These events escalated into eleven days of relentless Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip that killed 248 Palestinians, 66 of whom were children, displaced 107,000 people, injured more than 6,000 people, and destroyed over 2,000 homes. This assault also decimated vital infrastructure, including media offices, the only COVID–19 testing center in Gaza, and other critical infrastructure, further compounding the bludgeoning effects of a fourteen-year, deadly, Israeli-imposed closure of land, air, and sea.
On May 21, 2021, less than an hour after reaching a ceasefire that provided only a temporary reprieve to Palestinians in Gaza, Israel deployed its security forces to bombard the Al-Aqsa Mosque yet again, firing live ammunition at worshippers. In the following days, the Israeli state launched Operation Law and Order, a campaign in which state forces invaded over 500 homes and arrested more than 2,000 Palestinians. These arrests have continued and are accompanied by ramped-up efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homes in numerous towns and neighborhoods across Jerusalem and all of historic Palestine.
Alongside their neighbors in Sheikh Jarrah, more than 1,500 Palestinians in Silwan are being threatened with expulsion: some families were tragically forced to demolish their own homes to avoid being charged penalty payments by the State for the demolition. Land annexation and settlement development has also intensified in Beita, South Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem, Lifta, North Jericho and Aghwar. Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship are also facing displacement in Yaffa, Al-Naqab, Umm al-Fahm, and Akka. Since the Trump Administration declared the so-called “Deal of the Century,” Israel has built more than 9,000 new settler homes with plans to build thousands more, forcibly displacing many Palestinians.
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