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JERUSALEM (Ma’an) -- A Palestinian family was forced to demolish parts of their own home in the al-Saadiya neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City on Monday, following an order from the Jerusalem municipality saying the rooms were built without the required Israeli-issued licenses.

Samer Idkik said that he demolished two rooms comprising 30 square meters which he built two and a half years ago, adding that they were being used as bedrooms for his children.

“I added the two rooms to the main house because my wife, our three children, and I used to live in only one room. Israeli municipality crews escorted by Israeli forces raided my house four months ago and delivered a demolition notice for the two rooms. The Israeli court ordered to postpone the demolition so I can demolish it by myself to avoid the demolition fees.”

Idkik is among many Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem who are forced to demolish their own homes in order to avoid paying costly municipality demolition fees.

A spokesperson for the Jerusalem municipality had previously told Ma’an that “self demolitions occur when house owners heed legal notices and court rulings and remove building code violations independently. Specific instances of residents heeding these notices are not verified in real time, therefore we cannot comment on them."

The incident came amid a surge in Israeli-enforced demolitions against Palestinian homes and livelihood structures in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.Within the span of three days last week, 33 structures were demolished in multiple incidents, which left 35 people -- a third of them children -- homeless, and 100 people otherwise affected.

“These incidents bring the total number of structures destroyed or confiscated by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank since the beginning of 2016 to 878. This represents a 60 per cent increase compared to the figure for the whole of 2015 and is the largest number of structures targeted in any full year since 2008, when OCHA began systematically documenting this phenomenon,” the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, two Palestinian families in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina were forced to demolish their own homes last Wednesday for being built without licenses.

One of the owners of the home said that, had the municipality carried out the demolition, he would have been fined over 70,000 shekels ($18,000).

“Due to discriminatory and unlawful planning processes, it is almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits in the vast majority of Area C and East Jerusalem,” OCHA’s statement added. “The systematic destruction of property in this context, along with other factors, contributes to the generation of a coercive environment pressuring residents to leave.”