to move. Many Palestinians decide to move outside the city because they are no longer capable of living in this city with this environment. Neighborhood cut off by the Wall Palestinians move to the neighborhoods which are still within the Jerusalem municipality but were cut off by the Wall from the rest of East Jerusalem, such as Shu’fat refugee camp. These areas are over populated and have no structural plans for buildings or streets. If you go there you can see the poverty and negligence. People move to these neighborhoods because they can rent or buy houses at relatively inexpensive prices. These neighborhoods are under the control of the Jerusalem municipality and should be administered by it. In reality, the municipality collects taxes from people living in these areas but without providing any services, nor infrastructure, waste management, or repairing and paving the streets. Those neighborhoods are chaos; the infrastructure is destroyed, building is unplanned, and it lacks basic service facilities such as schools. This is the result of a discriminatory Israeli policy that has been operating for years and that accumulated and became a big problem. Israel is planning to cut these areas from the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem municipality. We are speaking about 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinians, who have Jerusalem IDs but live in these neighborhoods cut off by the Wall. Israel is planning to cut out those areas from the municipality and thus all those people will lose their residency status. In general, Palestinians from Jerusalem are living under intense economic and social pressure to leave, and the reason behind this is political. The reason is the discriminatory Israeli policies used against Palestinians. Those discriminatory policies aim to change the demographic balance and make the Palestinian population less; this is why many Palestinians are leaving the city. The situation is really hard in Jerusalem. Mazen Jaabari, Director of Youth Development Department, Jerusalem. Interview: 19 June 2017 81

Select target paragraph3

Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents