The Britain-Palestine All Party Parliamentary Group hosted an online briefing on 11 October 2025 for UK Parliamentarians on the forcible evictions of Palestinians in Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem with Zuheir Al Rajabi, spokesperson for the Batan al Hawah residents committee in Silwan, and a resident facing forcible dispossession from his home there, and Amy Cohen, Director of International Relations & Advocacy, at Israeli NGO Ir Amim, which focuses on Jerusalem. Zuheir wrote this in May 2025 for further context.It was chaired by Labour MP Andy McDonald, a vice-chair of the APPG. With thanks to Mi-Neged, a group of UK-based Israelis pushing for accountability, for their assistance in organising.
Silwan is a neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, bordering on the old city from the south. Far-right settler organisations have been trying to ‘Judaize’ it for decades, by forcibly displacing and evicting Palestinian communities out of their homes and replacing them with Jewish settlers, against international law. Over the last months, with international attention firmly on Gaza and the rest of the West Bank, settlers, backed by the state, have been using racist Israeli laws in order to forcibly dispossess Palestinian families and take over their homes. In one side of the neighbourhood (Batan Al Hawah) there are currently 87 families, 700 people who face forced eviction from their homes, under the same laws that saw residents of Sheikh Jarrah be dispossessed. Some of them face a deadline of mid-November to leave their homes. In another part (Al Bustan) 116 homes are facing home demolition. This area has seen historic demolitions already this year, and 1,500 people could lose their home.
On 9 November 2025, three families were forcibly evicted from Silwan - see this from Ir Amim. large forces of police raided the Batan al-Hawa neighborhood of Silwan and forcibly evicted three Palestinian households from their homes, displacing 14 people—including children and elderly residents. The families have resided in these homes for over 50 years. Settlers immediately seized and occupied the homes under police escort. The eviction of the extended Shweiki and Odeh families was carried out several days before the eviction order was set to officially take effect, raising serious questions concerning its legal pretext and procedural legitimacy. While the legal basis for carrying out the eviction early remains unclear, it appears to have been intended to mislead and catch residents off guard. See more from this from Ir Amim.
During the briefing, from his home, Zuheir showed us one of the homes which one Palestinian family had been forcibly evicited from, and which illegal Israeli settlers had now taken over.
