Palestinian Sub Laban family evicted from Jerusalem home as settlers move in

According to Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Ir Amim, some 150 Palestinian families in Jerusalem's Old City and nearby neighbourhoods are currently threatened with eviction.

Occupation forces this morning evacuated the Ghaith-Sub Laban family from their house in the Aqabat Al-Khalidiya neighbourhood in the occupied Old City of Jerusalem, replacing them with illegal settlers under the pretext that the settlers owned the property before 1948.

In the early hours of the morning, occupation forces accompanied by settlers stormed the family house, arrested five solidarity activists present in it and forcibly evicted those present.

The Department of Execution and Procedure had said the family would be evicted between 28 June to 13 July.

The house, which is located several metres from Al-Aqsa Mosque, has been rented from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan since 1953 and is subject to a protected lease. In 2010, the Galitzia Settlement Association claimed that the house is a Jewish endowment and the occupation courts decided to end the family’s protected lease and evict them from the house. This was preceded by several court sessions and various decisions that began in the 1980s.

In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court ruling prevented the presence of children and grandchildren in the house to stop them claiming the right to protection as third generation residents. Then, in 2018, the decision to evict the family was issued. The family has since lived under daily harassment at the hands of illegal settlers.

Israeli police forcibly evicted the Palestinian Sub Leben family from their home at the Old City near the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem on July 11, 2023 [Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency]

READ: Elderly Palestinian couple ‘cannot imagine’ forced eviction from home

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.