The so‑called “District Planning and Construction Committee” of the Israeli occupation municipality in Jerusalem has moved forward with a plan to establish 450 colonial housing units in the Palestinian neighborhood of Umm Lisoun in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli rights group Ir Amim said.
The plan, listed as 1049873, was first submitted in 2022 by the company Topodia, but remained suspended for more than two years after the committee conditioned its approval on expanding the access road leading to the project site.
Ir Amim noted that private developers were unable to advance the plan because they cannot legally propose expansions to public roads outside their ownership.
This procedural barrier halted progress until the Israeli occupation municipality in Jerusalem joined the project as an official submitting body, allowing the road‑expansion component to be incorporated directly into the plan.
Umm Lisoun, located between Jabal al‑Mukabber and Sur Baher, currently contains roughly 800 Palestinian housing units, most of them two‑ or three‑story buildings.
The new plan calls for construction of buildings up to ten stories, adding around 450 units for Israeli colonizers and significantly reshaping the neighborhood’s urban landscape and demographic balance.
According to Ir Amim, this is the largest colonial project ever advanced inside an existing Palestinian neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem.
By comparison, the colonial enclave Ma’aleh HaZeitim in Ras al‑Amoud includes about 120 units. The new plan could bring nearly 2,000 Israeli colonizers into the center of a Palestinian residential area.
The organization said the occupation municipality’s intervention to revive the plan after more than two years of stagnation reflects a deliberate political choice to push forward one of the most expansive and consequential colonial projects in occupied East Jerusalem in recent years.
It is worth mentioning that since the start of 2026, Israeli occupation authorities have issued 49 military orders under the label “security measures,” targeting about 2,093 dunams of Palestinian-owned land across the occupied West Bank.
All of Israel’s colonies in the occupied West Bank, including those in and around occupied East Jerusalem, are illegal under International Law, the Fourth Geneva Convention in addition to various United Nations and Security Council resolutions. They also constitute war crimes under International Law.
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment and acts of terror against civilian populations.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory”.
Articles 53 and 147, prohibit the destruction of civilian property and classify pillage as a war crime.
