olivewire.org

The May 2021 Escalation: Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah, Gaza, and the Unity Intifada

On the evening of 10 May 2021, Hamas issued a deadline to Israeli forces: withdraw from the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and Sheikh Jarrah by 6 p.m. or face rocket fire. Israeli forces did not withdraw. Within minutes, rockets arced out of Gaza toward Jerusalem — the first time the city had been directly targeted from Gaza since 2014. What followed was eleven days of bombardment, siege, and street confrontations that killed 256 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, displaced tens of thousands, and produced the most significant episode of coordinated Palestinian political action in a generation.

To understand why that ultimatum was even issued, you have to start months earlier — in the quiet, lawyerly proceedings of Jerusalem’s housing courts, and in the rhythms of Ramadan at one of the holiest sites in Islam.

Sheikh Jarrah: A Legal Eviction Case With Deep Colonial Roots

Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel in 1967 in a move never recognised under international law. For decades, a handful of Palestinian families there have faced eviction through Israeli courts, which have allowed settler organisations to press ownership claims based on property records from before 1948 — a mechanism unavailable to Palestinian families dispossessed in the same period. The legal asymmetry is documented extensively by Israeli human rights organisation Ir Amim and Palestinian group Al-Haq, among others.

By early 2021, the cases of the Ghawi, Qasim, Ja’ouni, Salhiyeh, and Iskafi families — among others — had reached critical junctures in the Israeli court system. The families had lived in the neighbourhood since the 1950s, resettled there by UNRWA and the Jordanian government following their displacement during the 1948 war. Settler organisation Nahalat Shimon International was pursuing their removal. In late April and early May, scheduled eviction hearings and a planned Israeli Supreme Court ruling generated international attention. Nightly demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah, streamed live on social media, drew solidarity protests across the world.

The Israeli Supreme Court postponed its ruling on 10 May — the same day Hamas fired its first rockets — in an implicit acknowledgment of the political volatility. But for Palestinians, the postponement was beside the point. The legal machinery was still in motion.

Al-Aqsa Under Siege: Ramadan, Flags, and Police Raids

The second trigger was Al-Aqsa itself. During Ramadan 2021, Israeli police repeatedly restricted Palestinian access to the Damascus Gate plaza, a traditional gathering point for evening prayers and socialising. The restrictions generated protests. On the night of 7 May — Laylat al-Qadr, the holiest night of Ramadan — Israeli police fired rubber-coated steel bullets and stun grenades inside the Al-Aqsa compound, entering the mosque itself. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, over 200 people were injured that night alone.

On 10 May, Israeli police again entered Al-Aqsa with stun grenades and tear gas as tens of thousands gathered for Jerusalem Day — the Israeli national holiday marking the 1967 conquest of East Jerusalem — during which nationalist marchers traditionally route through the Muslim Quarter. OCHA reported that by the time Hamas fired its ultimatum rockets, over 300 Palestinians had been injured at Al-Aqsa in the preceding days.

For Palestinians across the region, the combination — families facing expulsion in Sheikh Jarrah, worshippers attacked at Al-Aqsa during Ramadan — carried a symbolic charge that transcended the immediate incidents. These were not separate provocations. They were, in the Palestinian reading, the same ongoing dispossession: of homes, of sacred space, of the city itself.

Eleven Days: The Scale of Destruction in Gaza

Israel’s military campaign, which it named Operation Guardian of the Walls, began on the night of 10 May. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other armed factions fired more than 4,300 rockets and mortars toward Israel over eleven days; the majority were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system or landed in open areas, though some caused deaths and significant damage. Thirteen people in Israel were killed, including an Israeli Arab child and several foreign workers.

In Gaza, the scale of harm was of a different order entirely. OCHA reported that 256 Palestinians were killed, including 66 children, and more than 1,900 were wounded. The UN agency documented the destruction of more than 1,800 housing units and severe damage to a further 14,300, leaving tens of thousands displaced. Entire residential tower blocks were destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, including buildings that housed international media offices — among them the Al-Jalaa tower, home to Al Jazeera and the Associated Press bureau. The Israeli military said the building contained Hamas military infrastructure; it provided no evidence publicly, and the AP stated it had no indication of any militant presence in the tower.

The single deadliest incident of the campaign came on 16 May, when Israeli airstrikes on the Shati refugee camp and the Al-Wehda street in Gaza City killed at least 42 people, including an extended family sheltering in a residential building. Infrastructure damage was extensive: OCHA documented strikes on roads, water and sanitation networks, and the partial destruction of Gaza’s only COVID-19 testing laboratory. The territory was already under a 14-year blockade, its population already dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs. Médecins Sans Frontières, WHO, and UNRWA all warned of a mounting healthcare crisis as the bombardment continued.

The Unity Intifada: Palestinian Citizens of Israel Enter the Frame

What distinguished May 2021 from previous rounds of Gaza fighting was what happened inside Israel’s 1948 borders. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship — roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population, descendants of those who remained after 1948 — mobilised in unprecedented numbers. General strikes, mass demonstrations, and solidarity protests erupted in Haifa, Nazareth, the Naqab (Negev), and the so-called “mixed cities” of Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, and Acre.

In Lod (Lydd), the situation became particularly acute. Following the killing of a Palestinian citizen by a Jewish Israeli gunman amid communal tensions, intercommunal violence erupted. The Israeli government declared a state of emergency in the city and deployed Border Police and the military. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented instances of police violence against Palestinian demonstrators during this period across multiple cities.

Palestinian commentators and scholars, including Rashid Khalidi, described the events as a “Unity Intifada” — an uprising that, for the first time in decades, brought Palestinians across the fragmented geographies of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the 1948 territories into simultaneous, coordinated protest. Whether spontaneous or structured, the simultaneity was historically significant. It reflected a generational shift among Palestinian citizens of Israel, many of them young people for whom the Abraham Accords’ normalisation framework — concluded only months earlier — had confirmed that Arab governments would not advocate on their behalf.

Ceasefire and Its Discontents

An Egyptian-brokered ceasefire came into effect in the early hours of 21 May 2021, eleven days after the fighting began. It was unconditional on both sides and addressed none of the underlying causes: the Sheikh Jarrah eviction cases continued in Israeli courts; the blockade on Gaza remained in place; the political status of Jerusalem was unchanged.

The UN Security Council had failed to issue a joint statement during the fighting, blocked on three occasions by United States vetoes of draft texts calling for a ceasefire, according to UN records. Secretary-General António Guterres had called for an immediate halt to hostilities. The UN Commission of Inquiry subsequently established to investigate the events noted, in findings consistent with earlier OHCHR reporting, that Israeli airstrikes may have violated international humanitarian law through disproportionate or indiscriminate attacks, and called for accountability from all parties.

In Gaza, reconstruction barely began before the next cycle of violence. For the families of Sheikh Jarrah, the legal proceedings ground on. For Palestinians who had taken to the streets from Haifa to Hebron, the unity of May 2021 was a moment — real, felt, documented — even if the structures of dispossession it protested remained entirely intact.

Sources

Étiqueté , , , , ,

Laisser un commentaire

Votre adresse e-mail ne sera pas publiée. Les champs obligatoires sont indiqués avec *