AMMAN: Fahamiya Shamasneh, 75, and her ailing husband Ayoub, 84, have lived in the same house in East Jerusalem for more than 50 years. On Wednesday, Israel plans to throw them out.
Their home will be handed over to Israeli settlers as part of a wider plan to boost illegal Jewish settlements in the predominantly Palestinian area of Sheikh Jarrah.
It will be the first eviction there since 2009, according to the Israeli anti-occupation group Peace Now, and has become part of a fight over the disputed status of Jerusalem.
The Shamasneh family have been living in the house since 1964 and have been paying rent regularly, which they believed gave them legal housing guarantees as protected tenants.
Nevertheless, Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that Fahamiya, Ayoub, their son and his family have until Aug. 9 to voluntarily leave the cramped, 50-square-meter basement of their building or be forced out.
“Fifty-three years here means leaving is not easy — it is a lifetime. I was a young girl when I came to this house,” Fahamiya told AFP. “The police are threatening us. We don’t know what to do.”
Fahamiya said they had been told to leave peacefully or they would have to pay the cost of the eviction, which could be up to 70,000 shekels ($19,000).
They had not found anywhere else to go, she said.
“We will not leave of our own will. Maybe if they force us, carry us and throw us on the streets, then we’ll go. But for us to lock the door and tell them ‘here are the keys,’ that’s impossible.”
Palestinian political activists believe the eviction of the Shamasnehs and about 20 other families is a reaction to what Israel considers the humiliation of having to agree to Palestinian demands to remove security barriers at Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Eyad Shamasneh, a family member, told Arab News that the case has been in Israeli courts for years.
“Israel has targeted Sheikh Jarrah because it is close to the nearby Hebrew University on Mount Scopus.”
Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who focuses on Jerusalem issues, said events in Sheikh Jarrah had implications for the whole city. “Sheikh Jarrah, like any other East Jerusalem neighborhood, is a community at risk, and this is a big problem in terms of the stability and peace of the city and its political future.”
Under a decades-old Israeli law, if Jews can prove their families lived in East Jerusalem homes before 1948, they can demand that Israel’s general custodian office release the property and return their “ownership rights.”
No such law exists for Palestinians who lost their land.
According to historians, the neighborhood got its name from the 13th-century tomb of Sheikh Jarrah, a physician of Saladin.
Until 1967, Sheikh Jarrah straddled the no-man’s land between Jordanian-held East Jerusalem and Israeli-held West Jerusalem. When all of Jerusalem was occupied by Israel after the 1967 war, Israeli ambitions to claim Sheikh Jarrah grew. It is now at the center of several property disputes between Palestinians and Israelis.
Most of its current Palestinian population are refugees expelled from Talbiya in Jerusalem in 1948.
Palestinian family lose their home to Israeli settlers
Palestinian family lose their home to Israeli settlers
Hamas to hold leadership elections in coming months: sources
- A Hamas member in Gaza said Hayya is a strong contender due to his relations with other Palestinian factions, including rival Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, as well as his regional standing
GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Hamas is preparing to hold internal elections to rebuild its leadership following Israel’s killing of several of the group’s top figures during the war in Gaza, sources in the movement said on Monday.
“Internal preparations are still ongoing in order to hold the elections at the appropriate time in areas where conditions on the ground allow it,” a Hamas leader told AFP.
The vote is expected to take place “in the first months of 2026.”
Much of the group’s top leadership has been decimated during the war, which was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel in October 2023.
The war has also devastated the Gaza Strip, leaving its more than two million residents in dire humanitarian conditions.
The leadership renewal process includes the formation of a new 50-member Shoura Council, a consultative body dominated by religious figures.
Its members are selected every four years by Hamas’ three branches: the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank and the movement’s external leadership.
Hamas prisoners in Israeli prisons are also eligible to vote.
During previous elections, held before the war, members across Gaza and the West Bank used to gather at different locations including mosques to choose the Shoura Council.
That council is responsible, every four years, for electing the 18-member political bureau and its chief, who serves as Hamas’s overall leader.
Another Hamas source close to the process said the timing of the political bureau elections remains uncertain “given the circumstances our people are going through.”
After Israel killed former Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024, the group chose its then-Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar as his successor.
Israel accused Sinwar of masterminding the October 7 attack.
He too was killed by Israeli forces in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, three months after Haniyeh’s assassination.
Hamas then opted for an interim five-member leadership committee based in Qatar, postponing the appointment of a single leader until elections are held and given the risk of being targeted by Israel.
According to sources, two figures have now emerged as frontrunners to be the head of the political bureau: Khalil Al-Hayya and Khaled Meshaal.
Hayya, 65, a Gaza native and Hamas’s chief negotiator in ceasefire talks, has held senior roles since at least 2006, according to the US-based NGO the Counter-Extremism Project (CEP).
Meshaal, who led the Political Bureau from 2004 to 2017, has never lived in Gaza. He was born in the West Bank in 1956.
He joined Hamas in Kuwait and later lived in Jordan, Syria and Qatar. The CEP says he oversaw Hamas’s evolution into a political-military hybrid.
He currently heads the movement’s diaspora office.
A Hamas member in Gaza said Hayya is a strong contender due to his relations with other Palestinian factions, including rival Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, as well as his regional standing.
Hayya also enjoys backing from both the Shoura Council and Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades.
Another source said other potential candidates include West Bank Hamas leader Zaher Jabarin and Shoura Council head Nizar Awadallah.
