Jerusalem has seen some of its worst violence in years.
It began with protests in the usually quiet neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem.
The demonstrations spread to other parts of the city - including to the Al Aqsa mosque,
one of the holiest sites in Islam.
Heavy-handed policing fueled anger as tensions escalated.
Many see this as the spark that triggered one of the deadliest episodes of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict in recent history.
But tensions are still simmering over the planned eviction of Palestinian families in
Sheikh Jarrah.
So what’s going on there and why is it important?
Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian neighborhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.
Most of the people who live here are Palestinians - but in the past few years, Jewish settlers
have moved into some properties.
Protests flared recently over plans to evict Palestinian families to make way for more
settlers.
It’s all part of a long-running dispute over the ownership of the land and who has
the right to live there.
To understand why, we have to go back to the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, after Israel declared
its independence.
The conflict displaced some 750,000 Palestinians.
Some of them were later resettled in Sheikh Jarrah as part of a Jordanian project funded
by the United Nations.
Some of the land had previously been owned by two Jewish associations.
In 1967, Israel effectively annexed East Jerusalem - including Sheikh Jarrah.
Israel views Jerusalem as its ‘unified, eternal’ capital and denies that East Jerusalem
is occupied.
But with it under Israeli control, Jewish settlers started launching legal challenges
to claim ownership of the land.
"So in 1950 Israel legislated a law, the Absentee property law that says that Palestinians cannot
return to their properties in Israel.
In 1970 after Israel annexed East Jerusalem the Knesset legislated that Jews can return
to properties so this is the basis or the discriminatory basis of all the court cases
of evictions that we are seeing in Sheikh Jarrah & Silwan that settler manage to take
out the ownership from before 1948 and now they are suing the Palestinians out of their
homes.”
This is at the heart of the conflict in Sheikh Jarrah.
Seven families are facing eviction to make way for Jewish settlers - with several more
in the middle of court proceedings.
The land belongs to Jews for almost a hundred years.
Jews lived there, and Jews own the land since then.
Nothing has changed.
What has changed now is that suddenly the Arabs decided that they are the owners of
the land and they don't want to accept the Jewish ownership."
The families, though, say the laws are discriminatory - and that it’s not a real-estate dispute,
but a case of forced expulsion.
“And this is our life.
We are the owners of the land, the Palestinians, who have legally lived here, with legal proof
for everything [related to living here].
And here they are, the settlers have come, they occupied our houses and they want to
occupy what remains of the neighborhood.”
This isn’t just happening in Sheikh Jarrah.
There are dozens more cases in another East Jerusalem neighborhood, Silwan.
According to international law, Israel can’t confiscate property in an occupied territory.
The UN has called for a halt to the evictions, saying they may amount to a war crime.