Shu'fat

Shu’fat sits on the ridge about four kilometres north of the walled city, on the road to Ramallah. The Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem puts it 3.89 kilometres north of Jerusalem, at 792 metres above the sea, bordered by Hizma and ‘Anata to the east, Beit Hanina to the north, Beit Iksa to the west, and ‘Isawiya, Jerusalem city and the 1948 territories to the south. In English it is written Shu’fat, Shuafat or Sha’fat; in Arabic, شعفاط.

Where the name comes from is not settled, and the archive will not pretend otherwise. ARIJ, drawing on Mustafa Murad al-Dabbagh’s Biladuna Filastin, records the town as built over a Canaanite village and named for a Roman-era ruler called Shafat. A nineteenth-century attempt to derive the name from the biblical Jehoshaphat was rejected by Charles Clermont-Ganneau on phonetic grounds — the Hebrew name has no ‘ayin, and Sha’fat does. The tell of Tell el-Ful, which ARIJ lists among Shu’fat’s khirab along with as-Sawma’a, ar-Ras, al-Masani’ and Khirbet al-‘Adasa, is often called biblical Gibeah, but that identification is itself disputed: W. F. Albright argued for it after his excavations in the 1920s; Israel Finkelstein has argued against it. What can be said is geographical, not etymological — an ancient mound stands on Shu’fat’s land. Nothing documented links the village’s name to it.

The count, century by century

The Ottoman tax register of 1596 recorded eight Muslim households paying on wheat, barley and vines. An official Ottoman village list of the 1870s gave twenty-three houses and ninety men. Under the Mandate the British census of 1922 counted 422 people, all Muslims; the census of 1931 counted 539, in 123 houses; the village statistics of 1945 recorded 760 people and 5,215 dunums of land, of which 484 were plantation and irrigable and 2,111 under cereals. The Jordanian census of 1961 found 2,541, of whom 253 were Christians. By 2011 the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics counted 22,759 people in Shu’fat — a village that had become a district of a city without ever being asked.

The town’s own committee, speaking to ARIJ in 2013, named its principal families as the Issa, Abu Khdeir, Ziyadah, Muhammad, al-Mashni and Awad Allah households, and said its people descend from Hebron, Bethlehem, Beit Hanina and Shu’fat itself. The Encyclopaedia of Palestinian Villages (موسوعة القرى الفلسطينية) gives a longer roll of hamayil and a clan structure beneath those names — Ziyadah with Awad Allah, Jabr and al-‘Amouri under it; Abu Khdeir with Hasan and Husayn; Issa with ‘Abd al-‘Aal and ‘Alqam; Muhammad with al-Mashni, Sweilem, ‘Awdah Allah and Shihadeh; alongside Abu Nee’ and al-Du’ays — but they flag that list as preliminary and in need of review, and so does this record.

The camp

Shu’fat refugee camp is the only Palestinian refugee camp inside the municipal boundary Israel declared for Jerusalem in 1967. UNRWA established it in 1965 to rehouse roughly 500 refugee families then living in the Mu’askar camp inside the Old City; the camp’s own services committee dates the establishment to 1964, and the discrepancy is left standing here rather than resolved. It sits on 0.203 square kilometres — about 205 dunums, leased by UNRWA from the Jordanian government at the time of its founding — with an estimated density of 80,822 people per square kilometre. As of 2023 UNRWA registered 16,419 Palestine refugees there, and says plainly that the figure counts registrations, not people present. The camp committee’s own estimate of the actual population is about 23,000. Its refugees come from Lydd, from Jerusalem, from some thirty villages of the Ramla subdistrict, from Gaza and from the country west of Hebron; ARIJ’s account puts the number of villages of origin at fifty-five or fifty-six.

Three UNRWA schools serve around 622 pupils, and one health centre serves everyone.

Part of why the camp is so dense has nothing to do with refugee status. Because Israel’s Interior Ministry revokes the Jerusalem residency of Palestinians it decides do not have their “centre of life” in the city, the camp became a place where Jerusalem ID holders who could not afford the city itself could stay inside the boundary and keep their status. UNRWA says so in its own camp profile.

