Israeli authorities are accelerating home demolitions and forced evictions of Palestinian residents in the Silwan district of occupied East Jerusalem, Human Rights Watch said today. The organisation said the forcible deportation or transfer of the population of an occupied territory within or outside the territory, unless justified on a temporary basis for the protection of the population itself or imperative military reasons, is a violation of international humanitarian law and amounts to a war crime.
Silwan lies south of Jerusalem’s Old City. Among its 12 neighbourhoods, al-Bustan and Batn al-Hawa have for decades been the primary focus of eviction and demolition campaigns led by Israeli authorities and settler organisations such as Ateret Cohanim. These campaigns intensified under cover of the hostilities in Gaza and, this year, Iran.
Of the 587 Palestinians displaced by demolitions since October 2023, a quarter were displaced during Israel’s war with Iran in March-April 2026, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination and Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Over 2,000 people are at risk of forced displacement in Silwan, which, if not halted, will be one of the largest waves of expulsions in East Jerusalem since 1967, according to Ir Amim, an Israeli group that tracks government policies in Jerusalem.
