Eviction orders continue... The Supreme Court rejects the Rajabi family's appeal and upholds the decision to evict them from their building in Silwan
On Sunday, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the appeal filed by the Rajabi family against the decision to evict them from their residential building in the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood of Silwan, south of Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Zuhair Rajabi, head of the Batn al-Hawa Neighborhood Committee, explained to the Wadi Hilweh Information Center that the Supreme Court rejected the appeal filed by family members Nasser Rajabi, Ayed Rajabi, and their mother against the eviction order in favor of settlers, on the grounds that "the land has been owned by Jews from Yemen since 1881."
He added that the District Court had rejected the family's appeal last July, prompting them to turn to the Supreme Court, which today rejected the petition and upheld the eviction order in favor of the Ateret Cohanim settler association.
The Information Center noted that the Rajabi family's property is a three-story residential building with three apartments, housing 16 individuals, including children and the elderly.
For more than ten years, Nasser al-Rajabi's family has been waging a legal battle in Israeli courts to protect and preserve their property, moving between Magistrates' Courts, district Courts, and Supreme Courts. The settlement association first served the family with a court notice in 2016, demanding the return of the land on which the property stands. A series of court hearings followed, and the first eviction orders were issued by the Magistrates' Court in 2020.
The Information Center indicated that the Ateret Cohanim Association claims ownership of approximately 5200 square meters of land in the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood, claiming that it has belonged to Yemenite Jews since 1881. Since 2015, the association has been delivering notices and court orders to neighborhood families demanding that they vacate their homes. In 2001, it obtained the right to manage the so-called "properties of the Jewish Association," which it claims owns the land.
More than 80 Palestinian families in the neighborhood, estimated at 600 people, are at risk of eviction. All of them are facing legal proceedings and decisions in various Israeli courts. Among these families are the families of the Kayed, Jabr, and Wael al-Rajabi brothers, who are awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court regarding the appeal they filed in a similar case.
Zuhair al-Rajabi pointed out that the Supreme Court's decision to reject the appeal comes just days after a similar ruling ordered the eviction of the Shweiki and Odeh families from their homes in the same neighborhood, in the context of similar legal cases. The court gave the family only 30 days to implement the eviction order.
The Information Center explained that the Ateret Cohanim Association has succeeded in recent years in implementing eviction orders against several Jerusalemite families from their homes in the Batn al-Hawa neighborhood, including the Shehadeh, Ghaith, and Abu Nab families (who fall under the same case, with Jewish ownership of the land in the neighborhood).
