In order to establish settlement geographic contiguity and limit the Palestinian geographical connection with the old walls of Jerusalem, the Israeli occupation targets the village of Sheikh Jarrah in the occupied Jerusalem governorate.
The village fell under occupation in 1967, and it is adjacent to the borders of the fourth of June in the northern western side, and from here it acquires its strategic importance in the eyes of the occupation.
The village is adjacent to what has become known as the “armistice line” that was drawn in 1949, and it is the green line separating the eastern and western parts of the city. In order to completely cross the green line separating the two parts of the city, the occupation authorities have built 3 Israeli hotels.
More than 900 years
The history of the village and its foundation goes back to more than 900 years ago, and the village took its name from Prince Hussam al-Din bin Sharaf al-Din Issa al-Jarahi, who is the doctor of the Muslim leader Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, and his tomb is still located in Sheikh Jarrah.
The village was inhabited by well-known Palestinian families, such as the Nashashibi family. The Palestinian writer Isaf al-Nashashibi descended from them, whose palace is still there.
Sheikh Jarrah lives more than 3 thousand Palestinians on an area of land estimated at about a thousand dunams, which is the last remaining land for them after the confiscation of thousands of dunams of the residents’ lands, on which 3 settlements were established, known as the French Hill settlements.
The targeted Palestinian houses, whose residents are threatened with deportation for the benefit of the settlement associations, are located along Nablus Street, in the area of the Shekounat Refugees and the Kaniyat Umm Haroun. The number of properties is 28 homes, inhabited by about 500 Palestinians.
These homes were built in 1956, when the Jordanian Ministry of Construction and Reconstruction entered into an agreement with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) to construct 28 housing units in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and individual agreements were concluded with the residents to establish housing for them in the neighborhood, and it pledged under the agreements to be delegated Owning housing units and registering them in their names.
Before the establishment of Israel
Three years after the occupation of East Jerusalem, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) in 1970 approved a law claiming the existence of lands and real estate for Jews in Sheikh Jarrah, and claimed that they owned these lands and real estate before the establishment of Israel.
Since then, Israeli governments have successively planted outposts and established ultra-Orthodox Jews in the heart of the neighborhood with the settlement of “Shimon Hatzedek” and the settlement of “Shepherd Hotel”, which was established in 2011, the headquarters of the occupation police, the Border Guard Command, and the Israeli Ministry of Interior that besiege the Palestinian presence in the neighborhood.
After that, the Israeli courts began examining the cases brought by the settlement associations against the Palestinian residents, but in 1976 a judgment was issued by the Israeli courts in favor of 4 Palestinian families stating that the families existed legally and according to the powers of the Jordanian government, and that they were not aggressors on the land, but they recognized The land is owned by Jewish associations, according to what is registered in the Israeli Land Registry Department from 1972, and they have claimed that they have owned land in the neighborhood since 1885.
Lawsuits and allegations
This prompted settlement associations to initiate claims and royal claims in Sheikh Jarrah before the Israeli courts. In 1982, the first cases were filed against 28 Palestinian families, which the settlement associations demanded to vacate their homes, properties and lands, while the first official eviction decision was issued against two Palestinian families in 2002.
In November 2008, the occupation authorities forcibly expelled the first Palestinian families from the neighborhood and settled them with the Jews, namely the Ghawi family, who were evacuated by force of arms from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which they have lived in since the fifties of the last century after they became refugees after the Nakba, as they were displaced by force of arms from their homes. From the Jaffa area and the villages of Jerusalem, and some of them were driven by displacement and displacement from Haifa.
The area in which there are 28 homes is threatened by eviction, forced displacement, and settlement of settlers, while the Israeli government and the municipality of the occupation in Jerusalem have approved the establishment of a settlement neighborhood in the center of Sheikh Jarrah that includes 500 settlement units. And real estate before the catastrophe of 1948.