jerusalem, through which it maintains its institutionalised regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people – a system of apartheid.  Unlawfully applying Israeli domestic law to occupied territory, Israeli courts have ruled in favour of lawsuits undertaken by settler organisations to evict the Palestinian families.

The Sheikh Jarrah families have been resisting these attempts to evict them for years (read their story here.).  A member of one of the families, Mohammed El Kurd, wrote movingly of their plight last year.

He set the scene as follows:

“November 2009. My friend Ahmad and I, both 11, were riding our bikes home from school when I saw furniture scattered across the length of our street in Sheikh Jarrah, a politically charged neighborhood of occupied Jerusalem. The street overflowed with soldiers. My neighbors were screaming and protesting. As I approached my home, I couldn’t tell who was shoving me or in what direction. Then I saw the police horses—simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous—blocking my doorway. Settlers had invaded our home and taken over half of it. They claimed the front part and left us the rest… Now, more than a decade later, they’re coming to finish what they started.

…the battle over Sheikh Jarrah is not legal in its essence—it’s political. It is part of the larger systematic effort to Israelize the entirety of Jerusalem.”

The civil rights organisations fighting against this injustice have called on the UN to intervene as follows:

• Call on the international community to cooperate to bring to an end, including through coercive measures such as sanctions, Israel’s occupation, colonisation, and apartheid regime, as well as the prolonged denial of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, and the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, lands, and property, as mandated by international law;
• Call on the international community to ensure international justice and accountability through the ICC;
• Call on the UN to ensure the fulfilment of various UN resolutions in relation to the inalienable right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and to restitution and compensation of their properties, as well as resolutions directed at altering the composition and character of Jerusalem.

The Mission of the State of Palestine maintains that the only way to end these violations is though end the occupation, ensuring justice and accountability, and the realisation of a peacefully negotiated two-state solution along the 1967 borders.  Palestinians have a right to live freely.

Your vocal support to raise up the subjugation that our people face in Jerusalem neighbourhoods would be highly valued