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Photos:
Israeli forces destroy a building in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, Feb. 20, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

A demolished home in Silwan, East Jerusalem with Jewish settlements directly above, November 2024. (Georgia Gee)

A demolished home in Silwan, East Jerusalem, November 2024. (Georgia Gee)

Children look at a demolished home in Silwan, East Jerusalem, November 2024. (Georgia Gee)

Workers at the Givati Parking Lot excavation grounds next to the City of David National Park and the Palestinian village of Silwan, across the street from the Old City walls, Jerusalem, July 28, 2019. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

A confrontation between Aryeh King (right), Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, and Pepe Alalu, the former Deputy Mayor, in East Jerusalem at the demonstration against home demolitions, January 2025. (Jess Flom)
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In 2024, Israel destroyed 181 homes and approved the fewest Palestinian building plans in a decade, while greenlighting thousands of settlement units.

By Georgia Gee and Dikla Taylor-Sheinman for 972Mag
March 6, 2025

Ibrahim Mashahra and his family of six have been homeless for over two months now, after he was forced by Israeli authorities to destroy his own house in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabal Al-Mukaber.

The Jerusalem Municipality and National Enforcement Unit had threatened to tear down Mashahra’s home since 2018 for “building without a permit.” In December 2024, he received an official demolition order, giving him just three weeks to vacate or demolish the home himself. To salvage some of his young children’s belongings, Mashahra chose the latter. He was still made to pay fines totalling NIS 54,000 ($14,930).

“I was born here in East Jerusalem, but I don’t have the most basic rights,” he told +972. “The situation here is extremely grim.”

Mashahra and his family are not alone in this predicament. While Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza captured the majority of international attention, state and municipal authorities moved to increase settlement construction plans and escalate the speed and scale of demolitions. Countless Palestinian families across East Jerusalem have been facing the same devastating dilemma: demolish their own homes, or watch as the authorities do it.

According to data collected by Ir Amim, an Israeli non-profit tracking demolitions, 2024 saw a record number of Palestinian home demolitions in East Jerusalem. Most of the 255 structures — 181 of them homes — were destroyed for being built without a permit, which is almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain. To avoid severe penalties, including heavy fines and even imprisonment, residents had no choice but to carry out 108 of these demolitions themselves.

2025 began much the same, with 46 demolitions and counting. In late January, the Ja’abis family was forced to demolish their building in Jabal Al-Mukaber, which contained three apartments and multiple businesses. Another grim precedent was set this week when, for the first time, Israel conducted home demolitions in East Jerusalem during Ramadan.

“Home demolitions are central to Israel’s goal of controlling land and demographics [in East Jerusalem],” explained Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim. “It’s clear that if Israel is not stopped, demolitions will continue to accelerate by the day.”

In response to +972’s inquiry, the Jerusalem Municipality stated that “enforcement actions are typically taken against buildings and structures that were constructed illegally and cannot be retroactively legalized due to future plans for the area or when the owners or those responsible for the construction fail to comply with court decisions.” It added that there had been “no significant change” in the number of enforcement actions against “illegal buildings” over the past year.

Meanwhile, as demolitions persist, the Israeli government has advanced six new Jewish settler projects in East Jerusalem — paving the way for thousands of housing units. While previously stalled due to legal concerns and international criticism, after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Israel has been emboldened to revive and expedite them.

Pushing Palestinians out“The scale of Israeli state violence is much worse than it used to be,” said Tatarsky of Ir Amim. “In the past the international community would intervene, but now it seems almost complacent, allowing Israel to push forward with actions it couldn’t take for two decades.”

In response to +972’s inquiry, the Jerusalem Municipality said they have been “advancing a neighborhood master plan aimed at addressing unauthorized construction” in Silwan, while restoring the area “to its original designation as an open green space for public use.”

“This enforcement action is intended to encourage residents to implement the proposed solution while considering the area’s sensitivities,” the statement said.

Over weekends in January and February, hundreds of Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem, joined by left-wing Israeli and international activists, took to the streets in protest of the demolitions in Silwan. During one protest, Aryeh King, deputy mayor of Jerusalem and a prominent far-right activist, arrived to personally hand out demolition orders. “The Arabs who stole the homes of the Jews will be evicted,” he told the press. “God willing, a redeemer has come to Zion.”

‘Endlessly expanding’ settlements
In 2024, Israel designated 11 areas in East Jerusalem, including Beit Safafa, Umm Lysoon, Atarot, Sheik Jarrah, and Umm Tuba, for new settlements, with plans to build thousands of housing units.

“Settlements are being endlessly expanded,” said Kronish of Bikom. “There is this ongoing misuse of bureaucratic processes in order to confiscate as much land or register it under Jewish settler ownership.”

Demolitions are “part and parcel of the housing crisis in East Jerusalem,” explained Sari Kronish, architect at Bimkom, an Israeli human rights organization focusing on Israeli planning policies. “If Palestinians are not being allowed to plan, and equitable housing is not being considered, it trickles down to this devastating policy. It’s a vicious cycle.”

