Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians who were forced out of their homes in occupied East Jerusalem, as Israeli forces demolished a four-storey residential building displacing around 100 people on Monday. It was the latest in a series of demolitions targeting Palestinian homes in the area.
Published On 22 Dec 202522 Dec 2025
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Palestinian officials condemn the actions as part of a ‘systematic policy of displacement’ in the occupied territory.
Israeli forces have stormed towns in the occupied West Bank and demolished a residential building.
Soldiers fired stun grenades and tear gas on Monday as they carried out the demolition in East Jerusalem. Palestinian officials accused Israel of a campaign of displacement in the city, saying the operation was part of a systematic attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land.
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Scores of Palestinians were displaced as Israeli bulldozers tore through a four-storey residential building. Activists called it the largest such demolition in the area this year.
Three bulldozers destroyed the building with 13 apartments in the Wadi Qaddum neighbourhood of the Silwan district, south of Jerusalem’s Old City, Al Jazeera Arabic correspondents reported.
Israeli forces cordoned off surrounding roads, deployed heavily across the area and positioned security personnel on the rooftops of neighbouring houses. During the operation, a young man and a teenage boy were arrested.
Residents were told the demolition order was issued because the building had been constructed without a permit.
Palestinians face severe obstacles in obtaining building permits due to Israel’s restrictive planning policies, activists say, a policy that they assert is part of a systematic attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land.
Israel’s security cabinet has recently approved the recognition of 19 new settlements in the West Bank, expanding the total number approved this year to 69 as the government continues its settlement push.
The Jerusalem governorate, affiliated with the Palestinian Authority, condemned the demolition.
“The building’s destruction is part of a systematic policy aimed at forcibly displacing Palestinian residents and emptying the city of its original inhabitants,” the governorate said in a statement.
“Any demolition that expels residents from their homes constitutes a clear occupation plan to replace the land’s owners with settlers.”
The Jerusalem municipality, an Israeli authority whose jurisdiction over East Jerusalem is not recognised under international law, said the demolition was based on a 2014 court order.
Israeli human rights groups Ir Amim and Bimkom said the demolition was carried out without warning despite a scheduled meeting on Monday to discuss steps to legalise the building.
“This is part of an ongoing policy. This year alone, around 100 East Jerusalem families have lost their homes,” the groups said, calling Monday’s demolition the largest of 2025.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, Israeli forces damaged agricultural land and uprooted trees in the northern town of Silat al-Harithiya.
In the city of Halhul, north of Hebron, Israeli forces stormed several neighbourhoods with large numbers of military vehicles, deployed sniper teams and took up positions across the city.
Al Jazeera Arabic journalists reported that Israeli vehicles entered Halhul through multiple checkpoints, including Nabi Yunis, while closing the Halhul Bridge checkpoint linking the city to Hebron.
Since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have also sharply escalated attacks across the West Bank.
More than 1,102 Palestinians have been killed in the territory, about 11,000 wounded and more than 21,000 arrested, according to Palestinian figures.
Israeli authorities are engaged in multiple major efforts, including building settlements and pursuing annexation, to ensure there will be no Palestinian state in the future.
Israeli authorities are expected to advance plans to build 9,000 new housing units in an illegal settlement on the site of the abandoned Qalandiya airport in occupied East Jerusalem, in another attempt to cut off Palestinian lands from each other and block any possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state ever emerging.
The so-called Atarot neighbourhood in northern East Jerusalem, reminiscent of the E1 plan to undermine Palestinian statehood, is to be discussed and have its outlines approved on Wednesday by the District Planning and Building Committee, according to Israeli group Peace Now.
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The advocacy group said the new settlement is envisioned to be built within a densely populated Palestinian urban area, stretching from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank and Kafr Aqab in the north through the Qalandiya refugee camp, ar-Ram, Beit Hanina and Bir Nabala.
It would build an Israeli enclave in an area where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live in close proximity, with the aim of blocking development in a key area and further damaging the likelihood of a sovereign Palestinian state being established.
“This is a destructive plan that, if implemented, would prevent any possibility of connecting East Jerusalem with the surrounding Palestinian area and would, in practice, prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel,” Peace Now said.
Translation: The massacre government is working to establish a new ultra-Orthodox mega-settlement across the Green Line north of Jerusalem. The new political attack called ‘Atarot’ is planned to be built in the heart of the Palestinian state that will be established alongside Israel. This involves 9,000 housing units that Israel will have to evacuate. Isn’t it a shame?
