A Palestinian family in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah faced off against Israeli police on Monday morning, as Israeli forces attempted to forcibly remove them from their home.
Social media was flooded on Monday morning with photos of members of the Salhiya family standing on top of their roof with a gas canister, as armed Israeli forces attempted to remove them from their home.
Dozens of Israeli police officers stormed the Salhiya family home and ordered the family to leave. Israeli police and the Jerusalem municipality said in a joint statement that its officers went to carry out the operation after the Salhiya family “ignored countless opportunities to vacate the land as ordered.”
The Salhiya family is one of several Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah that Israel is seeking to forcibly displace in order to replace them with Jewish settlers.
Local media reported that a number of the young men in the family barricaded themselves on the roof of the home in an effort to stop the removal. Several news outlets quoted Mahmoud Salhiya as saying that he would set himself on fire and blow the house with the gas tank if the eviction was carried out.
“Police said they did not intend to evict him by force, but the municipality made it clear that they do not intend to sign any document as long as the family members are fortified on the roof,” Israeli news website Ynet reported.
Ynet added that Israeli Public Security Ministry said Salhiya’s home is not intended for eviction “this week”, only the plant nursery located next to it. This claim contradicted with the action of Israeli forces, who as of Monday afternoon, were still attempting to remove the family from their home.
According to eyewitness reports, at least five Palestinians were arrested by Israeli police at the site of the ongoing operation over the course of the afternoon. Israeli authorities reportedly called in the Yamam special forces unit, also known as the “Special Unit for Counter-Terror Warfare”
At around 1:00 pm, Israeli forces began bulldozing the plant nursery adjacent to the family home, while Israeli police sent in negotiators to work out a deal with the family to get off the roof and evacuate the house — something the family were still refusing to do as of 3:00 pm in the afternoon, local time.
Abdallah Ikermawi, one of the Salhiya family members who is barricaded on the roof, told reporters that the family doesn’t intend on giving their home over to the state.
“Back in 1948 our family was expelled from Ein Kerem and lost everything, including their home,” Ikermawi said. “We’ve been in this home since the fifties and fighting the eviction for 25 years.”
“They’ve offered us money to leave and we’ve been fighting to save our home. Now they are using the excuse of building a school, despite the fact that they keep closing local schools while giving permission for settlers to build,” he said.
“We don’t have anywhere to go, we have 15 people with no other home including small children and elders.”
The Jerusalem Municipality, headed by right-wing Deputy Mayor Aryeh King, a leader of the settler movement, has slated the area where the Salhiya family home lies for the construction of a school.
King, along with other leaders and international settler organizations, has been seeking to displace dozens of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in order to make way for settlers.
The family, who were refugees from the Nakba in 1948 and were settled in Sheikh Jarrah by the UN, have been under threat of forcible displacement for decades, with several families having been kicked out of their homes and replaced with settlers over the years.
The struggle of the families in Sheikh Jarrah against their ethnic cleansing catapulted to the world stage earlier this year, drawing massive protests in Palestine and abroad, and the attention of world leaders.
Despite widespread protests and social media campaigns to #SaveSheikhJarrah, which were believed to have staved off any forcible displacement for a while, the residents maintain that real action by the international community must be taken to protect them.
If the residents were Jewish, they would be recognised as the rightful owners. Because the are Palestinian, they must be ethnically-cleansed fropm their homes!
Misterioso: Pro-Israel America, which came into existence a few years ago, is not just lobbying to get Republicans elected, but as the US system seems to permit, to pay to get pro-Zionistas elected in the Democrats too, (as in the contest between Senator Omar and a pro-Zionist young black democratic female hopeful, whose name I forget).
It is disappointing that these “good people” will fight tooth and claw to protect a regime that is guilty of Apartheid and clearly guilty of ethnic cleansing as evidenced by the creation of a lattice-work of Jews-only colonies, roads and other services in the Occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem from which Palestinians are barred.
How long can the pathetic excuses of representatives in the US and around the world, continue to ignore – and indeed to block recognition of – Palestinian fundamental human rights?