On October 29, Israeli settlers placed mobile prefabricated structures on the rooftops of Palestinian commercial buildings along Shalala Street, the main entrance to Hebron's Old City. The structures are expected to accommodate 20 new settler housing units, extending a settlement presence that has existed since 1978 but is now pushing beyond previously established boundaries. About 500 settlers already live in the Old City, illegal under international law, amid a Palestinian population that has been progressively confined. The mechanism is precise: vertical colonization. Settlers do not need to demolish Palestinian shops when they can simply build on top of them. Yusef al-Khatib, 65, still operates the tailoring shop he inherited from his father roughly 80 years ago. He now works beneath a settler outpost erected on his roof. Bader al-Daour al-Tamimi, whose four children attend university, faces the same configuration — settlers above, livelihood below, and no guarantee the shop will be accessible tomorrow. Adel Mustafa al-Shuyukhi, 67, has spent 50 years in his inherited shop and has told his children to keep it open if anything happens to him. Hebron's Old City is structurally distinct from other West Bank flashpoints because of the 1997 Hebron Protocol, which divided the city into H1 (roughly 80 percent, under Palestinian Authority civil and security control) and H2 (the remaining 20 percent, under Israeli security control, including the Old City). Unlike other West Bank cities, settlers live directly among Palestinian neighbourhoods. The arrangement creates a uniquely granular form of territorial control where extraction happens building by building, rooftop by rooftop. The 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, in which an Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians at prayer, is the fulcrum event. After it, Shuhada Street — once part of a bustling market with vegetables, poultry, camels, and carpentry — was closed to Palestinians entirely. Restrictions on Palestinian movement and access multiplied. The current rooftop expansion extends settlement presence beyond the zones closed since 1994, reaching the Old Municipality building, described by activist Issa Amro as a symbol of Palestinian sovereignty. The extraction pattern is unmistakable: physical presence above creates economic uncertainty below, movement restrictions reduce customer traffic, street closures eliminate commercial viability, and Arabic street names are replaced with Hebrew ones while Israeli flags are raised over settler buildings. Each layer compounds the pressure to leave. The shopkeepers who remain describe their persistence explicitly as resistance — staying open is itself the act of maintaining Palestinian identity in the Old City. Issa Amro, founder of Youth Against Settlements, frames the expansion as part of a deliberate strategy: "These restrictions aim to empty the area of its Palestinian residents and expand the settlement presence." The takeover of the Old Municipality building and the establishment of a military position on its roof, combined with the renaming of streets, represents not just physical displacement but systematic identity erasure. What was once a living market is being converted into a controlled zone where Palestinian presence is tolerated only as long as it can be squeezed out. The 20 new rooftop units are not an anomaly — they are the latest iteration of a 47-year-old pattern that has accelerated since 1994. The shopkeepers' insistence on remaining is not sentimental. It is the last structural barrier between a mixed Old City and a fully settler-controlled enclave.
