Batn al-Hawa, Occupied East Jerusalem – During his last days in the only home he’s ever known, Kayed Rajabi is spending most of his time on the family’s rooftop, gazing at Al-Aqsa Mosque just a stone’s throw across the Silwan valley. “Smoke, smoke, smoke,” Rajabi says anxiously, a cigarette in his hand. “That is all we can do.”

A street sweeper for Jerusalem’s municipality, Rajabi has stopped going to work, afraid his family might be thrown out of their home while he’s out. His children and those of the other families facing imminent eviction have stopped going to school as well. Everyone is terrified about what might happen if they leave their homes for even a moment – while trying to have a last precious few moments together.

“I’m 50 years old. I was born here,” says Rajabi as he looks across the valley of Silwan. “I opened my eyes in this house. My laughter, my sadness, my joy, and all my friends and loved ones are in this neighbourhood.” He is quiet for a moment and the silence is filled by the cooing of pigeons in the coops he and his brother take care of on their shared roof.

After a moment, he resumes. “Today, the house that is my dream, that is all my memories – they want to destroy it in a single second and put a settler in our place. This is an enormous pain in the heart, a pain you can’t imagine.

“This isn’t a building or property that will be destroyed – these are memories they want to erase.”

‘Constant psychological pressure’

At the turn of the new year, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected final appeals by 150 Palestinians across 28 families in the Batn al-Hawa neighbourhood of Silwan facing eviction from their homes.

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In all, approximately 700 residents of the neighbourhood, spanning 84 families, are now facing imminent forced displacement, which, according to Israeli NGO Ir Amim, would amount to the largest coordinated expulsion of Palestinians from a single neighbourhood in East Jerusalem since 1967, when Israel’s occupation began.

Twenty-four homes belonging to the extended Rajabi family alone are subject to eviction orders, affecting 250 people.

On January 12, the 28 families which had launched appeals received official letters from the Israeli execution office under the Ministry of Justice demanding they vacate their homes within 21 days. The family of Khalil al-Basbous, a neighbour of the Rajabis, has already been forcibly evicted from their home as a result of the latest court decision.

For as long as they can remember, the rooftop of Rajabi and his younger brother, Wa’il, 44, overlooking Al-Aqsa Mosque, has been a meeting place for family and neighbours to have breakfast together and drink tea. “You’d find 50 of my family members coming here, and we’d fill the neighbourhood with our celebrations of Ramadan and Eid,” recalls Rajabi.

He reels off the names of all the family members and friends from past Ramadans who have already been forced out of their homes in their street.

“The memories were so sweet before the settlers came,” says Rajabi. “The best memories, the best neighbourhood, the best neighbours – our neighbours who were replaced by the settlers.”

As he is speaking, a commotion begins outside the terrace of houses. It is the settlers who recently replaced his lifelong neighbours, the family of Abu Ashraf Gheith. He goes out to argue with them and their armed security guard before he returns to the rooftop, his eyes wide from adrenaline.

Peering over at Al-Aqsa, he takes another puff of his cigarette.

“The Gheith family, they were like family to us,” he says of his former neighbours. “We all loved each other. We grew up together, we opened our eyes together. We used to play, me and their sons and daughters.

“I cried every day after they were thrown out of their home so easily.”

Now, settlers occupy all the homes bordering Kayed and Wa’il’s building. “We are under constant psychological pressure from the settlers,” said Wa’il. “We are not living.”

Rajabi and his brother’s apartments in the building they share with their mother are simple – a kitchen, a small living room, a bedroom for each of them and their wives, and another room for their many children. “This house isn’t a villa, it’s not a palace,” says Rajabi. “But we are happy and comfortable here. The most incredible thing is to sit here, and your eyes fall on Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

For years, Rajabi, his brother and their family have walked to the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque every week for Friday afternoon prayers – at least until recently, when their living situation went from dire to a “death sentence”, he says.

