A raid, a march, a court case: how Israel spiralled into a deadly conflict
Abd al-Fattah Iskafi, 71, has lived in his house on a tree-lined street near the historic Damascus Gate entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City since he was six years old. But he has spent decades locked in a court battle with hardline Jewish settlers over whether he has the right to stay.
Families in his Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood who also face losing their homes have been “destroyed psychologically” by the long legal fight, he says. But as lawyers prepared this month for a final showdown in Israel’s highest court, fallout from the case spread far beyond their neighbourhood.
For many Palestinians, the battle has become emblematic of what they see as a campaign to force them out of East Jerusalem. Anger at potential evictions fuelled broader tensions that over the last week exploded into communal violence inside Israel and a new war with Hamas.
Two different religious calendars and the slow-moving wheels of court bureaucracy all conspired to make 10 May a deadly flashpoint.
That day, Israel’s supreme court was due to hear the Sheikh Jarrah case. Also on that Monday, the 28th day of the Hebrew month of Iyer, Israeli nationalists were planning to hold a controversial annual “Jerusalem Day” march through Muslim quarters of the Old City, marking Israel’s capture of Jerusalem during the Six Day war in 1967.
Meanwhile Muslims were nearing the end of the holy month of Ramadan, with large crowds gathered every night to pray and celebrate in the Haram alSharif compound, site of the al-Aqsa mosque, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
Fury and grief over the evictions, the decision to ban traditional Ramadan gatherings in the square beside Damascus Gate, and other incidents including riots by the far-right Jewish group Lehava, had spurred weeks of clashes between Palestinians and police in the city, including at one of the most sacred sites in Islam.
“[Violence at] al-Aqsa mosque is probably the number one reason for most of the escalation,” said Raviv Drucker, a political analyst for Channel 13 television. “Even though Israel is aware of the sensitivity of the place, for some reason we make the same mistake over and over again. To break into the mosque with grenades and all of these things, it adds to the fire when you have this tension all around, of Ramadan, and Eid al-Fitr and Jerusalem Day, all together.”
There were tensions among Jewish Israelis too. A TikTok video of a Palestinian teen hitting a Jewish man on a train had gone viral in mid-April, generating copycat attacks and widespread outrage.
The court hearing on Sheikh Jarrah was ultimately delayed, when the state attorney general made a last-minute request for more time to study the case. It looked like a tacit step back from the government’s insistence that the case was just a “real-estate dispute between private parties”. The Jerusalem Day march was also re-routed from Muslim areas by police, after appeals from both the military and the Shin Bet security agency. But by then the spiral of violence had gathered a momentum of its own.
Early on Monday, Israeli police stormed the Haram al-Sharif compound, firing stun grenades and teargas and clashing with Palestinians inside following days of worsening violence. That evening Hamas fired rockets into Israel from Gaza, just minutes after passing an ultimatum for Israel to withdraw its security forces from the Haram al-Sharif compound and Sheikh Jarrah. The group’s military wing claimed it struck Jerusalem in response to Israel’s “crimes and aggression in the Holy City, and its harassment of our people in Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa mosque”.
The Sheikh Jarrah case is incendiary for many Palestinians because wouldbe settlers cite an Israeli law allowing