Har Homa
Coordinates: 31°43′31″N 35°13′18″E / 31.72528°N 35.22167°E
Har Homa (Hebrew: הר חומה, lit Wall Mountain), officially Homat Shmuel, is an Israeli settlement in southern East Jerusalem, near Beit Sahour. Built on 1,850 dunams of land expropriated in 1991, It is considered an illegal Israeli settlement by much of the world, although Israel disputes this. The settlement is also referred to as Jabal Abu Ghneim, which is the Arabic name of the hill. One purpose given for the decision approving of its establishment was to obstruct the growth of the nearby Palestinian city of Bethlehem.
The neighborhood was officially renamed Homat Shmuel in 1998 after Shmuel Meir, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, who played an active role in its development before he was killed in a car accident in 1996.
In 2013, Har Homa had a population of 25,000.
In the 1940s, a Jewish group purchased 130 dunams (13 ha or 32 acres) of land on the hill between Jerusalem and Bethlehem known in Arabic as Jabal Abu Ghneim (Arabic: جبل أبو غنيم, translit).
During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the hill was a base for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, a position taken over by Jordan's Arab Legion. The Hebrew name "Har Homa" refers to a wall built on the remains of a Byzantine church on the mountain which was visible to Palmach forces stationed at kibbutz Ramat Rachel. Following the war, the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property planted a small forest of non-native pine trees there to prevent misuse of the land by local Jordanian residents. After 1967, the forest was maintained by the Jewish National Fund until many of the trees were removed when the housing construction began in the late 1990s.
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