Muhammad Abu al-Hummus, member of a local follow-up committee, said that staff members from the Israeli Civil Administration along with Israeli forces stormed Issawiya and delivered demolition notices to several Palestinian-owned residential buildings.
Abu al-Hummus added that the notices mentioned that the demolition would be carried out under the pretext that it was built without the difficult-to-obtain Israeli permit.
Israel uses the pretext of building without a permit to carry out demolitions of Palestinian-owned homes on a regular basis.
Israel rarely grants Palestinians permits to build in East Jerusalem, though the Jerusalem municipality has claimed that compared to the Jewish population, they receive a disproportionately low number of permit applications from Palestinian communities.
For Jews living in occupied East Jerusalem's illegal settlements, the planning, marketing, development, and infrastructure are funded and executed by the Israeli government. By contrast, in Palestinian neighborhoods, all the burden falls on individual families to contend with a lengthy permit application that can last several years and cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Source: Maan News Agency