The wall through the middle of it

Israel began building the barrier in East Jerusalem in 2003 and routed it so that Shu’fat camp and the areas around it ended up on the West Bank side of it. The municipal boundary did not move. The result is the sharpest illustration of the residency regime anywhere in Palestine: residents hold Jerusalem identity cards, pay the arnona municipal tax — between 3,000 and 10,000 shekels a year, according to the town committee — and must queue at the Shu’fat checkpoint, built at the end of 2011, to reach the city they are legally resident in.

OCHA counted the localities left in this position — Kafr ‘Aqab, the Shu’fat camp area including Ras Khamis, Ras Shihadeh and Dahiyat as-Salaam, along with Ash Shayyah, Qalandiya village and part of as-Sawahira ash-Sharqiya — and estimated 160,000 people living in them. Residents keep their residency and pay their taxes, OCHA found, but the areas have effectively been abandoned by the municipality: roads unpaved and unlit, refuse collection contracted against undercounted population figures, Israeli ambulances not entering, so that Palestinian ambulances must transfer patients at the checkpoint. Israeli police rarely enter except on security operations, and the Palestinian Authority is barred from operating there under the Oslo accords — a vacuum OCHA describes as producing “an increase in lawlessness, crime and drug trafficking.”

Al-Haq, documenting the camp area in 2018, put its population at 26,000 with 19,000 registered refugees, and found it excluded from municipal services other than water and electricity. Over four days in November 2018 Israeli forces demolished twenty-one commercial premises — eighteen shops and three fuel stations — on the Ras Khamis main road, which the camp’s leadership called the largest demolition operation there since 2003. Al-Haq sets that against the planning regime it operates in: Palestinians may build on 13 per cent of East Jerusalem’s land and receive about 7 per cent of the city’s building permits.

The land ledger for the town itself is equally blunt. ARIJ records 3,989 dunums — 47 per cent of Shu’fat’s 8,495 — confiscated for five Israeli settlements built on its territory since 1968, and the separation wall isolating a further 813 dunums of its eastern land beyond the barrier while leaving 7,681 dunums on the Jerusalem side. Its commercial agriculture has effectively ceased.

Mohammed Abu Khdeir

On 2 July 2014 Mohammed Abu Khdeir, sixteen years old, was seized close to his home in Shu’fat, driven to the Jerusalem Forest, beaten and burned alive. On 19 April 2016 the Jerusalem District Court convicted Yosef Haim Ben-David of murder, kidnapping for the purpose of murder, and battery causing bodily harm; on 3 May 2016 it sentenced him to life imprisonment, with a further twenty years for other offences and 150,000 shekels in compensation to the family. Two others, minors at the time of the killing, had been sentenced in February 2016, one to life and one to twenty-one years. Abu Khdeir is one of the names on the town committee’s own list of Shu’fat’s families. That is the whole of what this record asserts about the case.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia of Palestinian Villages — Shu’fat, families and clans — the roll of hamayil above. The encyclopaedia labels its own list “preliminary information, may need review” (هذه معومات أولية قد تحتاج مراجعة), and we carry that caveat with it.

• Shu’fat Town Profile — Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ), 2013

• Shu’fat Camp Profile — Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ)

• Shu’fat Camp — UNRWA, camp profile (data for 2023)

• East Jerusalem Palestinian localities behind the Barrier — UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory, 10 August 2016

• Special Focus: Highest Rate of Demolitions in Shu’fat Refugee Camp in 15 Years — Al-Haq, 15 December 2018

• East Jerusalem: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN OCHA, update August 2014

• Israeli Court Convicts Primary Suspect in Abu-Khdeir Murder — WAFA, 19 April 2016

• Life term for Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s murder — Al Jazeera, 3 May 2016

• Shuafat — Wikipedia, for the tabulated Ottoman, Mandate and Jordanian census figures