In the spring of 2021, the world watched Muna and Mohammed al-Kurd livestream their family’s dispossession from a house in Sheikh Jarrah, a residential neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. The footage — settlers occupying rooms, a young Palestinian woman confronting a man who had taken half her home — traveled across social media and into United Nations chambers. But the legal machinery behind that moment had been grinding for decades, long before any camera turned on.
Sheikh Jarrah sits just north of the Old City walls, a quiet neighborhood of stone houses and tree-lined streets that has been home to Palestinian refugee families since 1956. That year, under a deal brokered by UNRWA and the Jordanian government, some 28 Palestinian families — displaced in 1948 from towns including Haifa, Jaffa, and Lifta — were settled in the neighborhood in exchange for surrendering their refugee camp registration. They built lives, planted gardens, and raised children and grandchildren. What they did not know was that two Israeli settler organizations would spend the following decades constructing a legal argument to remove them entirely.
The Legal Architecture of Dispossession: Two Laws, One Direction
The eviction cases in Sheikh Jarrah rest on a striking asymmetry in Israeli law. The Absentees’ Property Law (1950) allows the Israeli state to seize property belonging to Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war — even if those Palestinians became Israeli citizens and never left the country’s borders. Under this law, Palestinian families cannot reclaim property they lost in West Jerusalem or elsewhere in Israel, no matter how clear their pre-1948 title.
The Legal and Administrative Matters Law (1970), however, works in the opposite direction. It allows Jewish individuals and organizations to reclaim property in East Jerusalem — territory occupied by Israel in 1967 — if they can demonstrate ownership from before 1948. The combination of these two statutes creates a one-way valve: Jewish ownership claims in East Jerusalem can be pursued through Israeli courts; Palestinian ownership claims inside Israel cannot.
Human rights organization Al-Haq and Israeli legal watchdog Ir Amim have both documented this asymmetry extensively, describing it as a legal framework that structurally advantages settler organizations over Palestinian residents regardless of the individual circumstances of any case. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt) has repeatedly flagged Sheikh Jarrah as a flashpoint for forced displacement driven by this legal imbalance.
The Families: Al-Kurd, al-Ghawi, Hanoun, Sabbagh
The al-Kurd family’s case centers on a property that settler organization Nahalat Shimon International — registered in the United States — claims was owned by a Jewish association before 1948. Israeli courts accepted the claim, and in 2009 settlers moved into a section of the al-Kurd home, partitioning it. Mohammed al-Kurd’s father, Nabil, had been fighting the case in Israeli courts for years before his son and daughter became internationally recognized voices of resistance. By 2021, the family faced the prospect of full eviction.
The Hanoun and al-Ghawi families were not spared the wait. In August 2009, Israeli police evicted both families in a single predawn operation, removing dozens of people — including children — and allowing settlers to move in within hours. The families had lived in their homes since the 1950s UNRWA arrangement. Footage of Manal al-Ghawi being dragged from her home, and of Fawzia Hanoun clutching her belongings in the street, circulated internationally and drew condemnation from the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations. The families subsequently lived in tents outside their former homes for months.
The Sabbagh family faced a parallel process, with settler organization Ateret Cohanim — which focuses on acquiring Palestinian properties in and around the Old City and East Jerusalem — pursuing claims against their property. Ateret Cohanim has been involved in dozens of such cases across East Jerusalem and has received funding from donors in the United States, a channel that drew scrutiny in reporting by Haaretz and investigative outlets. Ir Amim has tracked Ateret Cohanim’s activity across the city as part of a broader settlement expansion strategy.
Nahalat Shimon and the Master Plan
Nahalat Shimon International has been explicit about its ambitions. The organization’s stated goal, documented in its own promotional materials and reported by Haaretz and Peace Now, is the construction of a new Jewish neighborhood of several hundred housing units on land currently occupied by Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah. The plan, sometimes referred to as the Shimon HaTzadik development, would require the displacement of the approximately 500 Palestinians who remain in the neighborhood’s threatened households.
Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights — an Israeli organization of architects and urban planners, has analyzed the proposed development and its implications for Palestinian residents. The group has documented how Israeli planning policy in East Jerusalem systematically restricts Palestinian construction while facilitating settler expansion, leaving Palestinian families legally exposed even when they hold long-standing residency.
May 2021: A Neighborhood Becomes a Crisis
The immediate trigger for the May 2021 Sheikh Jarrah crisis was an Israeli Supreme Court hearing, scheduled for early May, on the eviction of four families including the al-Kurds. The court date — combined with Israeli police restrictions on gatherings at the Damascus Gate during Ramadan — produced a convergence of Palestinian anger that spread from Sheikh Jarrah to the Old City and, within days, to Gaza.
Nightly solidarity protests in Sheikh Jarrah, which had been growing since January 2021, drew Palestinian citizens of Israel, Israeli Jewish activists, and international observers. Israeli police responded with stun grenades, rubber-coated steel bullets, and mass arrests. On the night of May 7, police entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and fired stun grenades at worshippers, injuring more than 200 people according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. Hamas issued an ultimatum; Israel did not withdraw. On May 10, Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza fired rockets into Israel. Israel launched an eleven-day military campaign on Gaza that, according to OCHA oPt, killed 256 Palestinians in Gaza including 66 children, and 13 people in Israel.
The Israeli Supreme Court ultimately postponed its ruling on the Sheikh Jarrah evictions and, in a rare move, requested that the state clarify its position. As of the most recent reporting, the families remain in legal limbo — neither evicted nor secure. The structural laws that produced the crisis remain unchanged.
For the al-Kurd, al-Ghawi, Hanoun, and Sabbagh families, Sheikh Jarrah is not a symbol or a flashpoint. It is where they have buried relatives and where they have raised children. The legal architecture that threatens to remove them does not distinguish between these details. That, advocates argue, is precisely the point.
Sources
- OCHA oPt, Humanitarian Situation Reports and Snapshots on East Jerusalem, multiple editions, ochaopt.org
- Ir Amim, Displacing Palestinians in East Jerusalem: Policies and Practices, ir-amim.org.il
- Al-Haq, Settling into Occupation: Analysis of Israeli Settlement Policy in the oPt, alhaq.org
- Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights, reports on East Jerusalem planning policy, bimkom.org
- Peace Now, settlement tracking and Nahalat Shimon documentation, peacenow.org.il
- UNRWA, historical records on 1956 Sheikh Jarrah resettlement agreement, unrwa.org
- State of Israel, Absentees’ Property Law, 5710-1950; Legal and Administrative Matters Law, 5730-1970
- Palestinian Red Crescent Society, injury reports, May 7–10, 2021
- Haaretz, reporting on Ateret Cohanim funding and Nahalat Shimon development plans
