The fight for homes in East Jerusalem

Maysaa Al Khurd was sipping tea at home with her octogenarian mother when she heard the dozens of Jewish settlers force their way in.

"I heard the door opened by force," she said. "And then I heard one of them say: 'This furniture belongs to whom?"'

Later she saw a settler breaking a television set. Outside, furniture and appliances, apparently removed by the intruders, stood for several hours in the pouring rain.

What Al Khurd, of the inner city East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah where she was born and has lived all her life, was hearing was the latest in an accelerating series of highly charged incursions by settlers into the city's Arab sector.

Armed with a court order saying they own the property, the settlers broke into and occupied the eight-year-old extension to the Al Khurd family home.

The invasion came just days after Hillary Clinton, the United States Secretary of State, dismayed Palestinian and other Arab leaders by praising the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "unprecedented" promise of "a restraint" in illegal settlement activity.

The ownership of the Al Khurd dwelling has long been in dispute, and since a 2001 court order, the section of the building invaded by the settlers was used only to store furniture.

But for Al Khurd, 50, whose family property is one of 24 that settlers are hoping to acquire in this highly sensitive neighbourhood on the Palestinian side of the 1967 border between East and West of the city, their sudden arrival only intensified her fear of losing her home.

"This is a brutal occupation," she said. "We are all worried for the future, not just in Sheikh Jarrah but in all East Jerusalem."

While Netanyahu has offered temporarily to halt new authorisations of settlement in the West Bank, he has resolutely set his face against any slowdown of settlement building in East Jerusalem.

Only last week about 100 Israeli security forces removed a nearby protest tent that the Palestinian Ghawi family had been sleeping in since being evicted in August. That move came 24 hours after bulldozers levelled homes of six families across East Jerusalem on the grounds they did not have the proper permit. Human rights activists say it is much harder for Palestinians than Israelis to obtain permits.

Police stood guard outside the Sheikh Jarrah house after it was occupied by what members of the Al Khurd family said was a group of about 40 settlers. The settlers left on the advice of police, but two security guards employed by them were still there yesterday.

- INDEPENDENT