The newly tiled floor is still immaculately swept and the two sofas and two armchairs are regularly dusted. Taghreed Essayyad, 36, likes to keep the sitting area clean because she and her family spend as much time as possible in their home in the Al Tur neighbourhood of Jerusalem.
Or, at least, in the corner that still stands. When a Jerusalem municipality bulldozer a few months ago flattened the rest of the house for being built without permit, a wire caught under its tracked wheel, Mrs Essayyad recalled with some fondness, and the bulldozer broke down before it could complete the job.
It was the only part of that February day that Mrs Essayyad could smile about. The family was left with one corner, two walls and a bit of roof of what had been a one-storey newly built family home for seven people, Mrs Essayyad, her husband, Khalid, and five children aged between six and 17.
“My two oldest children still refuse to talk about it. But my 11-year-old couldn’t stop asking about it. For two weeks he worried that they would come and demolish the homes of the neighbours.”
The Essayyads’ plight is an increasingly common one for Palestinians of East Jerusalem. Since 1967, when Israel occupied the eastern part of Jerusalem and promptly and unilaterally annexed it as the “eternal, undivided capital of Israel”, Israeli authorities have demolished thousands of Palestinian buildings in East Jerusalem, including about 2,000 homes.
A report by the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs made public on Friday found that this is an accelerating process. Since 2000, Israel has demolished 670 Palestinian-owned structures, 93 in 2008 displacing 400 people. This process peaked in 2004, with 133 demolitions, but 2009 threatens to be another boom year for demolition. Nineteen buildings have so far been demolished, displacing more than 100 people, including 60 children. Hundreds of demolition orders are pending, which could result in the displacement of another 1,000 people, the UN says.
Most of the homes were demolished because they did not have construction permits. The UN says that nearly one-third of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem do not have such permits. The process is a long and expensive one, and Byzantine legislation and strict zoning laws make it very hard for those who do apply to obtain permits.
“It’s a Kafkaesque system,” said Salim Shawamreh of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. “The whole legislation is designed so as not to give Palestinians building permits.”
Mrs Essayyad accepted they had not obtained a permit to build a house on the plot of land that was left to her husband from his parents. But, she said, according to municipality maps, part of the plot was set aside for construction, and the family needed to have a place to live. They decided to build while applying for a permit.
Two years ago, the house was completed, but in Nov 2007 the municipality issued a demolition order. Part of the house was built on land not set aside for residential construction. The family went to court and reached an agreement with the municipality that they themselves would take down 13 metres of the house that exceeded the zoning law.
“The lawyer cost us US$13,000 (Dh44,000) and the reconstruction another $10,000. But we reached an agreement so we thought we were safe.”
They were wrong. Late last year, the municipality found fault with a further 14 metres of the house and issued another demolition order. Mrs Essayyad’s husband, Khalid, a mechanic, pleaded with the municipality, but finally had to agree to shrink the house further. Before he could, said Mrs Essayyad, 30 masked security officers and a bulldozer arrived at the family home on Feb 8 to demolish the whole house.
The UN report recommends that Israel, as the occupying power, should “ensure that the basic needs of the Palestinian population of the occupied territories are met” and urges the Jerusalem municipality to freeze all pending demolition orders. In response, the Jerusalem municipality, while accepting there was a “planning crisis” in Jerusalem, rejected the UN’s numbers and called the UN findings a “report of the past”.
A spokesman for Nir Barkat, the Jerusalem mayor, said the law was being implemented equally in both East and West Jerusalem. He did not dispute the UN’s number for demolitions in 2009, but said there had been 15 demolitions in West Jerusalem during the same period.
He also rejected accusations that it was harder for Palestinians in the East to get building permits. For 2008, he said, 44 per cent of construction permits in East Jerusalem were granted and 52 per cent in the West.
Those figures were strongly disputed by Mr Shawamreh.
“Show me one home that has been demolished in West Jerusalem. That is absolutely not right. Maybe a garage, maybe a balcony. But not a house.”
Mr Shawamreh also rejected as spin the municipality figures for construction permits.
“The numbers may be right, but how many of those permits in the East were granted to Jewish construction? And while they may grant a permit for a single Palestinian family to build a home, they usually grant project permits, for 500 units, to Jewish housing in the East.”
The Essayyads, meanwhile, have become a statistic, two adults and five children of the 100 displaced so far in 2009 because of home demolitions. But they still return to their house once a week for a cookout, while Musa, 11, comes every day after school to tend to eight sheep he keeps in a trailer next to the demolished building.
Mrs Essayyad said she did not harbour any illusions about what they were facing. It is because they are Palestinian that the family is unable to obtain a building permit, she said.
“I am here now,” she said. “But tomorrow, where will my children be?”
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