On Dec. 8, 2025, the Knesset Finance Committee approved a budget transfer for the construction of police stations, including an additional allocation of 8 million shekels for the Oz Station.
It has now emerged that about a month ago, police representatives filed for a building permit to launch construction of the station. The budget approval and the filing indicate that work is expected to begin soon.
Oz Station is a police station on the outskirts of the Palestinian neighborhood of Jabal Mukaber in East Jerusalem. Not far from the station, amid the neighborhood’s Palestinian homes, Israeli developers in 2004 established the Nof Zion settlement, saying they had purchased a large tract of land in the area that includes the site of the police station.
In its first phase, Nof Zion was built with roughly 90 housing units.
In the second phase, hundreds of additional units, now in advanced stages of construction, are being added.
The third phase, planned by the developers, Kilas Investment Corporation, calls for 140 housing units and 550 hotel rooms on the land where the police station now stands; the plan, known as “Nofei Zahav” (local plan No. 976597), was approved for deposit in August 2023.
Peace Now: “The police are serving settlement interests twice over: on the one hand by building an Israeli police station on open land that could have served the Palestinian neighborhood, and, at the same time, relocating the current station, which clears space for a new settlement in the Palestinian neighborhood.
It is highly ironic that on the remaining open land available for the Palestinian neighborhood’s development, the government has chosen to place a police station whose main business is tightening control and policing of the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem.”
It is worth noting that a similar move took place about two decades ago in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras al-Amud.
Settlers initiated and financed the transfer of the Judea and Samaria District police station from Ras al-Amud to the planned E1 settlement site. Once the police moved to the new compound, settlers established a settlement there.