...this morning there's no relief on the horizon for Palestinians hoping to ease their desperate housing shortage. Only a day earlier, employees of Jerusalem's Israeli-run municipality handed house demolition orders to three more families in the Al-Bustan area of Silwan, which lies alongside Wadi Qadoum and abuts the walls of the Old City. All of the homes in Al-Bustan - 90 in total - are slated for demolition, despite ongoing negotiations between residents and City Hall.

There is even more cause for Palestinian alarm at Israeli intentions. Eli Yishai, the interior minister in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right- wing government, has reportedly instructed ministry employees to nix a new master plan for the city on the ground that it allocates too much land for the construction of Palestinian homes.

The master plan, on which dozens of Israeli architects and town planners worked for several years, was intended to outline the city's development over the next few decades and to remedy a situation in which, since 1959, Jerusalem has not been developed according to a comprehensive agenda.

Palestinians have long had difficulty getting permits to build even on their own property. The plan, if implemented, would allow increased building in the eastern part of the city, including 13,500 more housing units for the city's Palestinians.

The outline of the plan was recently submitted to the interior ministry for approval, but city officials discovered this week that Yishai had ordered the plan shelved. Instead, he threw his support behind another programme, drafted in 2000, which set aside considerably less area for new Palestinian building.