In 2024, the Jerusalem Municipality approved just 57 plans — totaling 1,000 housing units — for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the lowest number in a decade. Meanwhile, 120 plans were greenlighted for Israeli Jewish settlers, which would see the construction of 11,000 housing units.

Home demolitions in East Jerusalem are historically rooted in inequitable housing policies that aim to push Palestinians out of the city to create and maintain a Jewish demographic majority. After Israel occupied and illegally annexed East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, it suspended all land registration and zoning procedures, which prevented building permits from being issued. But while the land could not be legally developed, it could be confiscated by the state — a policy Israel aggressively pursued to dispossess Palestinian residents and facilitate the construction of Jewish settlements.

Israel resumed land registration procedures in 2018 under the stated goal of “reducing socio-economic inequality,” but the true objective was to assert Israeli sovereignty by cataloguing all of occupied East Jerusalem’s lands in the Israel Land Registry and consequently requiring its schools to use Israeli curricula.

In 2017, the Knesset passed the Kaminitz Law, which sought to criminalize building violations and intensify enforcement through increased home demolitions and heavier fines. As a result, more and more Palestinians began destroying their own homes, unable to afford the steep demolition fees and opting to avoid the more extensive devastation that the Israeli bulldozers wrought.

For decades, the so-called “Mukhtar Protocol” acted as an informal workaround for Palestinians to prove property ownership and submit private construction plans to the Israeli municipality in the absence of formal land registration. However in 2022, following a concerted public campaign from right-wing groups, affiliated with settlers who decried the “illegal transfer of land to Arabs with specious claims,” the Israeli authorities set new regulations requiring full proof of land ownership — a deliberately unattainable requirement for Palestinians. This brought planning to a halt: in 2023, not a single plan on private land that was never fully registered passed the preliminary stage.

In Jabal Al-Mukaber, Mashahra spent six years trying to organize his neighbors to submit a joint building plan for a single apartment, as required by the new regulations that mandate plans cover a minimum geographic area of 10 dunams, comprising 20 to 30 families. However, because approval depended on unanimous agreement among all neighbors, his efforts ultimately failed. One neighbor refused to relocate, so the plan “disappeared into thin air,” Mashahra said.

This requirement is just one of many bureaucratic hurdles Palestinians face, often after investing in costly planners and lawyers. “An entire plan may be rejected simply because the authority believes a single road [in the proposed scheme] is not in the correct location,” explained Rawan Shalaldeh, an urban planner at Bimkom.

Make way for tourists
Israel has used these convoluted processes preventing Palestinian construction alongside the invocation of older Israeli laws — such as the Absentees’ Property Law, which allows the state to confiscate Palestinian property they were forced to leave behind in 1948, and the Legal and Administrative Matters Law, which enables Jews to reclaim properties owned by Jews before 1948 — to remove Palestinians from their lands for the benefit of the state and Jewish settlers.

In Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood near Jerusalem’s Old City, Rami Abu Shafa, a special educator and art therapist, spent years trying to obtain a building permit, but like many others, his efforts were futile. The Jerusalem Municipality and National Enforcement Unit demolished his home, as well as those of his mother and siblings, in late December 2024. They were given only two weeks to clear out their belongings.

“We were not ready at all,” he told +972. “It was a very, very stressful period, trying to find alternative housing so that we could keep our children in school.”

Abu Shafa still had to pay a fine of NIS 90,000 ($24,860), and clean up the debris after the demolition. “I was really shocked that I would be a victim of demolition,” he said.

Abu Shafa’s home was one of 68 demolished in Silwan last year to make way for a biblical tourist park, a project two decades in the making brokered by the state and settler groups. Previously stalled due to international condemnation, the plan has now accelerated amid Israel’s war in Gaza.

In Jabal Al-Mukaber, Mashahra’s neighborhood, plans are underway to double the population of Nof Zion, a Jewish settlement currently home to 90 families. Last year, the Jerusalem Municipality allocated NIS 2 million ($550,000) to build a sports field for the settlement, while 34 Palestinian homes in the neighborhood were demolished. This year, authorities approved the further expansion of Nof Zion into the surrounding Palestinian neighborhoods, adding more housing units and a municipality-funded school.

One prominent resident of Nof Zion is pro-settler activist Henanel Garfinkel. In late 2024, he was appointed head of the Custodian of Absentee Property department — a powerful body within the Israeli Finance Ministry tasked with overseeing Palestinian properties in East Jerusalem. Garfinkel previously facilitated the sale of land in the Silwan neighborhood to pro-settler groups and has claimed that East Jerusalem is under “Arab occupation.”

“When we think we reached a bottom, we keep getting worse,” said Kronish. With the war as a pretext, “all of the arms of the state came to work together” to advance its aims in East Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Municipality told +972 it has invested approximately NIS 2.2 billion ($607 million) in the last five years in East Jerusalem and has been “advancing urban renewal plans tailored to meet the needs of the local population.”

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