A two decade park plan and a permit regime that allots roughly one new Palestinian housing unit for every six built for Jewish Israelis have pushed al Bustan past the demolition line.
In East Jerusalem, where the municipal planning apparatus allocated just 7 percent of new housing approvals to a population that makes up roughly 40 percent of the city, demolitions rarely announce themselves as policy. They arrive as a court order, a fine, or, as Fayez Awad experienced, an excavator at the door of a home that a biblically-themed park plan has been working to erase for two decades.
Awad, 58, returned from Friday prayers in late May to find a crew tearing through the lower floors of his Silwan home, according to a BBC report by Middle East correspondent Yolande Knell. "They destroyed the future," he told her. The lower two stories, built in 2018 and held under a court-issued stay, had been his family's only remaining rooms in al-Bustan, a tight grid of stone houses on the slopes below the Old City walls. Knell's reporting places the Awad home among 59 properties destroyed in the al-Bustan area since late 2023. The Jerusalem Municipality has pursued plans for roughly 20 years to convert the neighborhood into a settler-run, Old-Testament-themed public park called King's Garden, to be managed by a Jewish settler organization.
The 7 percent figure comes from Bimkom, an Israeli human rights group that tracks planning and housing. In 2025, only 7 percent of new housing approved in Jerusalem went to Palestinian residents, the group found, even though Palestinians account for roughly 40 percent of the city's population — roughly one new Palestinian housing unit for every six built for Jewish Israelis. Read alongside the demolition count, the disparity reframes al-Bustan from a local dispute into a structural outcome. Displacement is not an accident of court rulings. It is the running product of a permit regime that allocates new rooms at a fraction of the rate given to a population that already lives there.
The mechanism is older than any single demolition. The 2018 East Jerusalem land registration process, according to Bimkom and cited in the BBC's reporting, has functioned less as a bureaucratic procedure than as a tool for large-scale land appropriation and Palestinian displacement. UN monitors have logged roughly 200 Palestinian households, around 900 people, in active eviction cases in Israeli courts, most filed by settler organizations. The Basha family, whose historic building sits adjacent to an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva in the Old City, faces a court order to vacate that would leave about 12 relatives, mostly elderly, on the street; a temporary injunction is pending appeal.
The Jerusalem Municipality, asked by the BBC about King's Garden, said it was working "for the benefit of all city residents" in a zone suffering a shortage of open public spaces. That stated rationale deserves to be heard in full. It also sits uneasily next to two facts the same article documents: that the park is to be operated by a settler organization, and that no comparable, well-resourced public-space initiative has been announced for the Palestinian neighborhoods losing the housing stock the plan is meant to replace.
International law is unambiguous on the framework. The BBC reports, in line with mainstream international consensus, that settlements and the forced transfer of a population from occupied land are illegal under international law. Israel contests the framing. So does much of the East Jerusalem planning apparatus on the ground, where demolitions are recorded as enforcement of building codes, not as the slow relocation of a community. The al-Bustan numbers suggest the larger effect is what the law names it: transfer, by paperwork as much as by excavator.
The pattern is not confined to one neighborhood. The Jerusalem District planning committee has approved a long-delayed ultra-Orthodox yeshiva at the entrance to Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood that has already produced eviction battles watched around the world. The Israeli government has set up an inter-ministry team to explore the seizure of dozens of Palestinian-owned properties near the Chain Gate, the entrance to the al-Aqsa compound, the BBC reported. Peace Now's Yonatan Mizrahi, who tracks settlement activity, and Aviv Tatarsky of Ir Amim, who specializes in Jerusalem, both treat al-Bustan and these other sites as pieces of one planning logic, not separate skirmishes.
What remains to be seen is whether the demolitions pause, and what shape "legitimate planning" could take in a contested city. The European Union, asked by the BBC about recent moves, called the situation in East Jerusalem and Silwan specifically "dire" and reiterated strong opposition to settlement policy. The municipality has not committed to a timeline for King's Garden construction. Awad, for now, is living on the remaining floor of his home, calculating the tens of thousands of dollars in fines the city would charge if he tears down what is left himself.