On a Tuesday morning in January 2024, municipal bulldozers arrived before dawn in Silwan, the densely built neighbourhood that cascades down the hillside south of the Old City walls. By the time residents had gathered to watch, one family’s home — built without a permit because a permit was essentially unattainable — had been reduced to rubble. The family, which had lived there for more than a decade, was left to clear the concrete themselves.
This is not an exceptional story in East Jerusalem. It is, by the documented record, a routine one.
What the OCHA Data Shows
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has tracked demolitions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, for years through its Protection of Civilians weekly and monthly reports. The pattern they document is consistent: structures in Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem are demolished at a pace that has no equivalent in the city’s Jewish neighbourhoods.
In 2023, OCHA recorded more than 130 structures demolished in East Jerusalem, displacing well over 200 Palestinians, including a significant proportion of children. Across the preceding decade, OCHA and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) have together documented thousands of demolition orders outstanding against Palestinian homes and commercial properties — a backlog that functions less as a legal queue and more as a permanent instrument of pressure.
The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, which has maintained its own demolition database since the early 1990s, corroborates the scale. Its records show that the overwhelming majority of structures demolished in East Jerusalem are Palestinian-owned, and that the stated justification in nearly every case is the absence of a valid Israeli building permit.
The Permit System: A Closed Door
To understand why so many Palestinian families build without permits, you have to understand the near-impossibility of obtaining one.
Since Israel annexed East Jerusalem following the 1967 war — an annexation not recognised under international law and explicitly condemned in UN Security Council Resolution 478 (1980) — the Jerusalem municipality has administered building and planning law across the entire city. But the planning framework applied to Palestinian neighbourhoods was, from the outset, designed to constrain rather than accommodate growth.
Large portions of Palestinian residential areas are zoned as “green areas” (open landscape reserves) or carry strict density and height limitations that bear no relationship to how densely those communities actually live. According to research by Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights, an Israeli NGO that has studied East Jerusalem’s planning regime in detail — Palestinian neighbourhoods cover roughly 35 percent of East Jerusalem’s land area but have been allocated only about 13 percent of the city’s building rights.
The approval statistics are stark. Data compiled by the Israeli advocacy organisation Ir Amim, drawing on Jerusalem municipality records, shows that between 2009 and 2023 fewer than 13 percent of building permit applications submitted by Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem were approved. In some years the approval rate has been lower still. The municipality has on occasion approved permit applications in the single digits for entire neighbourhoods in a calendar year.
For Palestinian families whose households have grown, whose roofs are failing, whose children need a room — the arithmetic is simple and brutal: apply and almost certainly be refused, or build and wait for the knock at the door.
Silwan, Issawiya, Sur Baher, Beit Hanina: Neighbourhoods Under Pressure
The burden is not evenly distributed even within East Jerusalem’s Palestinian communities. Certain neighbourhoods appear repeatedly in demolition records, each for reasons rooted in their particular geography or strategic significance to settlement expansion.
Silwan sits immediately adjacent to the Old City and has been a focal point for settler organisations seeking to expand a Jewish presence in what they call the “City of David.” Ir Amim and Al-Haq have both documented how demolition orders in Silwan cluster in areas where settler group Elad holds property or operates archaeological and tourism sites. The overlap between heritage tourism, settlement activity, and displacement is visible on the ground.
Issawiya, a neighbourhood in northeast Jerusalem hemmed in by Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, Israeli roads, and an industrial zone, has seen repeated demolition campaigns targeting homes and community structures. Residents interviewed by B’Tselem have described the neighbourhood as effectively encircled, with no legal space left to build.
Sur Baher gained international attention in 2019 when Israeli authorities demolished buildings there that were partially located in the adjacent West Bank — despite the Palestinian owners holding Palestinian Authority building permits for that portion of the construction. OCHA documented the incident in detail; Human Rights Watch described it as emblematic of the contradictions imposed on communities that straddle the Jerusalem municipal boundary, known locally as the “seam zone.”
Beit Hanina, one of East Jerusalem’s more middle-class neighbourhoods, illustrates that the permit crisis is not confined to the poorest communities. Professionals and business owners there face the same structural barriers, and demolition orders in Beit Hanina have targeted multi-storey family buildings representing decades of investment.
Self-Demolition: Coerced Destruction
One of the least reported dimensions of the East Jerusalem demolition crisis is the practice of self-demolition — when Palestinian owners destroy their own homes to avoid a worse financial outcome.
When the Jerusalem municipality carries out a demolition itself, it charges the costs back to the property owner. These fees, for heavy machinery, labour, and municipal processing, can run to tens of thousands of shekels — sums that represent years of income for many East Jerusalem families. A family that demolishes its own home avoids these charges. B’Tselem and OCHA have both noted the phenomenon in their reporting, describing it as a form of coercion: the state does not always need to send the bulldozers if the threat of debt is sufficient to compel the family to do the work themselves.
The psychological dimension is documented by social researchers and clinicians working in East Jerusalem. Families describe the experience of destroying a home they built — sometimes with their own hands, sometimes over multiple generations — as a form of grief without a name.
A Legal Framework and Its Obligations
International humanitarian law is unambiguous on the status of East Jerusalem. The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, prohibits the destruction of property in occupied territory except where rendered absolutely necessary by military operations. Article 53 makes no exception for administrative or planning violations. The International Court of Justice’s 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Wall referenced the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and the UN Human Rights Committee has repeatedly called on Israel to halt demolitions in the area.
The gap between that legal framework and daily practice in Silwan, Issawiya, Sur Baher, and Beit Hanina is not a technicality. It is, for the families who live it, the entire landscape of their lives.
Sources
- OCHA oPt, Protection of Civilians reports, 2023–2024
- B’Tselem, Planning and Building in East Jerusalem database
- Ir Amim, East Jerusalem planning and permit data, 2009–2023
- Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights, reports on East Jerusalem zoning
- Human Rights Watch, Israel: Razes Palestinian Homes in Sur Baher, July 2019
- Al-Haq, reports on Silwan and Jerusalem displacement
- UN Security Council Resolution 478 (1980)
- Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 53; ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Wall, 2004
