Israeli police demolished the home of a Palestinian family and arrested at least 18 people as they carried out a controversial eviction order in the sensitive east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah early on Thursday.
The looming eviction of other families from Sheikh Jarrah in May last year partly fuelled an 11-day war between Israel and armed Palestinian fac-tions in Gaza. Before dawn, Israeli officers went to the home of the Salhiya family, who were first served with an eviction notice in 2017, after courts ruled the house had been built illegally. Jerusalem authorities have said the land will be used to build a school for chil-dren with special needs, but the eviction may raise tension in a neighbourhood that has become a sym-bol of Palestinian opposition to Israeli occupation.
Jerusalem deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum said the dispute surrounding the Salhiya’s home is “completely different” from the events in May, when Palestinians risked being forced to hand over plots of land to Jewish settlers.
Israeli police said they had “completed the exe-cution of an eviction order of illegal buildings built on grounds designated for a school for children with special needs”.
“Members of the family living in the illegal buildings were given countless opportunities to hand over the land with consent,” a police statement said. A bulldozer raked through rubble hours after the home was destroyed. A police spokesman said 18 family members and supporters were arrested for “violating a court order, violent fortification and disturbing public order,” but no clashes took place during the evic-tion.
When police arrived to carry out the order on Monday, Salhiya family members went up to the building’s roof with gas canisters, threatening to set the contents and themselves alight if they were forced out of their home.
Police had eventually backed off, but returned early Wednesday amid heavy rainfall in Jerusalem.
Salhiya family lawyer Walid Abu-Tayeh said the police had “illegally” arrested 20 people during the operation, six of them Israeli citizens, with the latter being released, adding that “the Arab detain-ees were assaulted.” The authorities “want to liqui-date the (Palestinian) population” of Jerusalem, he said.
Abu-Tayeh also confirmed reports that the Pal-estinian father Mahmud Salhiya is married to an Israeli Jew, named Meital.
In an audio recording distributed to local Arab-language media, Meital, who speaks Arabic, said the family was woken early Wednesday by the sound of loud booms and police had cut the electric-ity. “They took me out of the house with my daugh-ter and children who were crying, and arrested my husband and all the young men,” she said.—AFP
