RNA - The owner of one of these homes, Salih Turk, told Ma’an that a large number of Israeli police officers, including special forces, stormed his home in the neighborhood and forcibly evacuated his family, Ma'an reported.
“They even prevented us from taking our belongings,” he said.
Bulldozers then demolished the house, Turk said, adding that 11 family members, including six minors, were left homeless by the demolition.
Turk said that the Jerusalem municipality had postponed the demolition a year ago to Feb. 8, and fined him 25,000 shekels ($6,680), which he was still paying off.
Turk said that neither him nor his lawyer had been informed of the planned date of the demolition.
Meanwhile, local popular committee member Muhammad Abu al-Hummus told Ma’an that two houses under construction were demolished in the al-Kharuba area of Issawiya that same morning.
According to Abu al-Hummus, Israeli authorities demolished the buildings for being built without licenses from Israel's Jerusalem municipality.
Israeli authorities have stepped up issuing demolition warrants for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, particularly after Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barakat warned that the demolition of the illegal Israeli outpost of Amona in the occupied West Bank would be met with the mass demolition of Palestinian homes lacking the nearly impossible to obtain Israeli-issued building permits.
According to UN documentation, 14 Palestinian-owned structures had been demolished by Israel this year in East Jerusalem as of Feb. 6. A total of 190 Palestinian buildings were demolished in East Jerusalem in 2016.
In addition to land seizures and home demolitions, the crackdown on Palestinian Jerusalemites has also seen the escalation of violent night raids by Israeli police, carried out in breach of protocol and without proper search warrants.
The fate of Jerusalem has been a focal point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, with numerous tensions arising over Israeli threats regarding the status of non-Jewish religious sites in the city, and the "Judaization" of East Jerusalem through settlement construction and mass demolitions of Palestinian homes.
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