JERUSALEM — The Israeli Supreme Court delayed on Sunday a call on whether or not to expel six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem after the Attorney General requested extra time, in half as a result of of the tensions the case has stirred.

The court docket was to resolve on Monday whether or not to uphold an expulsion order for the households in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, in a listening to that many feared would spark a wave of unrest. Instead, the case was delayed by as much as 30 days to permit the Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, to evaluation it.

For many Palestinians, the households’ plight has change into emblematic of a wider effort to take away Palestinians from components of East Jerusalem and of the previous displacements of Arabs in the occupied territories and inside Israel.

Since the beginning of the month, the prospect of the evictions has prompted day by day protests, arrests and confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli police and Jewish extremists.

Tensions reached a crescendo on the Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem on Friday night time, the place police threw stun grenades and fired rubber-coated bullets as worshipers tried to hope, and worshipers threw bottles and stones. Some of the stun grenades landed contained in the mosque.

The Israeli authorities has argued that the Sheikh Jarrah case was a non-public real-estate dispute between the Palestinian households and a secretive Jewish settler group. Two a long time in the past, the settler group purchased the land on which the Palestinians’ properties had been constructed in the 1950s.

But the Attorney General’s intervention signaled that the case has change into a political and diplomatic legal responsibility for Israel — prompting a wave of outrage, not simply from Palestinians, however from American politicians and European and Arab capitals.

The Attorney General stated in an announcement that the case “raises sensitivities,” a reference to the tensions sparked by the looming court docket listening to.

For the affected residents, the Supreme Court resolution supplied little aid. Abdelfatah Skafi, a 71-year-old whose household is one of these below the menace of eviction, stated this was merely a delay.

He stated it does little to stop the broader expulsion of lots of of different Palestinian households from properties in East Jerusalem, which many Palestinians contemplate a type of ethnic cleaning, some rights teams view as a form of apartheid, and the United Nations rights company says is a possible struggle crime.

“This isn’t just about the situation for my family,” stated Mr. Skafi. “It’s about the situation for all Palestinians in East Jerusalem.”

Some metropolis officers deny that the substitute of Palestinian households by Jewish settlers quantities to a technique of displacement. Sheikh Jarrah “is not a political but a legal dispute” over land possession, stated Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem.

But others in town management say it’s half of a concerted effort to bolster Jewish management of East Jerusalem and stop it being ceded in putative future peace negotiations to a Palestinian state.

Another deputy mayor, Aryeh King, stated on Friday that it was “of course” half of a wider technique of inserting “layers of Jews” all through the japanese half of town. The purpose is, Mr. King stated, “to secure the future of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital for the Jewish people.”

Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli struggle and annexed it.

Settlers in the neighborhood contemplate the Palestinians squatters on land that was traditionally owned by Jews. They stated the court docket resolution on Sunday was an indication of authorities weak spot.

“I am so sorry that the Israeli government is afraid of the violence of a few young Arab people,” stated Yonatan Yosef, a settler chief who lives in Sheikh Jarrah. But he promised that settlers would proceed with their efforts to drive Palestinians out of the neighborhood.

“The Israeli people will go back to their land, and those who don’t want that should go home,” Mr. Yosef stated.

Peace Now, a marketing campaign group that paperwork the expulsions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, estimated that 200 Palestinian properties in strategic places close to the Old City of the Jerusalem, housing a number of thousand residents, are in danger of eviction.

Up to 20,000 Palestinian properties throughout town are below menace of demolition, in line with Peace Now. Restrictions on constructing permits in East Jerusalem has pressured Palestinian residents to both depart town, or to construct unlawful housing weak to demolition orders.

The dispute in Sheikh Jarrah originated in 1876 when the land was below Ottoman rule. That 12 months, Palestinian landowners offered a plot of land in Sheikh Jarrah to 2 Jewish trusts, an Israeli court docket has dominated. The land homes the tomb of a revered Jewish priest from antiquity, Shimon HaTzadik.

Jordan captured the plot in the Arab-Israeli struggle of 1948 and constructed dozens of properties there to accommodate some of the lots of of hundreds of Palestinian refugees who had fled from what turned Israel.

After Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967, it will definitely returned possession of the Sheikh Jarrah properties to the Jewish trusts. The trusts later offered it to right-wing settlers, who’ve tried to evict the residents ever since. Some households have already been pressured out, whereas the others are in numerous phases of the court docket course of.

The case has foregrounded the imbalance in who will get to reclaim land in Jerusalem. In East Jerusalem, Jews are allowed to reclaim property that was below Jewish possession earlier than 1948. But Palestinian households haven’t any authorized mechanism to reclaim land they owned in West Jerusalem or wherever else in Israel.

Israelis defend the coverage on the grounds that altering it might undermine the Jewish character of the world’s solely Jewish state.

Gabby Sobelman in Rehovot and Iyad Abuhweila in Gaza City contributed reporting.