The organisation said the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seizing every moment to bury chances for a future of peace and compromise.
“Especially now, when it is clear to everyone that the ideas of ‘managing the conflict’ and ‘decisive victory’ have led to a security disaster for Israel, we must act to resolve the conflict.”
The plan’s advancements date back to early 2020, when Israel’s Housing Ministry sent it to the Jerusalem municipality to prepare it for approval. It completed the bureaucratic preparation process within months, but faced objections from the Environmental Protection and Health ministries, according to Peace Now, which said the administration of United States President Barack Obama had also opposed it.
It would need further government consideration and approval before being given legal effect and moving towards tender processes to select construction contractors.
Most of the plan area is designated as “state land” by Israeli authorities, meaning they would not have to seek permission from Palestinian landowners.
Israel has been quickly advancing with several major projects to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian territory and pursuing annexation of the occupied West Bank, alongside its genocidal war on Gaza that started in October 2023 and has now killed more than 70,000 people.
The E1 plan, which would see the construction of thousands of illegal Israeli homes in the occupied West Bank, is hailed by Israeli officials despite international condemnation.
Israel’s security cabinet last week signed off on plans to formalise 19 illegal settlements across the West Bank.
Israeli forces continue to launch raids across the occupied West Bank and support violent settlers in attacking Palestinian lands while issuing permits to demolish Palestinian homes.
Israeli authorities began carrying out demolition operations Wednesday morning in the town of Biddu, located northwest of occupied East Jerusalem, under the pretext that the Palestinian buildings lacked permits.
In the central part of the West Bank, settlers, who have been rampaging with impunity often backed by the Israeli military, burned Palestinian vehicles and wrote racist slogans in the village of Ein Yabrud in Ramallah on Wednesday.
Several Palestinians were also arrested during raids across the West Bank, including in Nablus.
Local authorities said the Israeli military plans to demolish 25 residential buildings in the Nur Shams refugee camp this week.
Rights groups say the demolition order, which will affect 100 Palestinian homes, is an attempt to ‘cage in’ Palestinians.
The Israeli military will demolish 25 residential buildings in the occupied West Bank’s Nur Shams refugee camp this week, according to local authorities.
Abdallah Kamil, the governor of the Tulkarem governorate where Nur Shams is located, told the AFP news agency on Monday that he was informed of the planned demolition by the Israeli Defence Ministry body COGAT.
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Faisal Salama, the head of the popular committee for the Tulkarem camp, which is near Nur Shams, said the demolition order would affect 100 family homes.
Israel launched Operation Iron Wall in the occupied West Bank in January. It says the campaign is aimed at combating armed groups in refugee camps in the northern West Bank.
Human rights organisations have warned that Israel is using many similar tactics it used in its genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza to seize and control territory across the occupied West Bank.
“This is part of a wider campaign that has persisted for about a year, targeting three refugee camps and demolishing or damaging a total of about 1,500 homes in the past year, and forcibly displacing 32,000 Palestinians,” said Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from the West Bank’s Ramallah.
Palestinians and human rights organisations say such demolitions are an attempt to “cage in” Palestinians and alter the geography in the West Bank, she added.
On Monday, a dozen displaced Nur Shams residents held a demonstration in front of armoured Israeli military vehicles blocking their way back to the camp. They protested against the demolition orders and demanded the right to return to their homes.
The head of the Palestinian National Council, Rouhi Fattouh, said that the Israeli decision is part of “ethnic cleansing and continuous forced displacement”, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
Omer Bartov, a professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, told Al Jazeera that Israel was “dehumanising” the Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank.
“[It is creating] a growing situation of social death, which is a term that was used to describe what happened to Jewish populations in Germany in the 1930s. That is, that your population, the Jewish population of Israel, increasingly has no contact with the people on the other side, and it exists as if they don’t exist,” he said.
“It dehumanises the population because you treat it as a population that has to be controlled, and it dehumanises the people doing it because they have to think of that population as being lesser than human.”
Aisha Dama, a camp resident whose four-floor family home, housing about 30 people, is among those to be demolished, told the AFP she felt alone against the military.
“On the day it happened, no one checked on us or asked about us,” she said.
“All my brothers’ houses are to be destroyed, all of them, and my brothers are already on the streets,” said Siham Hamayed, another camp resident.
Nur Shams, along with other refugee camps in the West Bank, was established after the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in what is now Israel.
With time, the camps they established inside the West Bank became dense neighbourhoods. Residents pass on their refugee status from one generation to the next.