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Since November, eight other families in the neighbourhood have been forcibly evicted from their homes, often violently, and Israeli settlers have immediately moved into the emptied homes, often holding loud celebrations.

These recent evictions mark a rapid acceleration of the forced displacement which has been taking place for years now in the neighbourhood.

Displaced – yet again

In the 19th century, impoverished Yemeni Jews settled in the area of modern-day Batn al-Hawa, located outside the Old City walls on a hill just south of the Haram al-Sherif complex, home to the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

While good relations reportedly existed between Jews and Muslims within the neighbourhood at the time, bouts of violence in the 1920s and 1930s in East Jerusalem made movement outside the neighbourhood dangerous, compelling these Yemeni Jewish families to leave. Local Palestinians then gained sole ownership of the area over time.

Just before the 1967 war, which saw Israel seize control of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula and the West Bank, the Rajabi family was living in the Sharaf neighbourhood in the Old City of Jerusalem.

In 1966, the Jordanian government advised the Rajabis to leave that neighbourhood before violence erupted. They fled to nearby Batn al-Hawa, buying land there from the existing Arab owners. After the war in 1967, the Sharaf neighbourhood was destroyed by the occupying Israeli authorities, who replaced it by expanding the modern-day Jewish Quarter.

Then, in 2001, the Israeli courts revived the long-dormant Benvenisti Trust, which had been created in the 19th century to manage land and property in the Batn al-Hawa area and provide homes there to Jewish Yemeni families.

The Israeli courts appointed two representatives from the settler organisation Ateret Cohanim to oversee that trust, which was historically entitled to buildings in 5.5 dunums (1.36 acres or 0.55 hectares) of land that today comprise dozens of family homes – despite the lack of any connection between these individuals and the Benvenisti Trust or the Yemeni Jewish community that had once been there.

Such court decisions have been made on the basis of Israeli laws, which allow for Jewish-owned lands vacated before and after the 1948 war to be returned to Israeli hands – regardless of any connection to the original inhabitants – following Israel’s conquests in 1967. Such rights are expressly denied to the many more Palestinians who also lost their homes in the aftermath of the wars in 1948 and 1967, including the Rajabis and other families in Batn al-Hawa.

“You’re turning these people away from our homes of 60 years because 120 years ago, their lands were ours,” remarked Zuheir Rajabi, 54, leader of the Batn al-Hawa community council, and cousin of Wa’il and Kayed. “So where are our lands, our homes in Katamon, Jaffa, Haifa, the Jewish Quarter, that we were forced to leave?”

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Ateret Cohanim is one of the main Israeli organisations attempting to advance the transfer of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, replacing them with Israeli settlers. Earlier, the organisation offered to buy homes from families in this working-class neighbourhood for millions of dollars apiece. Nearly all Silwan residents refused. Then, as it fought through Israeli courts to assert control over the land and its buildings, Ateret Cohanim began sending eviction letters to families in Batn al-Hawa in 2015.

Homes ‘for the poor’

According to Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher for the Jerusalem-based Israeli nongovernment organisation Ir Amim, documents from the Benvenisti Trust stipulated that if there were no poor Jewish families in need, other poor families should reside in these lands in their stead. But “the homes [in Batn al-Hawa] are given to ideological settlers, not to Jewish families that are poor,” notes Tatarsky. “The Palestinian families who are evicted are, of course, under the poverty line. So this is a very direct, explicit contradiction to the way the trust is supposed to function.”

Official investigations concluded this year by the Israeli Registrar of Charitable Trusts into the Ateret Cohanim-controlled Benvenisti Trust found multiple irregularities, including that all financial activities were conducted via Ateret Cohanim’s bank accounts rather than the Benvenisti Trust. “It’s very clear that the trust is just a cover for the actions of the settler organisation,” says Tatarsky.

Nonetheless, Ateret Cohanim has continued its efforts, unabated, to forcibly evict the Palestinian residents of the neighbourhood. After rebuffing earlier attempts to buy them off, by Zuheir Rajabi’s account, the families in the neighbourhood have spent “hundreds of thousands of shekels” in court since 2015, attempting to reverse or at least delay eviction proceedings.

