Kufr 'Aqab

Kufr ‘Aqab is the northernmost piece of the Jerusalem the Israeli municipality claims, pressed up against Qalandiya and al-Bireh at the end of the Ramallah road. Its whole territory — 6,665 dunums — was placed inside the municipal boundary Israel declared unilaterally in 1967, and for that reason it was never assigned to Area A, B or C when Oslo II divided the West Bank in 1995. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics counted 14,315 people there in 2010. Its village council names the principal families as the Barakat, Habbas, Nassar, Abu Shariff, Abu Rmeilah and ash-Shweiki households.

Then the barrier was routed along its southern and western edge. ARIJ records the wall running four kilometres across Kufr ‘Aqab and excluding 92 per cent of the village’s land from the city, leaving the people who live there holding blue Jerusalem identity cards on the wrong side of it.

What happens to a place that belongs to no one

The result is not a neglected suburb; it is a jurisdictional hole, and Palestinians moved into it deliberately because OCHA calls it “the location of choice for couples with ‘mixed residency’ status”, and it is one of the few affordable places inside the municipal boundary. OCHA found that Kufr ‘Aqab is “the location of choice for couples with ‘mixed residency’ status” — a Jerusalem resident married to a West Bank ID holder can live there together without the permits that Israel’s family-reunification restrictions otherwise require, and still claim their centre of life inside the municipal boundary.

The numbers that follow from that are extraordinary in both directions. Employees of the municipality’s Building Inspection Division, OCHA records, have not entered Kufr ‘Aqab since 2005. As of 2012 the neighbourhood accounted for 83 per cent of all new building starts in the entire city of Jerusalem, and by the beginning of 2013 some 1,282 new apartments were nearing completion, all in high-rise blocks — this in a city where Palestinians receive roughly 7 per cent of building permits and a third of Palestinian homes have none at all. Meanwhile only four of the neighbourhood’s twenty-five kilometres of road are paved and in reasonable condition.

Residents keep their residency and pay their municipal taxes. OCHA’s finding is that these areas have effectively been abandoned by the municipality: services degraded or absent, refuse collection contracted against undercounted population figures, Israeli ambulances not entering so that Palestinian ambulances transfer patients at the checkpoint, Israeli police entering only for security operations, and the Palestinian Authority barred from operating there under the Oslo accords — a vacuum OCHA describes as producing “an increase in lawlessness, crime and drug trafficking.” Together with the Shu’fat camp area and the smaller enclaves, some 160,000 people live in this condition.

Beyond the wall’s line, 2,037 dunums of Kufr ‘Aqab — 30.6 per cent of it — were confiscated for the Israeli settlement of Kokhav Ya’acov, which ARIJ records as holding around 6,000 settlers.

Sources

• Kafr ‘Aqab Village Profile — Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ)
• East Jerusalem Palestinian localities behind the Barrier — UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory, 10 August 2016
• East Jerusalem: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN OCHA, update August 2014