A Palestinian woman gestures as an Israeli soldier stands above her during clashes between Palestinians and Jewish settlers during the olive harvest in the West Bank village of Karyout. (Rami Swidan, Maan Images)

Maysaa Al-Kurd has lived all her life in the home her family moved into in 1956. The pomegranate tree standing in the garden was planted by her father when she was still an infant nearly half a century ago. But that hardly reassured her yesterday when she heard the Jewish settlers break into the next-door extension building her brother Nabil built to house his family in 2001.

"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 "with my own eyes" a settler breaking a television set. Outside, a refrigerator, cushions and household furniture, apparently removed by the intruders, stood for several hours in the pouring rain. Inside, broken glass could be seen above a stove.

What Ms Kurd, of the inner-city East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, was hearing at about 10.30am yesterday was the latest in an accelerating series of highly charged and organised moves by settlers into the city's Arab sector. Armed with a court order saying they own the property, the settlers - about 40, according to Ms Kurd - decided to break in just four days after Hillary Clinton, the US 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.

Mrs Clinton sought on Monday to "clarify" her remarks by acknowledging that Mr Netanyahu's proposals fell well short of the settlement freeze the US had earlier called for. And, while Mr Netanyahu has offered temporarily to halt authorisations of new settlement building in the West Bank, he has resolutely set his face against any slowdown in East Jerusalem. The UN says that 194 people were forcibly displaced from their homes in East Jerusalem by evictions and demolitions between January and July of this year. Israel insists it annexed the Arab sector of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War in 1967, but this is rejected by most of the international community who endorse Palestinian aspirations for it to be the capital of a future state. In Amman, the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband expressed "concern" over events at the Kurd house and added: "The current situation is obviously particularly tense in respect of Jerusalem."

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