Palestinian would rather 'burn home' than be evicted
Scores of police in riot gear surrounded the property from early morning during an hours-long stand-off. Roads were sealed off around the area 1km north of Jerusalem's Old City walls, which last year saw regular clashes between Palestinians and Jewish settlers.
Jerusalem's municipality expropriated the land to build a school, in an area that captured and occupied in a 1967 war, along with the rest of East Jerusalem, and later annexed. An Israeli court ruled in favour of the eviction.
A tree-lined area of sandstone homes, foreign consulates and luxury hotels, Sheikh Jarrah has become an emblem of what Palestinians see as an Israeli campaign to force them out of East Jerusalem.
But it lies very close to the line between East and West Jerusalem, and contains a site revered by religious Jews as the tomb of an ancient high priest, Simeon the Just.
As Sheikh Jarrah residents and activists monitored the situation from nearby rooftops, Hagit Ofran, of the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now, called on the authorities to halt the eviction.
"Its good to build a school, but why take out families from their home and not use other public land that you already confiscated in the past and gave it to settlers?" she said.