While declining to address some of the particular issues regarding Ateret Cohanim’s involvement in the properties around Batn al-Hawa, Daniel Lurie, executive director and international spokesperson for Ateret Cohanim, told Al Jazeera that the current actions in the neighbourhood are “righting an historical injustice done by barbaric violent Arabs [and the British] towards Yemenite and Sephardi Jews – who drove out the Jews from a known Jewish neighbourhood in the 1920-30s”.

“Taking hate-filled violent Arabs out of any neighbourhood [based on Supreme Court rulings] or from Israel is a good thing,” his statement said.

The entire process has now culminated in the latest court decision, which rejected the final appeals legally available for the 28 families that are now to be evicted by the start of February, including Zuheir Rajabi’s.

“We’re truly exhausted,” says Rajabi, the community representative, inside his home, which is slated for eviction in the coming days. As he speaks, his eyes dart to the video feeds of the security cameras he has installed outside his home.

“We’ve been in the courts for 12 years with no results. Anything that benefits the settlers and the extreme right wing gets implemented, but nothing [positive] happens for the Palestinian Arab citizen. It’s impossible.”

‘They scatter us, cut us up like salad, grind us up’

Wa’il Rajabi says he does not know where his family will go when they are forcibly evicted from their home in the coming days. Few of the low-income families here do. “We will stay until our last breath, steadfast, sitting in our homes,” he says.

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According to Wa’il Rajabi, who earns 9,000 shekels per month, also working for the Jerusalem municipality, rent for any available homes in East Jerusalem is a minimum 5,000 to 7,000 shekels per month, with another 1,000 shekels going towards electricity and water. “How are you going to live on 2,000, 3,000 shekels? What are you going to eat? What are you going to drink? What are you going to dress your child in? How are you going to educate him? How are you going to go to and from work? It’s unreasonable,” said Wa’il, the breadwinner for a family of nine. “They sentenced us to death.”

As the families in the neighbourhood face eviction one by one – and now at a dramatically accelerated pace – the neighbourly and family bonds are being ripped apart. “It feels like the community is ending,” says Wa’il.

“We were all together here, but now you don’t know where one lives – one is in Beit Hanina, one is in Shu’fat, one is in Ras al-Amud,” his brother, Kayed, says. “They scatter us – cut us up like salad, grind us up.”

Through this traumatic period, parents spend their nights soothing children from the nightmares they are having about violent settlers coming to throw them out of their homes.

“Sometimes I joke with them, laugh with them, tell them stories, just to make them stop being scared, to stop thinking, to ease their stress,” says Wa’il. “But deep down, I know that no matter how we finish the story, they’ll always come back to the same topic.”

In the children’s last moments together, every second feels precious, but fragile. “I wish we could live peacefully and play like before,” laments 11-year-old Joury, Wa’il’s youngest daughter, on the family rooftop.

Out on the street one recent afternoon, one of the little girls she plays with was performing cartwheels when armed border police walked through their impromptu football game.

Moments later, a family of Israeli settlers, accompanied by armed security, passed right by them.

Joury recalls another time when the children were playing in the street and an Israeli settler started throwing garbage at them. “We defended ourselves,” she says. “The settler called the police. So since that day, we have not been able to play. If we stay there, the police will come and beat us up and humiliate us and stuff.”

The children spend these last days asking their parents the same questions:

“Why are they making us leave our homes? Where will we go?”

But their parents don’t have any answers for them.

However, in their last days together, the children snatch what time they can together on the stairs in front of Wa’il and Kayed’s home, playing football or paddle games.

“These days, sometimes, us kids have breakfast together,” says Joury. “Sometimes, we talk about growing up. Sometimes, we talk about defending each other or doing something like that. And we play when we can. We try to enjoy ourselves during these days because we will be separated from each other, from all our friends and family.”