Astonished Palestinians in Silwan in Occupied Jerusalem were awoken early in the morning on December 27 by dozens of Israeli settlers guarded by Israeli occupation forces seizing and fencing off a Palestinian land called “Al-Hamra Land” in the Al-Ain area. The Palestinians men women and children alike confronted this blatant brutal theft and were resultantly assaulted by the occupation forces. Occupation soldiers detained at least 5 Palestinians and injured several others.
“While I was standing looking shocked at the sudden raid of Israeli settlers fencing our land an Israeli soldier hit me with a rifle butt and walked on as if nothing had happened” Mohammed Samreen says. According to Samreen the settlers aim to establish a biblical garden in Al-Hamra land. Legal attempts have been made with the Israeli courts seeking to protect the Samreen family’s land. Samreen says “The lawyer submitted a letter to the Israeli court to stop the settlers’ work on the ground with contracts dating back to 1928 attached proving that we Samreen family own this land for more than 70 years but nothing happened and now they seized it.”
The Israeli settlers installed surveillance cameras and placed banners on the 5-dunum land of Al-Hamra to ready the site for the excavation of the pool of Siloam. The excavation is being carried out by the City of David Foundation known in Hebrew as Elad which mainly works to increase the presence of Jewish settlers in and around Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. The area is an archaeologically rich swath of land outside the Old City.
For many years the residents of Silwan have been undergoing an open battle against Zionist Judaization projects which seek to eliminate Palestinian identity history and presence. On the 28th of last June 2019 Israeli occupation troops besieged a Palestinian house and a commercial establishment in the Al-Bustan neighborhood of the town demolishing them. The specter of the demolition targets large parts of this neighborhood which includes approximately 100 houses. The Central Court in Jerusalem had decided during the session held on May 28 to postpone its ruling until next December regarding appeals filed by seven families in the Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood in Silwan against decisions to demolish homes owned by 86 Palestinian families. It includes about 750 individuals who live in 15 buildings.
The Zionist attack on Palestinian homes in the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood began in 2015 under the pretext that Jewish settlers had owned the homes since 1890. The Palestinian population of the town is about 59000 and about 2800 settlers live there who were forcibly settled there by the occupation in 78 settlement outposts.
Silwan is the town closest to the walls and gates of Al-Aqsa Mosque from the southeastern side. It has an old well-known water spring called Ain Silwan which belongs to the Islamic Waqf. It is believed that the well was used to supply water to Jerusalem. The town also includes several historical monuments including the remains of Umayyad palaces tombs and monasteries. They include sites dating back to the Greek period and also some Canaanite antiquities.
Zionist Judaization and ethnic cleansing projects began in Silwan during the early 1990s when in October 1991 Jewish settlers stormed and seized the home of the Abbasi family in the town and succeeded after great pressure exerted on the Custodian of Absentee Property to declare the house absentee ownership. The settlers began to dwell in the home. Year after year the number of settlers seizing Palestinian homes in Silwan increased as settlers usually came armed and forced the Palestinians under force of arms to evacuate their homes.
Two major settlement associations supervise these Judaization and elimination of any Palestinian presence operations: the Ateret Cohanim Association which seeks to Judaize the Old City in East Jerusalem and its environs by ensuring the achievement of a demographic superiority for the Jews in it and the Elad Association which in Hebrew mean “to David city” which is considered one of the richest settlement associations in the occupied West Bank. It supervises dozens of settlement outposts in the town of Silwan most of which are in the Wadi Hilweh area. It finances Israeli excavations in the area and confiscates lands.
These two associations resort to several methods to seize the property of Palestinians in the town of Silwan including filing lawsuits before the Israeli courts to claim ownership of the real estate and property claiming to be of Jewish ownership and abandoned since 1948 falsifying real estate title deeds and using the absentee property law if the owner of the house is proven to be a Palestinian. These two associations have also succeeded though in limited cases in using brokers who work in secret to buy real estate from its owners then transfer its ownership to settlers.
– Wafa Aludaini is a Gaza-based journalist and activist. She contributed this article to the Palestinian Information Center.
